A Demon-Haunted Land: Post-WWII Germany's Surge of Supernatural Events With Monica Black

Michelle: Welcome to Haunted History Chronicles, the podcast where we unravel the mysteries of the past one ghostly tale at a time. I'm your host, Michelle, and I'm thrilled to be your guide on this eerie journey through the pages of history. Picture this a realm where the supernatural intertwines with the annals of time, where the echoes of the past reverberate through haunted corridors and forgotten landscapes. That's the realm we invite you to explore with us. Each episode will unearth stories, long buried secrets, dark folklore, tales of the macabre, and discuss parapsychology topics from ancient legends to more recent enigmas. We're delving deep into locations and accounts all around the globe, with guests joining me along the way. But this podcast is also about building a community of curious minds like you. Join the podcast on social media, Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram to share your own ghostly encounters, theories, and historical curiosities. Feel free to share with friends and family. The links are conveniently placed in the description for easy access. So whether you're a history buff with a taste for the supernatural or a paranormal enthusiast with a thirst for knowledge, haunted history chronicles is your passport to the other side. Get ready for a ride through the corridors of time where history and the supernatural converge, because every ghost has a story, and every story has a history. And now let's introduce today's podcast or guest.

Michelle: Welcome to Haunted History Chronicles, the podcast that delves into the eerie echoes of the past, exploring how history and the supernatural intertwine to shape our world today. I have an extraordinary guest joining me, Monica Black, a distinguished historian of modern Europe and a professor of the University of Tennessee. Monica is here to share insights from her groundbreaking book, A Demon Haunted Land, which examines the eerie and unsettling supernatural eruptions in post World War two Germany. In the aftermath of 1945, a strange complacency seemed to envelop the nation. Beneath this placid surface churned a cauldron of anxieties and spiritual unrest, manifesting in bizarre and supernatural ways.

Michelle: Monica's book takes us deep into this.

Michelle: Murky period, where apocalyptic visions, faith healers, and witchcraft accusations became startlingly common. She explores how these phenomena reflected deeper societal fears and a pervasive sense of malaise amid the so called economic miracle of the 1950s. Through this lens, Monica reveals the profound moral, spiritual, and social void left by the war and its aftermath. In our discussion today, well delve into the unique context of post World War Two Germany, exploring how the defeat, allied occupation, and denazification process fuelled the rise of figures like Bruno Groening and the resurgence of witchcraft accusations. Well, analyse how a society lacking consensus about truth and moral authority manifested in distrust in institutions. Join us as we uncover the haunted history of post war Germany and explore the universal themes of societal responses to trauma, the interplay of truth, guilt and supernatural beliefs, and the broader implications for contemporary societies. Welcome to Haunted History chronicles, and please welcome Monica Black.

Michelle: Hi, Monica. Thank you so much for joining me today.

Monica Black: Hi, Michelle, nice to talk to you. Thank you.

Michelle: Do you want to start by just introducing yourself and sharing a little bit about your background with the people listening to the podcast?

Monica Black: Oh, sure, I'd love to. My name is Monica Black and I'm a professor of history at the University of Tennessee, which is in Knoxville, Tennessee, in the foothills of the great Smoky Mountains. I've been teaching modern european and particularly german history for, wow, more than 20 years now. And yeah, I think that's probably the most important thing for people to know. I'm also a specialist in the sort of history of the Third Reich in Germany, and then of the Third Reich's aftermath or its after lives, as I like to say sometimes.

Michelle: And we're going to be talking about a very particular book that you have researched and written called a demon Haunted Land. Just to help set the context for the discussion around that book.

Michelle: Do you want to just go into.

Michelle: The unique context of World War Two Germany, post World War Two Germany, including the defeat in the war and allied occupation, and how that kind of contributed to some of the figures like Bruno Groening, who were going to hopefully talk about today and the resurgence of witchcraft accusations.

Monica Black: I guess maybe some of the most important things to point out as background or as sort of wider context for the book and the events that the book describes is to sort of set your readers to thinking about what Germany might have looked like in 1945. And I don't necessarily just mean physically. I mean, we all have images in our minds, probably of what Berlin looked like in 1945, or what other big cities in Germany looked like that had been subjected to allied bombing raids for years. You think of these kind of gutted buildings and people sort of wandering around, looking for places to sleep and something to eat. And indeed those images, not to mention images of people flooding in from the countryside, looking for. Looking for loved ones that were missing and people who were refugees coming streaming into the country from all sides. So it was a really chaotic and profoundly dislocated moment. But the thing that I think about the most when I imagine the broader context of this book is about the psychological effect of all of that. And I would also say the spiritual effect of all of that. In other words, how did Germans, how exactly did they confront that moment in May 1945 when the Third Reich went down in defeat, when the so called thousand year Reich ended after twelve years in the total destruction of Germany? And when I say destruction, of course, I don't just mean that chaos I was just describing in broken buildings and smashed bridges, I mean the chaos of moral collapse as well. In other words, how did people deal with the knowledge, the very direct knowledge of the crimes of the Third Reich and how did they deal with the fact of defeat? Because I think that in a lot of ways, of course, we think of the defeat of the Third Reich as one of the great and most important moments of 20th century german history, 20th century global history, for that matter, for Germans who had seen the Third Reich as a sort of salvific experience, who had experienced those years as the triumph of the german nation in some way, the destruction of Germany at the end of the war, the death of this leader that many, many millions of people had revered tremendously, Washington, that had a profound impact on people, and it had a profound impact on society, sort of collective impact. So those are some of the things that inspired me to write this book, was trying to understand exactly what 1945 was like for Germans and what the years just after that period were like.

Michelle: And I think it's so valid and so interesting because it goes beyond just simply, well, this is a country who's experiencing defeat. And what does that mean? You know, there's so much more nuance to that and so much more context to that that I think is part of the discussion. And I think this is why the book is so well researched and crafted in bringing all of those elements to the table to really explore this period, in particular after 1945.

Monica Black: Thank you, Michelle. I hope that that's true.

Michelle: So do you want to kind of go into and elaborate on how the allied denazification process kind of influenced public sentiment and contributed to that climate of distrust that really allowed some of the phenomena that were going to talk about again today to flourish in this space?

