Monica Black (2)

In A Demon-Haunted Land, Monica Black explores how the emotional and psychological fall-out of WWII led to a surge in belief in faith healers and in witchcraft accusations in 1950s/60s Germany. She argues that this particular uptick in such beliefs arose at least in part from a collective denial of guilt/responsibility for Nazi war crimes which led to many Germans seeing themselves as the war's true victims. Black's argument is sometimes more convincing in the micro than in the macro, and the structure didn't always best support it, but this is still an interesting and clearly argued read.

I'd recommend this more for an academic/upper-level undergraduate or graduate classroom audience, however; despite the sexed-up subtitle, this is an academic book, not a work of popular history.

(The audiobook narrator's pronunciation of German was very "..... Well, you tried.")… (mer)

Inevitably something of a work of supposition and speculation, the author takes an interesting angle on how the social strains of post-1945 Germany led to an embrace of supposedly supernatural folk belief. Most of this book focuses on the phenomena of the faith healer Bruno Groning, or a wave of lawsuits and trials relating by the practice of witchcraft (usually instigated by the accused "witches"), and what it says about all the issues in the wake of the Third Reich that "couldn't" be talked about, in terms of just recompense and retribution, when so many hands were dirty, and imaginations failed at how this abyss of human behavior had been reached. I have to admit that the overall impact is a little slighter than I thought it might be, but I was still happy to learn about some history of which I was totally ignorant of.… (mer)