I appreciate the publisher allowing me to read this book., this is very well written and i found the book very hard to put down i highly recommend to anyone who likes to read.

The title was very misleading. The book was well researched, no complaints with that, but what I thought I was going to be reading is not what I read.

This is a gem of a book. This is weird history, almost unthinkable upon reading the synopsis, but utterly believable once read and incredibly
absorbing.

This was an interesting book, but in a quieter way than I feel like the marketing promised.

Very in-depth and thorough, it was clearly well researched and the author knows the source material, but at times I did struggle to hold on to the narrative thread.

If you're looking for a light, pop-history type book (which I admit, I was) this is not the book for you. If you lean more towards the scholarly and academic, though, it might be, especially if you're interested in post WWII European history.

After World War II, Germany had to rebuilt itself literally, politically and—as we learn in Monica Black’s intriguing book, A Demon-Haunted Land—psychologically. Black dove into state and newspaper archives to reveal a history I’d never heard about. In the 1950s, spiritual healers and witch hunts broke out in the new West Germany. Faith healers are nothing new to American me, but in Germany? And witch hunts? Black uses the evidence to explain how healers and hunters were a deeply, troubling psychological response to the crimes and horrors of the Third Reich.

Black’s argument rests on two main stories and on the work of mid-Twentieth century German psychologists. After an introduction that sets the stage, Black begins the story of Bruno Gröning. After service in the Wehrmacht, Gröning supposedly cured a boy of life-long paralysis. This cure—and Gröning’s talk of God and evil people—turned Gröning into an instant celebrity. The boy’s family home became a pilgrimage point for hundreds of ailing Germans, hoping for a miracle. The crowds drawn by Gröning cause local governments to urge the healer to move on, back and forth across Germany. From 1949 to his fall from grace in court in 1957, Gröning was seen by some Germans as the answer to all their problems…and by others as a fraud. Black then moves on to tell the story of another healer, Waldemar Eberling, who started to (indirectly) accuse his neighbors of evil-doing. He is a murkier figure than Gröning. Where Gröning is portrayed as mostly harmless, Eberling’s accusations lead to at least one nervous breakdown and is generally viewed as a nastier person.

While Black discusses the careers (for lack of a better word) of Gröning and Eberling, she reveals a long-standing controversy in German medicine. At the same time that Germany was making incredible advances in pharmacy and medical practice in the late 1800s and early 1900s, the country also apparently had a roaring trade in folk and lay medicine. Healers would use Besprechen—spoken charms or formulas—to break curses and cure people. Patients could buy devil’s dung (asafoetida) at any pharmacy. Before and after World War II, officials and doctors wondered about how to stifle folk healing. At the same time, some psychologists argued that folk healers could help patients who had afflictions that we would now diagnose as psychosomatic or conversion disorders.

Black also dissects the issue of trust and mistrust in post-war Germany as part of her larger effort to explain why faith/folk healers and witch hunts were so popular. She argues that many people felt betrayed by their institutions: the government, doctors, etc. Turning to folk healers must have made sense to people who found that their doctors couldn’t do anything for them other than to say, “it was all in their heads.” Black goes so far as to argue that some Germans lost their faith in reality. She writes that, for years, ordinary Germans had been told that they were invincible and that it was their destiny to rule the world. The last years of the war, their defeat by the Allies, and the Allied occupation must have been seen by some Germans as punishment. No doctor can help someone who feels like fate has just slapped them, but maybe a folk healer could.

I was very interested in Gröning and Eberling’s stories, and was impressed by Black’s industrious work in all those archives. That said, A Demon-Haunted Land felt a bit thin to me. I just couldn’t quite buy all of Black’s argument that post-war Germany was completely swept up in supernatural fears. All of Black’s sources are articles from news magazines and newspapers, court documents, and published books. I missed seeing ordinary Germans speaking for themselves. There’s a lot of theorizing in this book, but not a whole lot of direct proof from Germans who sought healing or were accused of being witches to support it.

To understand something about how one type of society began the process of becoming a very different one, this book looks at two distinctive but related forms of postwar haunting. One plagued individuals, beleaguered souls who sought spiritual respite — who wanted to be healed, transformed, or redeemed. Another took hold of whole communities where seething social resentments were sublimated into fears of witches.

West Germany had an incredible story of postwar recovery: from the defeated Third Reich to a European economic superpower and stable democracy, without all the evil. Almost a fairy tale-transformation.