Monica Black: Right. So one of the main themes of this book, in fact, is social distrust, is the idea that after the war ended, a lot of Germans felt that they could not necessarily trust their neighbors anymore. And why was this the case? And there's also sorts of interesting evidence for this. One of the things that the Allies did after the war was to start taking public opinion polls in Germany because they were trying to figure out social scientists were fascinated by trying, trying to figure out how this society had gone so badly off the rails. They were trying to learn from that. And so public opinion polling became a commonplace after the war. And we have polls from that period of huge percentages of Germans responding that people could not be trusted, that they felt like the people, that most people, as they put it, could not be trusted. So why was this the case? I was fascinated by that. And it seems that the denultification procedures, there were different kinds of procedures. Different members of the allied coalition perceived the task of denoflification in slightly different ways. So it unfolded differently, say, in the american sector from the british sector. But the idea essentially was that which was agreed upon by all of the post war allies was that Germany had to be denazified. That is to say, people had to, people who had been ardent Nazis had to be taken out of positions of authority. Nazi laws had to be struck from the books. Basically, the authority of Nazism as an ideological system had to be dismantled. You can imagine all of the sorts of ways that that would have transpired. I mean, everything from school textbooks to smashing buildings that had nazi insignia on them, removing artworks from museums. I mean, there were many, many different ways in which this manifested itself. And at first, a lot of Germans, a lot of Germans actually supported the deuscation procedures and looked to the allies to sort of sort out the people who most people could agree had been most responsible. The problem, of course, was that a lot of the people who had been most responsible were no longer around. And im talking about the leaders of the Third Reich, Hitler, people like that Himmler, were no longer around. And so as the procedures continued and the allies began to, they're questioning sort of ordinary people, like everyday people that you might meet on the street, about their involvement in what had happened, the level of their engagement with nazi organizations, what kind of job they had held, and whether or not that implicated them in any way in what had taken place in the Third Reich. As that sort of process began to drift down to smaller and smaller fry, if you will, the general sort of tone around denazification began to shift, and people began to perceive it as an unjust procedure, as an unjust fact. And one of the things that I found interesting about all of that was that a lot of times in these procedures, you have people, the people who were sort of responsible for overseeing, particularly in the british zone, I think this was the case. You have people overseeing these kind of tribunals, local tribunals, where people have to come to the tribunal and present documents and show what they've been up to, essentially, for the last twelve years. And the people who were superintending these tribunals were often local people themselves and people who were considered politically not implicated in a Third Reich. In other words, people who had been social democrats, for example, people who had politically or ideologically been opposed to Nazism. And that fact, the fact that local people who all knew each other were involved in these procedures that could lead to things like losing one's job or any number of other, unfortunately, consequences meant that a lot of sort of discontent was sown among people that people no longer knew whom to trust and who was saying, what about them? And is my neighbor telling something out of turn about me to these authorities, to the allies, and to the people who are working with the allies to, to unearth the crimes of the recent past? What exactly is being said to whom? And that, among other things, I think contributed in a very significant way to just a latent feeling of distrust that lingered in Germany for years after the second world War.

Michelle: And I think that comes to something else that I was going to ask in terms of this mindset of black or white, good or evil, these worldviews that seemed to kind of very much play into the environment and where people were inclined to think and how they were inclined to believe and that element of superstition and mistrust. And I think that's where you can then see how it comes through, into what you see transpiring in terms of being inclined to believe in these supernatural explanations and therefore rises in accusations of witchcraft, etcetera.

Monica Black: Right. I mean, Nazism really created a very black and white universe and, you know, a universe in which some people were in and some people were definitively out, some people were good and some people were evil. And that sort of mentality carried over into the post war years and lingered for a very long time.

Michelle: So your book explores the consequences of a society that really lacks consensus about truth and moral authority. And you've spoken about the lack of mistrust in institutions and how this kind of allowed this to flourish. Can you elaborate on how this may have been demonstrated then, and whether you see parallels in contemporary society?

Monica Black: Yes. I mean, you know, after the war, the Allies were convinced essentially that most german institutions had been profoundly influenced by Nazism. And they weren't wrong. They were under the impression that in some ways the churches had been sort of free of nazi sentiment. That wasn't true, certainly, but they saw the need to do what they could to root out nazi sentiments from the broader society and so this had the effect, not to mention the fact that the state itself had been smashed and the military had been defeated and the country lay in ruins. A lot of the framework that helps all of us make sense of the world that we live in, institutions are part of what help us make sense of the place that we live and the way that we work in that place and the way that things run. So without those institutions or, I know, having either smashed those institutions or having taken control of them in order to ferret out lingering nazi elements meant that a lot of the sources of authority in society were simply not functional anymore in the way that they had been before. And I think that contributes to the sense of mistrust as well. I think what's happening with us now. I mean, I thought about this extensively when I was working on this book. It was something that influenced me a lot, actually, was that in my own country, in the United States, we see increasing and very dangerous levels of mistrust in basic institutions. And I thought a lot about what that must have been like in Germany on the examples that I, you know, that I wrote about in the book. But I, you know, I don't. I don't have any answers for. For you or for your listeners about that, but I do think that we. We should all be very, very aware and very cautious about the way that we talk about our institutions, because they do provide an essential framework, as I was saying a moment ago, for the way that we all sort of live in the world. And we should. And I think we should, of course, all of our institutions are fragile and fallible because we're human beings, and human beings make those institutions. But when we speak really aggressively, I would say, about the failings of our institutions without thinking about how we might best reform them and take care of them, I think we're getting into some really dangerous territory. And some of that territory, I think, is, or at least I tried to illuminate what can happen in this book.

Michelle: So how did private feelings of guilt and trauma express themselves in the public sphere through religious phenomena? And what would you say that says and reveals about the broader societal attempts to cope with the past?

Monica Black: I think that for a lot of people, this is a major question in post war german history, is what did Germans think about what had transpired in the Third Reich? What did they think about the Holocaust? What did they think about the criminality that so many of them had, whether tacitly or overtly supported? What did they think about those things? And, you know, authors, various historians have given a variety of responses to that question. But one of the things that interested me was how, how often or how, I don't know how frequently I saw people talking about their illnesses and the need for healing. This was something that people talked about in various ways. And sometimes it was quite literal. I mean, people were, a lot of people were ill after the second world War. And one of the things that I noticed in particular was that a lot of the people surrounding one of the figures that I write about extensively in this book, whose name was Bruno Groening, you mentioned him earlier, a lot of the people who surrounded him. Groening was a kind of what, what we would call a faith healer. But a lot of the people who surrounded him were people who had developed sort of spontaneous forms of paralysis in the last years of the war, just after. And this struck me as very interesting. I wondered about what it could mean. What did it mean that so many people had just suddenly lost the ability to walk for no reason? That was discernible. And the fact that Bruno Groening could, could often have a positive effect on these kinds of illnesses was very interesting to me. And I took it to mean, at least in some sense, that people, that some of these illnesses were internalized forms of perhaps guilt, perhaps shame. I think it could be different for different people, but I was very struck by the physical, bodily manifestations of the kinds of harm that had been done. That was one of the things that I was most interested in writing about in this book.

Michelle: And, you know, in the book, you obviously go into a lot of detail in terms of the phenomena, the religious phenomena that you describe, which often took place outside of traditional church settings. How do you say that reflects the public's disillusionment with established religious institutions?

