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A review by erboe501
A Demon-Haunted Land: Witches, Wonder Doctors, and the Ghosts of the Past in Post-WWII Germany by Monica Black
3.0
What caught my attention about this book was the witches in the subtitle. Witches in the 20th century? Intriguing! But most of this book was dedicated to the case of one wunderdoktor, Bruno Groning. I wasn't familiar with the immediate post-WWII German landscape, so reading about the chaos of reintegration and government formation and social dynamics was interesting. And I find
Black's argument credible that a fixation on mystical healing and nefarious witches festered in that chaos. Germans' general refusal to acknowledge or speak of the atrocities committed during the war was also informative. The "demons" of the title, I guess, are the traumas and evils Nazis committed and the general populations complicity or refusal to reckon with those actions.
Black's argument credible that a fixation on mystical healing and nefarious witches festered in that chaos. Germans' general refusal to acknowledge or speak of the atrocities committed during the war was also informative. The "demons" of the title, I guess, are the traumas and evils Nazis committed and the general populations complicity or refusal to reckon with those actions.