It was integrated into the Cold War’s Western alliance, had an economy unrivaled in Europe, and was seeing its bomb-flattened cities rapidly rebuilt for a good life of consumerist plenty. History, which is often thought to move glacially, has in its annals not many shifts of fortune as sudden as this. And in this dramatic transformation lie questions at once rich and unsettling.

But it wasn’t all so rosy. The German people were in a bad way, especially psychologically. They were blamed for the horrors of the war regardless of individual culpability. So even as they saw their country rebuilt around them and participated in the economic miracle that followed, they also witnessed things like the Allied powers hanging pictures of the murdered in public places with captions reading “THIS IS YOUR FAULT”.

University of Tennessee historian Monica Black identifies the Allies as viewing the German people as “morally unclean”. She argues that this contributed to the feelings of national shame and guilt which then led to a disturbing supernatural obsession throughout the country, including accusations of witchcraft.

For a period of time after the Third Reich’s horrors, after the Holocaust and the bloodiest and most nihilistic conflict in human history, witches — men and women believed to personify and to be in league with evil — appeared to have been loosed on the land.

I couldn’t have been more intrigued by this book. My experience living in Germany was that the Germans in general were far less susceptible to the woo-woo than what I’d witnessed growing up in the US. Not to mention they’re less fervently religious than the US as a whole, and religion, regardless of your thoughts on it, does tend to influence individual and group thinking about what’s possible in terms of the supernatural.

With a title hearkening to Carl Sagan’s The Demon-Haunted World, Black looks in A Demon-Haunted Land at what exactly happened and how it ties into the postwar atmosphere, ideas around guilt and responsibility, and, most intriguingly, an outlet for all of that evil built up during the Nazi regime.

This is something that concerns me, especially right now, because although I’m ecstatic that we won’t have another four years of a Trump presidency, the ideas and rhetoric that he espouses didn’t begin with him; rather he was a symptom of problems long percolating. Those ideas have been fermenting throughout his term and aren’t going to disperse so easily into nothingness. All of that matter has to go somewhere. This book is a case study of one possible outcome.

Silence about what was euphemistically called ‘the most recent past’ was pervasive, but far from perfect. No one forgot the demons Nazism had unleashed: they just didn’t talk about them, or they talked about them only in highly coded, ritualized ways. The past often slipped into view, like a ghost that wants to remind the living that its work on earth is not done.

The old values — those that made National Socialism possible in the first place — became outwardly taboo, but they did not vanish. Culture — understood here in terms of the ideas that groups of people impose upon the world and that form the deep structure of their understanding of how it works — transforms only gradually.

This opens with a gripping introductory chapter, although it does take on a more academic tone later in spots. For the most part it’s extremely accessible. The bottom line is that there were many factors at play here, from what I mentioned above, of a necessary outlet for the anger, hatred, and discrimination normalized with the Nazis to the lingering suspicion of others, the need to place blame, and the open condemnation from the Allies. And forcing the people into an entirely different mindset immediately after war’s end wasn’t going to be so simple. As Black paints one striking example: “Imagine living in a small town, where your family doctor after the war is the same one who had recommended to the Nazi state that you be sterilized. Such scores could never be settled; such losses would go unredeemed.”

She also cites other critics’ comparison of the early Federal Republic of Germany to film noir, with its roots in German expressionism, and it’s a creepy, apt metaphor:

Noir plays with depths and surfaces, shadow and light, emphasizing that what we see is not necessarily all there is to know, and that a shiny veneer can conceal something considerably less appealing. Just below the surface of West Germany, moving murkily in the near depths, was the ever-present memory of the war and crimes that had led to the state’s creation in the first place.

She also quotes another scholar who pointed out that the period’s literature hearkened to noirish qualities as well, with “magical eyeglasses, limping prophets, martial toys, games and sports, powerful engines, robots and hydrogen bombs, abortion, suicide, genocide and the death of God.” I mention all this because my biggest takeaway is that there was a lot going on in the culture, and it would’ve been stranger if all of this didn’t find some ominous outlet. It’s all fairly fascinating to read about and is material I haven’t seen covered elsewhere in postwar histories, making it very worthwhile.

The focus only felt somewhat limited at times. I thought for sure the case of Anneliese Michel would be covered. She died age 23 in 1976 after an exorcism and Catholic ideas of demonic possession instead of proper treatment of her epilepsy and mental illness led to starvation, but it was never mentioned. The biggest focus are a few charlatans, namely Bruno Gröning, a former Nazi and mystic/professed faith healer who attracted hordes of followers who believed wholeheartedly in his healing powers, which targeted illnesses caused by “evil”.

