First Paragraph

In 1945, Germany lay in ruins, morally and materially. Germans had waged the most brutal war in history and were responsible for genocide and mass murder. Seventy years later, the same country welcomed nearly 1 million refugees. To sympathetic observers, Germany had become the moral voice of Europe. To others, it was a reckless agent of moral imperialism, so keen to do good that it put the interests of strangers above its own. The return of a far-right party to parliament in 2017 revived long-standing fears that Germans had never really changed.

- From Out of the Darkness: The Germans, 1942-2022 by Frank Trentmann