Monica Black: A lot of people, a lot of german historians would say, usually when we talk about this subject, we say that there's a kind of flurry of returning to church after the war. And it's true. I mean, statistically speaking, that seems to be true. Lots of people returning to the church and attending services again, and then that seems to drop off again after a couple of years. And I'm not really sure what the best explanation for that is. But one of the things that I noticed was that at the grassroots level, in the ordinary everyday life sense, a lot of people seem to be really captivated by religious phenomena and experiencing some kind of spiritual craving after the second World War, which may or may not have been satisfied by the institutional churches. I think a figure like Bruno Groening invoked God he talked about God in a way that seems to have spoken to people, and he talked about good and evil a lot. You know, he talked about being good and not being evil. And I think that there was resonance for people in those words. There was some kind of direct. Someone who looked like them and had experienced many of the same things they had experienced, was talking directly to them, not as a priest or a pastor from the pulpit, but directly to them on the streets. And in conversation, he was saying to them, in order for there to be healing, there has to be. There has to be some kind of admission of guilt. He did talk this way. Now, what exactly he meant by that, we can't really know. And I also have no way of knowing exactly how people perceived it when he said those things. But I was struck by how often people gathering around him seem to have been moved by these kinds of ideas.

Michelle: So how did the narrative of Germany's economic miracle coexist with this deep societal trauma that they've experienced and the supernatural beliefs that you describe? You know, what does that suggest in terms of the duality about post war german society?

Monica Black: There is a kind of duality, in a way. I think that's right. I think that's a perfectly fair word to use. I think that for a long time, the narrative of the federal Republic of Germany was the narrative of a success story. And indeed, no one can deny that Germany has managed to come back from that experience of being destroyed after the Third Reich to establishing a functional. A highly functional, I would say, democracy, and, of course, also a very successful economy. And for a long time, that was sort of the story that we knew about, that we knew about Germany after, at least about West Germany, excuse me, after the Second World War. And the thing is that that story is true. The things that I write about in this book do not detract from that story, actually. But what I wanted to say was that while people were working hard, going out every day and doing their jobs as citizens, going out and teaching school and working in factories and working in shops and bringing up their kids and doing all the things that people do, there were also these lingering, latent feelings that a lot of people seem to have had that were complicated and that sometimes sound to us like they don't fit together. So on the one hand, you think about this kind of, you know, modernizing society, a society that is resurrecting itself after being smashed. You think about the sort of. I don't know, the sort of expansion of the economy and, you know, the growth of this nascent democracy as sort of modernizing features of the post war period. And so there's this sense that how could that coexist with people accusing each other of witchcraft? But what I'm saying in the book is that these two things did coexist. And I think these kinds of things coexist in all kinds of societies. The fact that we're struck by it is something that maybe we should reflect on. We should think about why we assume that if we have one sort of thing, we can't have another sort of thing. And I think that the psychological effects of defeat in the second world war did indeed coexist, even the ones that strike us as the most surprising. Those things did coexist with a growing economy and a stabilizing state.

Michelle: And we've mentioned a few times the name Bruno Groening. I have to say, just one of the most fascinating characters that I have ever, ever come across. And I just thank you so much for kind of introducing him to me in this book, because just such an intriguing person. Just really, really fascinating to see the. The scope and the kind of draw that he had, the way he could command attention from people and draw the tight, you know, the kinds of numbers to him, almost like a flock, is just fascinating. Fascinating. Do you want to just tell us a little bit more about his background and what may have influenced his path in, towards him becoming a faith healer?

Monica Black: Yes. You know, Bruno Groening is. I'm glad that you found him fascinating, Michelle, because I did, too. And I. And when I first learned about him, you know, going back to that, what I was saying earlier about the sort of the general narrative of post war history about a modernizing country and, you know, rebuilding the state and I, along very, very different lines, of course, and a flourishing economy. How does this line up with a guy like Bruno Groening? I had studied german history for years and had never heard his name. And when I found out about him, I just had to know more. I was absolutely fascinated. So Bruno Groening is a guy who comes from near Danzig, which is today's Gdansk in northern Poland. Uh, he was, you know, um, he was tank hunter in the Wehrmacht during the second world war, which, as I say in the book, is not. Was not a job for the faint of heart. You know, he, like, was a guy who walked around or maybe rode in a vehicle hunting for tanks to blow them up. This was his job. I mean, this is not a job that certainly, if I. If I were a soldier, I don't think that's the job I would want. It seems very, very dangerous after the war. At the very end of the war, towards the end of the war, he was, he was caught by the Soviets and he was interned as a POW for a short time. And then he was let go. And when he left, he leaves and winds up in West Germany, or what becomes West Germany. And from an early point, it's not quite clear when he seems to have been practicing healing in one way or another. In fact, it seems that he was even practicing healing on people in the years before the war ended. And it is said that he developed the ability that this ability to heal the sick was given to him by a neighbor woman when he was a child, actually. But in any case, he ends up in what becomes West Germany. And at some point, a family in Westphalia hear about him and they have a little child who has gradually, because of a muscular, some kind of a muscular disease or disorder, he has lost, gradually lost the ability to walk. And he has been in bed sort of bedridden for several, several weeks at a certain point in 1949. And they hear about this man that's kind of healing people in the region, and they ask him to come and he comes and apparently helps their boy walk again. The boy goes back to bed, actually within a few weeks, and is not entirely cured by any means of his ailment. But at least at first, the parents become convinced that Bruno Groening has cured their son and that he's going to be better again and he's not going to have the problem with his legs anymore. So when this, and I think this is one of the things that's most fascinating, is sort of as soon as people hear about this, the healing of this little child, floods of people begin, or waves of people begin flooding into this little town, which is called Hereford in Westphalia. And this sort of phenomenon just grows up around groening in a very short time, within a couple of weeks, there are thousands of people gathering in this little town. And of course, I've visited this town on many occasions because I worked in the archives there. And thinking about what it would have looked like for 5000 or 10,000 people to be extra people to sort of be in this town is kind of hard to imagine in some ways. And then groening goes on kind of a, kind of a tour of, again, what becomes West Germany. In 1949, he goes to Bavaria. He has an enormous impact in a place called Rosenheim. And just thousands and thousands and thousands of people are coming out to see him every day, featured in all the major magazines and newspapers of the day. So he just becomes a huge sensation. And he himself was a fascinating person in a number of other ways. But I don't want to sort of keep going without giving you a chance to come back with another question.

Michelle: So what kind of specific techniques and beliefs did he employ in his healing and his practices? And I think an important other question to that is, how do they differ or resemble contemporary or historical faith healers?

