A Demon-Haunted Land appeared in November 2020 with Metropolitan Books (Henry Holt). A Dutch edition (trans. Frans Reusink) was published in 2020. Editions in Polish (trans. Bartosz Kurowski), German (trans. Werner Roller), and Russian were published in 2021. In 2023, the book appeared in Chinese (complex characters, trans. Albert Wu). A Brazilian edition and a second Chinese edition (simplified characters) are in preparation.
To read short excerpts of the book in English, please click here or here, or here to read an excerpt in German. To listen to an interview with Stephanie Bastek on The American Scholar’s Smarty Pants podcast, please click here, or click here if you’d like to listen to an interview with Steven Seegel on the New Books Network. And here, on Geschichte der Gegenwart, you can find a German-language interview about the book with Svenja Goltermann. Reviews have appeared in Boston Review, H-Soz-Kult, Süddeutsche Zeitung, New Republic, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, and other publications and venues. In 2022, the book was published in a special edition by the Federal Republic of Germany’s Office for Political Education (Bundeszentrale für politische Bildung) to promote civic education.
Summary: Post-1945 German history’s central question asks how Germans remembered their complicity in genocide, annihilationist war, and racial dictatorship. In the immediate aftermath of an unprecedentedly violent conflict, even the keenest observers believed that Germans had been virtually unchanged by those experiences. As Hannah Arendt wrote when she returned to her homeland in 1949, nowhere else in devastated Europe was the nightmare of the recent past “less felt and less talked about than in Germany.” And yet, just below the inscrutable surface, anxieties that didn’t even have names churned away against the backdrop of the 1950s’ complacent consumerist forgetfulness. Moving murkily in the near depths was the ever-present memory and fact of the war and defeat and the crimes that led to the Federal Republic’s creation in the first place.
A Demon-Haunted Land accesses those near depths by looking in an unusual place: a series of mass supernatural eruptions that convulsed West Germany throughout the 1940s and 50s. The period saw apocalyptic visions of floods and plagues of mice and predictions of an impending shift in the earth’s axis. A messianic faith healer toured the country, handing out tin foil balls containing his hair and nail clippings and curing people of inexplicable maladies, especially paralysis and blindness. Thousands of apparitions of the Virgin Mary transpired. People sought out exorcists. Most strikingly of all, neighbors accused each other of witchcraft, resulting in a series of trials—more than 70 of them in the 1950s—for defamation and even violence.
Through the prism of these mostly unremembered phenomena, one perceives things that have often remained hidden from historians’ view: fears of spiritual defilement and toxic mistrust. A deep malaise permeated daily life even as the “economic miracle”—which brought rapid rebuilding and unprecedented new wealth to the country—took shape. A Demon-Haunted Land takes seriously the void—at once moral, spiritual, social, and epistemic—that defeat, the legacies of Nazism, and an Allied-superintended confrontation with mass murder opened up.
A Demon-Haunted Land is a work of history, but many of the questions it raises are as germane to us, now, as they are to Germany’s past. One is the question of how knowledge, authority, trust, and morality intertwine in the social world. If society can be said to comprise a set of commonly held ideas about how the world works, what happens when the conditions that made consensus possible no longer obtain?
The book inquires as well into the enduring associations among sickness and health, sin and suffering, guilt and atonement. It looks at the uses of theodicy, and how people think about misfortune and evil in the modern world. It aims to contribute to a trans-historical and trans-cultural conversation about what it has meant to be ill, suffer, and heal in various historically-contingent contexts and how to know “what is right” and “what is true” in the aftermath of massive social dislocation.
Lastly, A Demon-Haunted Land suggests what a limited purview “realist” historical answers may have to questions of awesome moral significance. Listening to ghosts, though, as Avery F. Gordon and other scholars suggest, allows us to hear the otherwise unspoken and sublimated terrors at the center of social life.