She also focuses on the actual witchcraft trials that took place — amazingly enough — and mostly involved people accusing their neighbors of evildoing because something weird and seemingly inexplicable happened to them.

Narratives proliferate in the spaces between what is known and what isn’t, especially in the spaces where life and knowledge are the most fragile. Illness is mysterious. It comes without warning, and its sources are often hidden. By explaining death or illness or bad luck, witchcraft acts as a form of theodicy, a way of understanding why bad things — like granaries collapsing — happen when they do, and to whom.

So was there something evil haunting the land of West Germany? Of course not. Black emphasizes the social conditions, rife with “moments of instability, insecurity, and malaise”. Witchcraft accusations and fears “prevail in situations where dramatic change has caused the familiar suddenly to appear strange, and even ordinary occurrences — illness, bad luck, accidents, injuries — to gain graver meaning.” Let alone when one bad thing happens close behind another — accident or coincidence surely can’t be responsible, but rather orchestration by those who wish harm on the afflicted.

A fascinating and well-argued social history of an underexamined area.

This book was fascinating, haunting, and utterly unforgettable. I will not forget this book in a hurry, and it has become an essential addition to my nonfiction collection. An excellent example of "liberal arts nonfiction," this book touches on everything through the dissection of an extremely niche chapter in world history.

I ended up DNF-ing this less than 20 pages in. The content was interesting, but the writing was hard for me to read. I'm not sure if that was because of the format of the book on Netgalley. It's looked like the pages were downloaded out of order or something. I might try this again with a physical copy that I borrow from the library.

A fascinating look at what post war Germans were thinking and feeling, it's interesting to think that they would manifest such deep beliefs after such a traumatic time. Faith healers and witch craft suddenly make an explosive return to the German belief system and Monica does a wonderful job making this subject informative, exciting and incredibly interesting. The duality of a population that both places so much hope and trust in to faith healers and yet renews the "anti-witchcraft" views of the past is an interesting dichotomy.

I feel like most people forget that the majority of German citizens were victims of war as well and just lump them all together in the same "that's what they get" flavored casserole as Hitler and the Nazis. I wholly appreciate this title by Monica Black and the humanization of normal German citizens. The pain endured, both physical and emotional was enough for many to seek alternate means just for a bit of relief.

#ADemonHauntedLand #NetGalley
This book was absolutely fascinating from beginning to end. Occasionally during my research of WWII, I enjoy looking at the periods before and after the war. This book gives the reader a glimpse of German life and beliefs that many other books do not. The author has done an incredible job of writing a book that is both informative and exciting for the reader.

I found the sections of the book dealing with Bruno Groning particularly interesting. This author delved deep into the ideals of mysticism in the German lands and allowed the reader to explore how the belief systems in said country changed after the war.

The depictions of faith healing in front of enormous crowds were particularly fascinating since it hadn't been many years before that large crowds were gathering in rural areas and cities in Germany for a different reason. This book really highlights the sense of desperation and hope that people have even during the worst of times.

This is one of my favourite non-fiction books of the year, and I would be remiss if I did not recommend it to others.

This review is based on a complimentary copy from the publisher, provided through NetGalley. All opinions are my own.

It's tempting to read every history as a referendum on today, but that is particularly difficult not to do with Monica Black's terse yet evocative book about the proliferation of faith-healing and witch hysteria in postwar Germany. After providing some useful background on traditional healing in the country (complicating the cliche about Germany's purported hyper-rationality), Black studies a couple of the more outrageous cases in the 1950s and ties it all back to guilt and willful forgetting of atrocities.. "The past refuses to be denied," Black writes, tying the period's denunciations of witches and determination to seek moral absolution (without acknowledging the realities of the just-concluded Nazi era) to American ghost stories about Indian burial grounds.

What a wonderful book. Full of bizarre and creepy real-life horror. Black does a fantastic job keeping the writing interesting. I would definitely recommend this one for my true crime and bizarre history loving friends (and I will).

A Demon-Haunted Land is short, dense, and not at all what I expected it to be.

Post-WWII Germany has a lot of internal struggles going on. We're not taught in school about what happened when the war was over except for minor bits and pieces. From an American perspective, I never once thought about how the German citizens felt after they loss. There's a moment in this book where we read about feelings of collective guilt. People aren't moving on with their lives. The war has shattered the country in numerous ways. People who were part of the Nazi Party still have those beliefs while others are struggling to figure out why they had to suffer when they weren't the ones fighting or doing all those horrible things.