Monica Black: Yeah, those are great questions. I mean, one of the things that's really striking about groening is that he said that he was just the channel for this thing that he called the heistrom, or the sort of healing current, like a current of energy that he could, that manifested itself in him and that made him able to make people feel better, a lot of people said, just by standing nearby. So a lot of the things that, you know, we might. I don't know. One of the things that I found really interesting about writing about him was that he didn't seem to have techniques exactly. Or nothing that you would call that. Nothing that you would call a method exactly. He had the idea of the heistroom of this healing current. There were certain kinds of themes that he would often talk about. He often talked about good and evil, as I said earlier. And he would tell people, for example, to sit in a certain way when he was in their presence, so that these currents of energy that came through him would be able to be, you know, transmitted to them more easily. But as far as a sort of program that somebody else could reproduce, he didn't have that. It was really genuinely like a thing that was unique to him. And, you know, he was. It wasn't just sort of patients or people who were suffering in one way or another who sought him out. He was also sought out by doctors who were really interested in what he could do and were quite amazed by some of the things that he was able to do. And people wrote about him. And a particular doctor that I write about in the book, his name is Fisher, did some experiments with Groening in Munich. Excuse me. Not in Munich. In Heidelberg. Excuse me. He did some experiments with Groening and was quite impressed by him, I would say, to the question of other faith healers. There had been other faith healers in german history, to be sure. So Groening comes down in a kind of lineage, if you will. There had been faith healers in the Weimar Republic, for example, who also gained fame. No one who gained the kind of fame that Bruno Groening did, however, and as far as other examples go, for instance, in the United States, we think about someone like oral Roberts. He's someone that immediately came to mind from me when I started reading about Groening. But what I realized after a while was that Groening never preached anything. You know, he didn't have sort of a. He didn't have sort of a theology as such that he. That he would. That he would offer to people. He really was a. He would, in fact, you know, in gatherings around him, he would sort of stand in front of people or stand on a stage or on a balcony where he could address people, if you will. But he didn't say things like that we would call preaching. He would just sort of be there. And as a result of him being there, a lot of people attested that he was able to heal them. So in many ways, I think groening. I don't think Groening is an absolute anomaly in the history of faith healing in the world, but I do think that he had some very particular characteristics.

Michelle: And that's something that I certainly picked up on. And again, I think it's partly why I found a learning about him and discovering him so intriguing, because, like you, oral Roberts was one that came to mind as well as, you know, Amy Semple MacPherson. And when you look at historical examples of faith healers, they do tend to have, by and large, something that they want to preach a particular approach and style. And groening just seems to be this highly charismatic individual that just seemed to have such huge public impact, which I think makes him a fascinating person to look at in terms of his approach and how it differs. But at the same time, how that fits into this broader context of what we've been talking about in terms of world War two, post the war, and how it just was almost this perfect melting pot, if you like, of someone so charismatic in a time period where there is this massive void of. And people needing something to step into that breach.

Monica Black: Yeah, no, that's exactly right. And of course, I was also struck by the fact that, as I think a lot of readers would be, too, that Germany had just lost its leader, right? Had just lost its extremely charismatic leader, Adolf Hitler. And here was this guy who shows up and kind of, as you put it, fills that void. I think there's more to it than that, but I do think that it's interesting that Groening was. Groening was himself a member of the nazi party. What that means exactly. That can have a lot of different connotations. I think he was an ordinary rank and file member of the party. But in any case, the fact that he could sort of stand at a distance from people and just sort of look into the crowd and be so captivating, I could not the image in my mind of Hitler, who had a similar kind of effect on some people, I couldn't ignore that fact when I was writing about groening. And I do think that you're right that there's a kind of perfect storm of need on the one hand, of sort of need for, I don't know, feelings of salvation, feelings of of when people are in despair and they're looking for someone who can lift them up out of their despair. Again, I do think that those feelings and the charisma of a groening, which also echoes the charisma of someone like Adolf Hitler, was kind of a it was an amazing coming together of a lot of different elements.

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Michelle: So what other factors would you say contributed to his popularity?

Monica Black: Well, I think that, you know, in addition to his just, let's put it this way. In addition to the context which might have lent itself to people looking for some kind of salvific figure, there was also and Groening's own charisma, his own sort of natural ability to pull people in without saying much of anything at all. I mean, that's even more amazing. I think. I think that there were a lot of people who were needy in various ways, as I've described a little while ago. The people coming to him with various kinds of maladies, all kinds of things. I mean, people came to groaning with every imaginable, every imaginable situation, you know, everything from cancer to tuberculosis to, you know, having had an accident that hurt their foot. And they're having, you know, ten years ago and they still have pain from it and they're. And they're coming to ask him to help with their foot pain or they've got headaches or they have sleeplessness or whatever. I mean, people had all kinds of things that they came to him with. So there's a great deal of need as well. And besides that, I think also that there was a certain. I do think there's a certain openness in german society historically to figures like groening, to, you know, even in, among medical doctors, there was a, there was a considerable openness among some of them to, you know, the, the whole sort of strand of what's referred to as psychosomatic medicine, the idea that we cannot simply treat the body as a collection of organs. The human being is not a collection of organs. And so for a lot of people, groaning, touched that nerve, you know, that sort of the impulse to see the human being as more of a totality as a totality of spirit, matter and mind. And I think that also contributed that sort of a sort of openness to that channel was another thing that sort of helps explain Groening's success as a healer.

Michelle: And obviously, we've kind of touched upon just how popular he was. Do you want to just go into that a little bit further in terms of how he was received by the public and the media at the time and that kind of range that he might have experienced in terms of reaction to him?

