Black explores post-war Germany, a pervasive belief in witchcraft and healing. And as a result, he creates a universal methodology for studying not only German, but also any other history. What makes the "A Demon-Haunted Land" "not just a witty and paradoxical study of a local historical phenomenon, but something immeasurably larger."
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.
Hans and Erna, owners of a small village inn in Schleswig-Holstein, were almost desperate to cure their little daughter of an incomprehensible ailment when they were advised to seek help from the local cabinetmaker Voldemar Eberling, who owned the ancient art of spiritual healing. He came and with the help of prayers, spells and magic passes in one evening put the baby on her feet, which the best doctors had not been able to help before. Moreover, Eberling was able to establish the origin of the disease: in his opinion, an evil neighbor systematically damaged the child of Hans and Erna. The woman, against whom the charge of witchcraft was brought, soon fell ill herself, thereby indirectly confirming the truth of the revelations, and after her, the former mayor of the same village was also convicted of witchcraft ...
If you believe that this story descended from the pages of a medieval chronicle, and that the events described were followed by a judgment and a bonfire, then you are mistaken. In fact, it took place in the early 1950s, ended more or less happily for all participants and, most surprisingly, became only one of dozens, if not hundreds of similar ones. The whole of Germany in the first post-war decade seemed to be seized by a belief in witchcraft and healing, as well as other forms of mass psychosis and occult exaltation. It is this little-studied aspect of modern German history that the study of the American historian Monica Black is devoted to.
It is not so common to find books that, at first impression, have such a clear and definite address. It is difficult to get rid of the feeling that the main audience of "Earth Possessed by Demons" in Russia is people who experienced similar processes in our country in the late 1980s and early 1990s, and are able to easily build a historical parallel.
Both in our country and in post-war Germany, the revelry of all kinds of charlatans and obscurantists had similar reasons: a long ban on such practices (in Nazi Germany, any medicine, except for the official one, was prohibited by law), the liberalization of the public sphere, the collapse of the ideological system and the confusion associated with it ... But the main thing is the accumulated collective trauma and collective guilt, as well as the virtually complete absence of legal mechanisms for their integration and experience.
However, one should not rush to conclusions: Monica Black's book goes far beyond the bounds of a banal analogy, and not all the subjects with which she operates can be found clear correspondences in domestic realities. So, for example, German evidence-based medicine seriously discredited itself during the years of Hitler's rule, and this could not but undermine its authority in the eyes of ordinary people - a fate that Russian medicine (excluding, perhaps, punitive psychiatry) happily escaped. In Germany there was less open religious sectarianism (in any case, Black hardly writes about it), but much more eschatology - the end of the world in the late 1940s was expected in Germany literally from day to day, both Protestants and Catholics, and people are religiously indifferent. Well, the most important for Black phenomenon of "spiritual healer" Bruno Gröning - one of the main, if not the main character of her book - with all the formal similarity with the phenomenon of Anatoly Kashpirovsky, nevertheless had a fundamentally different nature. Unlike the physician Kashpirovsky, who talked about "energies", hypnosis and "attitudes", Groening treated in the name of God, and the adherents saw in him the new Messiah who came to save a crippled world mired in sin and suffering.
Bruno Gröning, the son of a worker from Danzig and a former member of the NSDAP, first declared himself in 1949, having cured (as it turned out later, only temporarily) a nine-year-old boy unable to walk. This event gave rise to, without exaggeration, nationwide hysteria: over the next two years, the "miracle doctor" remained the main topic of street conversations, materials in the press and public polemics. Gröning and his “methods” were studied by professional doctors, officials argued about him, his activities were prohibited or regulated, and tens of thousands of sufferers gathered in the hope of communicating with him personally, getting at least a glance or getting a “charged” ball of metal foil from his hands (Gröning smoked a lot, and the foil from cigarette packs went to these improvised carriers of spiritual energy). Around Gröning instantly gathered a retinue of all sorts of demoniacs, swindlers, hangers-on and other dubious personalities, either sincerely believing in his gift, or trying to warm their hands on his obvious inexperience in pragmatic issues, or combining the first with the second. Gröning was sued, accused of drunkenness, extortion and sexual assault, but, nevertheless, a circle of people widened around him, convinced that he was the one who restored their health.
For Monica Black, the figure of Gröning becomes a key metaphor for the totality of the moral, mental and spiritual problems of post-Hitler Germany. If Gröning really helped those in need (and we have a lot of evidence of his effectiveness), then from what ailments did he heal them? Could the systemic reticence about the crimes of Nazism, which were committed not just somewhere, but right here, in the neighborhood, cause a catastrophic increase in psychosomatic diseases, with which classical medicine has so poorly dealt with? Fixation on one's own suffering, refusal to accept the blame for what happened - could this emotion, driven deep inside, unspoken, become the basis for the popularity of Gröning and others like him? The uneducated, tongue-tied, nondescript "miracle doctor" becomes, in Monica Black's interpretation, a kind of projection of the aspirations, complexes and traumas of post-war Germans - a way to understand what was going on in their heads and souls. And the “magical”, archaic form of realization of this burning, but never reflected social request allows us to see in the events of the 20th century in Germany distant echoes of its much more ancient, almost folkloric past, into which Black also immerses his reader.
Collective neurosis always accompanies great political and social upheavals, and the darkest creations of the unconscious invariably break loose from the cracks of the split world order - in principle, we knew all this without Monica Black. However, in her book she offers a kind of universal methodology, equally suitable for studying German and Russian, and any other history - throws a reliable bridge from mystical moods in society to its real problems described in rational terms. Thanks to this, "The Earth Possessed by Demons" turns out to be not just a witty and paradoxical study of a local historical phenomenon, but something immeasurably greater. Well, and of course, in this reading it may be interesting not only to those who remember well how in 1990 Alan Chumak charged water on TV.
This article was sponsored by Keith Kampen
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