This conflict manifest itself in the form of physical pain for a lot of people. Otherwise, if not an ailment or injury, people assumed everything bad that happened to them was the result of what had occurred. That there is a negativity hanging over them. A curse. if you will. There's a line in the book which I'll paraphrase here. It went something like "Those who look for a cause for their pain blame others." It is in this spirit that the book talks about Witchcraft. This was a let down for me because I honestly thought, with how it's on the cover and the description, that Witches were going to have a bigger focal point. Witchcraft comes up sporadically. First in a quick story in the beginning of the book, and then sprinkled throughout other chapters. Nothing too heavy. Someone's child is sick, the neighbor who has a competing business must have used witchcraft on them. More important than the accusations are the fact that these cases usually went to trial for slander and ruining people's reputation.

What the book is mostly about are wonder doctors, or glorified lay healers, specifically Bruno Groning. Bruno was a mystic with no medical background. He traveled around the country giving lectures on faith healing. Many considered him to be a Jesus-like figure who can cure any ailment. He constantly told people that their belief in God will pull them through. They had to focus on healing energies and that by thinking about the pain and negativity it would interfere with their recovery. As with most faith healers, there isn't proof that Groning legitimately did anything. People either recovered or they didn't. It sounds a lot like people were mainly inspired to believe they can overcome their ailments and put in the efforts themselves such as the cases where people throw away crutches or walk on their own. Groning was also a drinker and and slept around. At one point he's managed by a husband and wife team who were heavily involved in the Nazi party. The man, Otto, even worked at a concentration camp.

Another Faith Healer tells a man he will cure his sterilization. The man's wife becomes pregnant, but it turns out she slept with the Faith Healer. You see how this all goes. Groning, the first healer and the one mentioned the most, ends up going through countless trials up until his death in 1959 from cancer.

There's a few pages dedicated to the story of the Virgin Mary apparition that is mentioned on the back cover. While playing, a few girls discover what appears to be the Virgin Mary praying. People start flocking to see this apparition until the local government and the church step in to denounce it as being a hoax. I believe it is implied it was people playing dress up to scam others because if I'm remembering this section correctly, I think a Jesus or other religious figure is also mentioned to have shown up at one point. It's a very small portion of the book, and took only a few minutes to get through this bit.

This was a well researched and informative book. What it wasn't was a book about Witches or the occult that I expected it to be. I was thinking it would be a Post-WWII Paranormal Germany situation and it's truly a bunch of bogus guys and some trash talking the neighbors. Groning was an interesting figure to follow as he was a cross between a Jesus figure and also a mild replacement for Hitler. Someone the Germans can look to and believe he can cure them of their diseases. He didn't want power, or money. Maybe some coffee and sausages. I won't say that I didn't like the book. It took me on an adventure back in time that I wasn't planning on going on.

I enjoyed this! It was definitely different than what I originally had expected but was really good. It amazes me the lengths and what people would go through to get past WWII. It was kind of a different perspective on like faith healing and what people believed that witchcraft could do for them. Then all the misguided faith in what would help the people in regards to their grief, guilt and any kind of wound physical or mental. Definitely a book I want to revist and a book that when reading don't expect to fly through it. There is a lot of detailed information and its very eye opening to the beliefs at that time.

This excellent study of belief in faith healing and witchcraft in the immediate post-WWII era in Germany is a fascinating read complete with intrigue, denazification, schemers, and thousands of people desperate to believe in anything to get past war injuries, trauma, and guilt. Relying on primary sources and previous scholarship, Black crafts a detailed account of the postwar psyche, seeking to heal from the past even as many used wartime connections and power to create new opportunities for themselves. Written in an accessible manner for general readers, this would be terrific for book club or similar read-and-discuss forum.

I never actually gave it much thought, but I should have expected Germany’s postwar transition to be much more complex than just the economic transformation that most histories focus on. Considering the immense trauma that was endured on every level of society, of course, its people would need to have to process it all, somehow. But through adoration of healers supposedly working miracles, an outbreak of witch fears, and a diverse array of other sudden obsessions with the supernatural? To say the very, very, very least, I never would have been able to guess any of that, at least admittedly not in postwar Germany specifically of all countries. However, as Monica Black’s thorough research shows, such was exactly the case. Her new book “A Demon Haunted Land” is a most revelatory read that shines attention upon an incredibly overlooked part of a shattered nation’s recovery from the ruins of war.