In conversation with Professor Frank Trentmann

You can watch the event video here:

 

Join us on Tuesday 7 November from 6.30pm GMT at the London School of Economics for a conversation between our Chairman Peter Barnes and Professor Frank Trentmann on his new book Out of the Darkness: The Germans, 1942–2022, a groundbreaking new history of the people at the centre of Europe, from the Second World War to today.

In this book Trentmann tells the dramatic story of the Germans from the middle of the Second World War, through the Cold War and the division into East and West, to the fall of the Berlin Wall and the reunited nation’s search for a place in the world. Their journey is marked by extraordinary moral struggles: guilt, shame and limited amends; wealth versus welfare; tolerance versus racism; compassion and complicity. Through a range of voices – German soldiers and German Jews; environmentalists and coal miners; families and churches; volunteers, migrants and populists – Trentmann paints a remarkable and surprising portrait over 80 years of the conflicted people at the centre of Europe.

The event will be hosted jointly with the LSESU German Society.

Frank Trentmann is Professor of History at Birkbeck, University of London, and at the University of Helsinki. He is the author of Empire of Things and Free Trade Nation, was a Moore Scholar at Caltech and has been awarded the Whitfield Prize, the Austrian Science Book Prize, the Humboldt Prize for Research and the 2023 Bochum Historians’ Prize. He grew up in Hamburg and lives in London.