Monica Black: Sure. Yes. I mean, so once he shows up in Hereford and people start hearing about him, and then the media, both local and national, within just a few weeks, people are writing articles about him and then national articles about him. So he gets a huge amount of press in a pretty short period of time. And, you know, newspapers and magazines are of sending reporters from cities like Munich or Hamburg to this little town, Hereford, to see what groening is up to. And groening himself, another thing that's important to know is that he pretty quickly, some people of a range of characters, I would say, kind of become interested in him. And some of those people are. Have had fairly nefarious backgrounds themselves are former Nazis themselves, for example. And some of these people present themselves to him as potential managers, and some of these people become his managers. And they want to sort of promote him, and they want to get him in front of as many people as possible. And they have ideas about things that they could do with him. And he has some ideas, but it seems to be to have been more the case that he kind of goes along for the ride at a certain moment. He's interested in helping people, but he also has these individuals who are interested in being his managers, who present him with lots of different options. And so he starts traveling. At a certain point in 1949, he begins traveling the country after having had just an enormously successful sort of debut in the town of Rosenheim in Bavaria, which is not too far from Munich, where he has tens of thousands of people coming to see him, where every newspaper is writing about him, where major politicians are coming out publicly and speaking in favor of him and saying that the people need him and he's doing wonderful things for the people, and that he has to be allowed to continue his work. Because I should also mention that there was a law that had been created during the Third Reich to stop sort of, let's just say, to regulate the practice of lay healing. The sort of thing that groening was practicing was regulated by law. And so some people were calling for groening to be stopped. They said, groening is a charlatan, and he's going to do harm to people, and he must be in it for the money or something like that. Although at the beginning, there was, you know, what money exactly was being generated is not exactly clear. But in any case, this sort of, what I'm trying to describe in a way, is a sort of snowball that begins small and then starts getting bigger and bigger as it rolls down the hill. So finally, at a certain point in 1949, as I was saying, after this great success that he's had in the town of Rosenheim Hentai, he goes on tour with a manager who was a high ranking SS officer, actually, and becomes sort of the guiding force in Groening's life for a few months. And he travels all around the country, and at this point, actually, large sums of money are being generated. And so the tax authorities become interested in Groening, and they want to know where the money's going and where the money's coming in and is it being accounted for. And basically, during that process, a number of sort of legal challenges to Groanings continuing as a healer are presented. He's pulled into court on a number of occasions, and ultimately, by about 1950, he is no longer able to sort of go out in public and present himself to these huge audiences anymore. He still does heal people. He still does meet with groups of people, but he does this much more on a much smaller scale, let's say, at some kind of gathering place. He'll meet with a few dozen people at a time. But the wild moment in 1949, the snowball that I was describing, that doesn't last for very long. That lasts for a few months. And then the legal challenges and the critics kind of serve to tamp down the initial enthusiasm and the initial. The initial, I don't know what to call it, but the sort of, as I said, the sort of wild period, it gets a lot quieter after that.

Michelle: How did his followers respond to that kind of criticism and skepticism? Did they respond in a particular manner to that kind of coming in, of those looking to discredit and to bring down what he was trying to do?

Monica Black: Yeah, it's a good question. I mean, you know, a lot of his followers or a lot of the people who came to him looking for help were not people whose kind of thoughts get recorded in the historical records that remain available to us. Some of them do. I mean, one of the things that happens as a result of these numerous court cases is that lots of people were asked to testify or offer some kind of witness statement about what they had seen around Groening. And some of those statements are preserved in the archives. And people explain, I had this problem, and Bruno Groening helped me. And I think he's wonderful. But there's also a sort of. It's not the case that I have lots of people that the historical record contains the. The words of lots of people offering support or, you know, or offering some kind of support in the face of criticism. Because most of the people who came to see groening were just kind of regular people like like me, who, you know, whose thoughts didn't necessarily get recorded. But the. But but within his, you know, within his circle, there were. There was. There was. There was in fact, some of the people who were in the original sort of groaning group, if you will, within his kind of inner circle, which is a constantly evolving and changing cast of characters, which is. That itself is amazing. I mean, he ends up with this kind of retinue of people who are traveling around with him. Everyone from a sculptor to filmmakers and just all sorts of people are sort of drawn into his orbitz. I would say that among those people, there's a mixed response. On the one hand, some of them admire groening tremendously, and they want to be a part of this thing that they think is revolutionary, that they think is going to transform the way that medicine is conducted, even. And some of them become disillusioned. And some of them, when they become disillusioned, decide that they're going to write a book. One of the main sources that I used at a certain point, Washington kind of manuscript of a book who was written by a man who was a journalist who had been a great supporter of groening and then becomes disillusioned. So you have those kinds of things. And then there are people who remain absolutely steadfast supporters all along. And it has to be said, too, that groening himself had a very mercurial character. So beyond. And you've read the book and you know what I'm talking about. But he. Beyond the sort of whether or not people supported his particular brand of healing practice, there was also his own kind of personal behavior. And his personal behavior was sometimes, you know, he'd like to drink a lot. According to many sources, you know, he was a bit of a. He was a bit of a cad, is possibly putting it mildly, where women are concerned or where women were concerned. So there are various reports about that. But of course, one of. One of the problems that I always ran into is that some of the people who would say those sorts of things about groening were themselves highly questionable. People whose ethics were certainly not whose own ethics could be questioned, let's put it that way. So there's a really. Writing about him was fascinating because there were so many different kinds of opinions about him. And these opinions could change because, as I said, he was a mercurial person. He sort of went where the wind blew. And sometimes, you know, sometimes that landed him in some, in some strange circumstances.

Michelle: Yeah. As I say, I've just, I just found him totally and utterly fascinating. Just such an intriguing character. I went away and I, I can't tell you the number of other things, other places I went to try and find out more about him because I just. So intriguing, such a fascinating character that I had never heard about before picking up your. It was just incredible to discover him, really.

Monica Black: Yeah. And, you know, I mean, you probably noticed this when you were looking around that, I mean, his followers span the globe. He only lived to the late fifties. I think he died in 1959, if I'm remembering correctly. And his followers span the globe even now there are websites dedicated to him in dozens of languages. I recently was contacted by a very sweet and charming lady in Los Angeles, California, who is a supporter, and I. And supporters the wrong word, but I'm trying to think of what the right word is. A person who's kind of an acolyte, if you will, of groaning. And of course, the people that I'm describing are not people who actually met Groening in person because he died a very long time ago. So, no, I think that it's even the case here in my own little neck of the woods, if you will, that I found people who are groaning, acolytes and people who were fascinated by him, that until I learned about him, I had no idea who he was. And I certainly didn't know that he had this massive international following, which I would suspect at this point is much bigger now than it was then.

Michelle: And again, just interesting to see how he fits into this time period of real social tension and how again, like we've been discussing how he kind of steps into a little bit of a void. And again, coming back to, you know, something that we were talking about earlier in terms of a big part of your book covering, you know, accusations of witchcraft. And again, it's something we've touched on briefly, how it acted as this language almost for this social conflict that we've been talking about. Do you want to just kind of, again, just explain how those types of accusations were used to navigate and express those social tensions and how they kind of compare and contrast to earlier witchcraft accusations, you know, say, in early modern Europe or the Salem witch trials.

