Book cover of A Demon-Haunted Land: Witches, Wonder Doctors, and the Ghosts of the Past in Post-WWII Germany

Book description

“Evocative. . . . Epic. . . . Chock-full of colorful anecdotes and charismatic figures, A Demon-Haunted Land not only offers a brilliant rethinking of postwar German history, but also asks us to see the irrational as an integral part of modernity.” ―Boston Review

In the aftermath of World War…

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Why read it?

1 author picked A Demon-Haunted Land as one of their favorite books. Why do they recommend it?

Although there is no longer a shortage of scholarship on the occult or supernatural before 1945, Monica Black’s Demon Haunted Land is the first major history in English to investigate the afterlife of these cultural and intellectual traditions in the early years of the West German Federal Republic.

Beautifully written and based on extensive archival research, a Demon Haunted Land shows how witchcraft, the occult, and a belief in miracles played an important role, alongside democratic stabilization and the so-called “Economic Miracle”, in helping Germans work through the trauma of defeat and legacies of the Third Reich in…

From Eric's list on Nazism and the occult.

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