A Land Obsessed with Demons: Witches, Healers, and Ghosts of the Past in Postwar Germany

American professor Monika Black doesn’t just look at postwar Germany; she examines the tragic pages of the past through the lens of the flourishing of witchcraft, popular healing, and an intense fascination with secret symbols and omens—offering a thoroughly rational explanation for all these phenomena. As a historian-scholar, Monika Black seeks the roots of these events in long-ago times, finding, for example, a tendency among residents of German lands toward occult practices even in the Middle Ages. Later, that tendency will burst forth in the development of occult sciences in the Third Reich. Germans’ attraction to magical rituals and all manner of healers after World War II seems, in this chain of events, perfectly logical. Mass death, the collapse of a state, a collective sense of guilt—all of this pushed citizens of a newly formed Federal Republic of Germany to seek support in the sphere of the irrational. Monika Black’s work is full of examples tied to specific lives; the narrative is easy to follow and gripping—no less than any other mystical thriller.