Monica Black: Right. So, yes, I mean, the book kind of deals. Deals extensively with groaning, and then the other sort of major portion of the book deals with this sort of flurry of witchcraft accusations that take place in Germany between the late 1940s and the late 1950s. So those are two. There are other subjects that the book covers, too, but those are sort of the two, I would say, main topics that the book deals with and these witchcraft accusations. You know, when I first heard that, when I first started reading about that first in a book that was written at the time, which I found kind of by accident, and then when I went to the archives and saw the sources, and I thought, I had no idea. I had no idea how to write about that as a, you know, I couldn't figure out what exactly does it mean that people believed in witches? I've since come to understand from doing the research and reading a lot about witchcraft what a global phenomenon witchcraft is, that it's kind of an endemic feature of human societies all over the world and has been for a long time. It means different things in different places, in different times. It manifests itself differently in different places. But witchcraft is sort of a human thing. I'm reading a great book right now by a scholar named Marian Gibson called Witchcraft a history and 13 trials. It's excellent. I'm really enjoying, and Marian Gibson does a very good job of explaining this by looking at witchcraft trials in various locations in various points in time to show, sort of, in a way, the ubiquity of witch thinking. Witch thinking is kind of, you know, on one level, witch thinking is about trying to explain things that otherwise are very difficult to explain. For example, if you became ill and then one of your children became ill, and then there was an accident, and then your car stopped working, and then, you know, like a series of unfortunate things befall you, you might think, well, I'm just having a really bad streak of luck here. Or if you were from a context in which witchcraft thinking, witch thinking made sense, was a part of the idiom of cultural light, which it was in some places in Germany in the 1940s and fifties. You might say, I'm not just having bad luck. Somebody is making me have bad luck. Someone is conspiring against me to bring supernatural harm into my life. And that kind of thinking had existed in Germany for a long time. As it has existed in many places. Again, as I was saying earlier, it's very much a global, kind of ubiquitous human phenomenon in many ways. But what we see in post war Germany is a sort of sharpen, um, uptick in people being worried about witchcraft accusations of witchcraft. There's an uptick in witchcraft accusations, and then you have people who might concern themselves with such things, police authorities, local health authorities, also being concerned that people are accusing each other of witchcraft. And I asked myself, why would people in 1940s and 1950s Germany have accused each other of witchcraft? I'm not saying, and I want to be clear, that everybody in Germany was accusing everyone else of witchcraft. That's not. That doesn't make any sense. But there were communities in which witchcraft was an idiom of social life. It had always been. And it could be touched off by certain kinds of. It could be touched off by certain kinds of circumstances. And so the case that I wrote about most extensively, because there is the most extensive archival collection related to it, was a case of a guy named Valdemar Aberling, who was a local healer, not unlike Bruno Groening, in a certain way, who, when asked to do so, would come to people's homes and let's say they're having trouble with one of their children was ill, or I. Their things weren't going well on their farm, for example. They might ask him to come, and he would carry out some rituals, he would say some prayers, and he would offer some blessings, and then hopefully, these problems would go away. And indeed, he was quite successful at this, and lots of people said that he was quite successful in his healing practices. But what happens at a certain point in a small village in Schlesicholstang, which is the northernmost city in the federal Republic of today, is that he gets. Aberling gets the idea that some of the. Some local people in this village might be witches. And he communicates this not in words, but through gestures. He communicates to some of his patients, the people who have sought him out for help, that their. Whatever problems they might be experiencing are not just down to bad luck or something else. They are. They're being actively created by local witches. And so a kind of local witch scare erupts out of this, where people are accusing. Sort of accusing some of their neighbors of being witches or are passing on the news, let's put it that way, from one neighbor to another, that so and so has been implicated as a witch. And this leads to a court case. And it eventually, the reason there's such a large collection of sources related to this particular cases, because it ends up going all the way to the equivalent of the Supreme Court in West Germany on a kind of technical question. But in any case, I was fascinated by what latent mistrust that had been sort of sown in society, probably already beginning in some ways at the very end of the war, but then continuing through the postwar era, what this social mistrust had wrought in some communities. And it seemed clear to me that some piece of this eruption of witchcraft accusations had something to do with the recent past and the sort of undigested aspects of the recent past. That is to say, the nazi past.

Michelle: Yeah, it almost gives a. A way to express that, doesn't it? To be able to deal with that physically, emotionally, in all the ways that, you know, they couldn't necessarily internalize individually or collectively. This was a way of projecting that out, you know, in a way that they did.

Monica Black: Yeah, exactly. So one of the things that I think happens is that, you know, during, for example, with denazification proceedings, where I was explaining earlier that in some of these proceedings, local people would be asked to present documents if they wanted to clear their names of the taint, of the political taint of having been affiliated with the nazi regime, they would have to come to these tribunals and show their documents. The people who were looking at their documents were people who were considered unsullied politically, often former social democrats. And these people were essentially set the task of judging their neighbors. And the judgments mattered because sometimes when it came to things like property, people had gotten illegally during the Third Reich that something that had been given to them by, let's say, a local Nazi that they were friendly with. And now after the war, they're trying to clear their good names and they're the. They don't want to give back their ill gotten gains. And things like that created these situations in localities where people could feel very much like they didn't want other people to know things that they had done in the past. Right. Or they didn't want their previous sins exposed. And it seemed to me very clear that a lot of the witchcraft, what should we call it? The turbulence that that created lent itself to accusations of witchcraft, which in turn, as you point out, allowed people to kind of sort each other out when it came to questions of, you know, who had done what without actually naming the thing that they were all angry with each other about, which was, we have to imagine, sort of there's this brutal regime in place for twelve years. When it comes into power, it sorts everybody out right. It decides who its friends are and who its enemies are, and those enemies are marginalized and its friends are rewarded. In 1945, precisely the opposite happens. Right? So a new group of people are in charge, and they decide who, they sort everyone out. They decide who's going to, you know, who's going to win under the new system and who's not going to win under the new system. So there's this sort of, there's this churn of people being, you know, I don't know what to call it exactly, but of the tables being turned again and again. And I think that that sowed a lot of fear and anxiety and people, frankly, didn't want their previous sins exposed. Right. And people didn't necessarily want to expose anyone else's sins because at the end of the day, you didn't want your sins exposed either. And so there's this sort of, you know, it seemed to me a situation ripe for the kinds of accusations that I found in the archives.

Michelle: So what were some of the legal and the social consequences for those accused of witchcraft, and how did the communities and the authorities handle that?

Monica Black: Yeah, its a great question. I mean, so some of this, im trying to think of a kind of concise way to explain it. But, I mean, part of what happens is that, you know, there's a figure that I write about quite a lot in the book who wrote. His name was Kruse. K r u s e, Kose. Johann Kuza was a guy who had been kind of obsessed with local witchcraft beliefs for years, and he had seen them as very dangerous. You know, he thought that they were dangerous in the same way that anti Semitism was dangerous. He himself was a social democrat. He was not a fan of the Nazis. He was very much the opposite. And he kind of was forced to lay low during the Third Reich and was constantly, he was a schoolteacher. He was constantly moved from one school to the next because he wasn't sufficiently enthusiastic about the nazi regime. But he had been concerned for years, going back to the Weimar Republic already, about people in his region accusing each other of witchcraft. And he thought it was a very dangerous thing. It was a thing that could lead to great social upheaval, as I've kind of tried to describe, but also a thing that, yeah. Was just targeting a member of the community and calling that person a witch, meaning a dangerous, evil person in league with the devil. Right. This is dangerous behavior. And so he writes about it in the 1950s, in the early 1950s, he writes a book about it. He had written about it previously, but in the fifties, he writes a book that kind of explains witchcraft beliefs to the uninitiated. And he becomes this sort of ardent, and I think very much so. And I try to explain this in the book, very much in the post Holocaust period, thinking about what had happened to jewish Germans, the ways that they had been targeted, persecuted, marginalized in society, and then ultimately were murdered, he sees witchcraft as sort of a replay of that same kind of behavior, and he's very, very alarmed by it. And he begins, after the war, this campaign of letter writing. He writes letters to everyone, every state official he can think of to alert them to this problem. Was the problem as great as he made it seem? It's hard to know, but he gets a lot of officials very concerned. He gets local health officials concerned. He gets leaders of state, state government's concerned. He gets local police authorities concerned, and they begin trying to investigate the problem. The issue was that this was not the kind of thing that one discussed with outsiders. So if someone comes to you and says, have you heard anyone accusing anyone of being a witch, the first thing that you say is, I have no idea what you're talking about. Right? Because these are local issues. And one does not just sort of, one does not just sort of talk to authorities about what's happening in the locality, not just because one wants to protect the integrity of the locality, but because witchcraft itself is not a thing that is to be discussed and certainly not with outsiders. So it becomes this kind of interesting situation where on the one hand, there are people who are very concerned about it, writing about it. There are editorials written about it in newspapers. There are the equivalent of podcasts. At the time, there were radio programs that were conducted kind of trying to alert the public about the danger of witchcraft accusation. And on the other hand, there are the localities themselves who refuse to, you know, who refuse to discuss with outsiders what's happening in their villages and towns. There were also, you know, the reporting also produced a lot of interesting statistics about witchcraft trials. And there were witchcraft trials held all over West Germany during this period in big cities and in very, very small towns. So the phenomenon was clearly real. Its dimensions are very hard to quantify. And then it just sort of, at a certain point, ends. And even officials themselves say, we dont know what happened, we dont know why the spate of accusations suddenly just stopped.

Michelle: But it did, which seems to be what we see all the way through history, that you have this uptake of it and then just suddenly it stops, that panic, that initial spark, that spurs it into action, just disappears again, I think you see that here really very clearly.

Monica Black: Yeah. And I think what happens in this case, I mean, I think there are probably other, other complex local issues involved, too, that are very specific to the places where these accusations were made and where these witch scares transpired. But I also think that at a certain point, by the late 1950s and early sixties, West Germany was a stable country with strong allies and economically was certainly on the upswing. And people who had been worried that they might be exposed for various levels of crimes and misdemeanors that they had committed in the Third Reich might have, by the end of the 1950s, been able to breathe a sigh of relief. So I think some of the tension that generated the accusations in the early part of the 1950s, by the end of that decade, had dissipated. And thats part of the way that I explain that in the book.

Michelle: And I think one of the other things that comes across in the book is that there isnt necessarily an archive for kind of documenting these fears of spiritual punishment. So coming to what you were doing, how did you navigate these historical silences and what sources did you find most revealing in, in kind of uncovering the hidden aspects of post war Germany?

Monica Black: Yeah. No, I love to answer this question because it's one, you know, historians always love to talk about their sources. But, I mean, it is the case that the sorts of questions that I have, that I have generally had about the past are not ones that are the easiest ones to unearth in archives, because archives aren't organized around things like spiritual anxiety, and they're not organized around questions of psychological damage. They're organized around things like, you know, the welfare office of this or that state and the health board of such and such and the economic board of whatever. I mean, that's sort of, they're organized around the ways that states are organized generally, and so, or bureaucracies are organized generally. So I have always, as a historian, because of the things that interest me, which is basically human beings, I'm just really interested in human beings and the way that, the ways that they act, I'm interested, I'm interested in the things that they do everywhere, all the time. I'm fascinated by us as a species, I guess. But because of the things that interest me, which is to say things like psychology and spiritual life and religious life, I kind of have to look in weird places, and I have to kind of read sources against the grain. One of the things that I thought about a lot when I was writing this book is the question of silence, which is exactly the question that you were posing, and it's a very, very good question. We think of post war Germany as kind of a society that was beset by silence because there were so many things that no one wanted to talk about. No one wanted to implicate themselves. No one wanted to implicate their families or their neighbors. No one wanted to be implicated by anyone else. And there were these feelings among at least some people of latent guilt, of, of memories of things that they had done. And all of that is sort of the stuff that I wanted to unearth in this book. And when I say, I say at a certain point that silence becomes a kind of source of its own, because you have to ask yourself exactly what people are being silent about. Because they're not being silent. Exactly. They're saying plenty of things, but they're not saying exactly what you want to know. So you have to learn how to read against the silences or to try and think about why specific areas of concern are not on the table. Is that because no one at the time was thinking about those things? Maybe. Or maybe it's because there are very specific ways that people sort of ham all of that stuff in that they sort of, that they're organizing life, in a way, their new lives. Right. The post 45 lives. They're organizing their lives on a new basis. And there are certain kinds of things that have to be sort of squirreled away, that have to be stuck in a box and shoved under the bed. And I tried to figure out ways by looking at a very broad variety of sources, everything from court records and newspaper clippings to, I don't know, pieces of music, all sorts of things that could give a flavor of the emotional sort of tenor of this moment in time. And, yeah, I mean, I think that probably just trying to find sources that would help me get into the heart of all of those kinds of questions that I'm interested in was the most interesting part of writing the book, actually.

Michelle: And again, I think you touch upon something really very much relevant, which is that this is really just about trying to understand human nature and human response. And I find that equally fascinating. It's why I love history. It's about people, first and foremost, and the history of people on the ground, at ground, roots level type thing is often overlooked, but actually, it can provide so much interesting material and responses to situations. And in this case, we're really seeing how a society is responding to trauma. And again, one of the fascinating and really brilliant things that I think you do in the book is start to show and compare and contrast that with other examples of trauma from other societies. Thinking about things like the post tsunami in Japan and the Taiping rebellion, for example. And just coming back to that, what would you say by drawing on those comparisons, it kind of helps to reveal about just this universal nature of response to trauma in societies?

Monica Black: Yeah, I mean, I think that when I was a younger historian, I was always very well, I was trained this way. I think a lot of us are trained this way. You know, you're trained that every historical situation is absolutely unique, and it has to be treated that way, that there are very specific, you know, that every historical circumstance has, or every historical situation has very specific circumstances, and you have to be very careful about comparison. This is just the way I was taught. And as I wrote this book, and as I've thought about it more and as I've watched some of the things that have happened in my own society in recent years, I have come to be much more relaxed about making such comparisons. I don't want to get too relaxed about it. Of course, it is important to bear in mind the specificities of particular moments in time and the cultures that produce those moments or the circumstances that produce those moments. But it's still the case that we can see really interesting parallels, I would say, between societies in moments like this. I mean, I would also say, I'm not sure there's ever been a moment quite like this one. I'm pretty sure there hasn't been. But nevertheless, we can't ask the question, how do groups of human beings sort out? How do we sort through feeling like we don't know what's going on? We thought we understood was happening and the world got flipped over on us. We know that terrible criminality has terrible crimes have taken place. Whether we want to really admit that to ourselves or not or our own role in it, we know that bad things have happened and there's a sort of defense mechanism in place there. The things that we thought were true turned out to be absolutely false. I mean, how do we deal with that? And that for me, I thought about the book in many ways as a kind of a window onto how human beings deal with extremely complicated questions that we can't actually answer. Like, maybe not everybody asks themselves these questions, but a lot of people ask themselves, why am I here? What is my purpose on this earth? Why did this bad thing happen to me? I'm a pretty decent person. Why are these bad things happening to me? I mean, these are the kinds of questions that human beings bring to their experience of the world. And some of these questions just don't ever have answers. And so part of what interests me as a historian is trying to see how humans in this or that circumstance, what kinds of answers do they come up with to those questions? And that was what fascinated me about groaning. And, you know, a lot of people said, oh, you're writing a book about the supernatural. And I was like, I'm not writing a book book about the supernatural. I'm writing a book about german history after 1945. And the way that I get to it is by looking at kind of grassroots experience and the sorts of questions people were asking and the ways that they sought answers to those questions.

Michelle: So what lessons would you say that contemporary societies can learn from post war Germany in terms of dealing with those historical crimes and the processes of memory and atonement?

Monica Black: Yes, it's such an important question. I feel like I never give the best answer to it because I think it's a question of enormous significance. And I just don't, in some ways, I don't feel sort of equal to the challenge of answering it. But I do think that watching my own society in recent years, I do think that we can see clear evidence of what happens in a society that refuses to acknowledge the past. You know, in the United States, I think a lot of people think that we do acknowledge the past. We do acknowledge the past of slavery, for example. We do acknowledge the past of Jim Crow or of the theft of the land from the indigenous people who lived here before Europeans came. We say that we acknowledge those things, but at a deeper level, at a real, true level, like how our society is organized and the role of racism in our society and issues like that, we have not addressed those questions, and they boil and churn. And the tension over the tension. I think the social tension is between people, on the one hand, who think it's very important to not only to acknowledge, but to begin to dismantle the effects of the past and people who insist that actually the past has already been laid to rest, that the crimes of the past have been that justice has been done. And that tension is, I think, at the heart of so much of what faces the United States as a society today. The willingness, on the one hand, to engage and the absolute unwillingness to engage, on the other hand. So I thought when I was writing this book that it was very interesting, the way that Germans, the past would constantly percolate to the surface. It was right there. It was hardly even the past. It was hardly even what you would call memory at that point. It was just like something that had just happened. And I saw the way that nevertheless, I mean, it's not like in the United States where we're often talking about crimes that took place decades ago or even in some cases centuries ago. This is something that had just happened. And I was fascinated by the way that the desire to keep a lid on that had certain kinds of psychological effects on people. And so I do think that parallels can be drawn to between the german case and other cases, even if the german cases, as we know very well, a very extreme example.

Michelle: So what would you say you would like to see in terms of further areas of research when thinking about and understanding the long term impacts of post conflict trauma and the way that societies heal from that? What would you say you'd like to see, see next in relation to post World War two Germany?

Monica Black: I don't know about post world War two Germany exactly, but I do think that the connections between sort of, first of all, I should say this spiritual healing is. And sort of, I'm not talking now about alternative healing. That's a different thing, I think. I want to say that that's a different thing, but I'm not sure exactly what I mean right now. But I think that sort of, let's just say religious healing is a very under researched aspect of european history in general, I think. I don't think that's just a german thing. I think that's a. You know, a lot of the topics in my book have been kind of relegated, if you will, by historians to folklorists and people who study sort of. I don't know who study folk tales and study sort of vernacular knowledge. But I don't understand why. I don't understand why historians don't study those things, too. And certainly, as you were saying a little while ago, it made me think about this. Early modern historians and medieval historians have no trouble at all studying these issues. And then there's still this belief that these forms of healing, that these practices of healing just vanished somewhere after the enlightenment. It's just not true. And so I would love to see more work done in those areas, and I would love to see more work done, actually, on the connections between physicalist medicine and sort of university trained doctors and these practices. Because as I found in my book, there were many times when there were overlaps between these two things where doctors, you know, university trained physicians were interested in groening. They were writing about psychosomatic medicine. And they. I saw him as an interesting example. And I would love to see more work done sort of in that area, not just in Germany, but in other places, too. And I think, too, that it would be really interesting to see more work. I mean, to your question about trauma, I would love to see more work done across lots of different european national histories on the trauma of world War Two. I mean, there is a literature on memory, a big literature on memory, on how people have sort of remembered that past and the changing ways in which they instrumentalize the past of the second world War or of the Holocaust. But what were the effects for ordinary people of the experience of the war? That is a different question, actually. And I would love to see more work done on that question.

Michelle: Oh, I completely agree with everything you just said. I'd love to see the same types of things. I just think it's fascinating. And like you said, it's very much under researched and shared. And I think that's a shame, because I think it's something begging to be looked into further and discussed further.

Monica Black: I think so, too. And I also think that there's a lot of, you know, one of the things that has been just a dream for me about writing this book is the number of letters that I've received from people who are the children of. So in german terms, they would be called, like, the 68 generation, the people who sort of came of age around 1968. So there are people who were born just at the tail end of the second World War or just after, and they're young, either teenagers or in their twenties when the 1968 student movement takes off. And so I've just received the most amazing letters from individuals from that cohort who are saying to me things like, you helped me understand something about my father that I never understood before. You helped me understand things about my mother. I wish that I had known about these things earlier. And so I think that there's a, that can't just be true in Germany. The case of Germany is very particular. But I also think that there are ways that knowing more about what people experienced in Britain or in France or in Poland, you know, how did people sort of carry the burden of what had happened during the war as individuals and as communities, and how did that affect generations after them? I think that's a really interesting and important story.

Michelle: Absolutely. Honestly, it's been such a privilege to chat with you. It's a fascinating discussion, and your book is incredible. I mean, it's so well researched. I highly recommend people take a read and have a look at some of the other materials that you've written as well. And to that end, I will make sure that all of the links to your website to the book are readily and easily available so that anybody looking at the podcast description notes will find them. Anyone looking to find out more about you on you know, the podcast website will be easily signposted so that if they want, if you want to go and get this book, if you want to find out more about Monica and her other work, then you can easily do so. Because like I said, this is a book I highly recommend.

Monica Black: Well, Michelle, that would be wonderful. Thank you so much. And I've just, it's been a delightful conversation for me and your questions are excellent and really, really made me, really made me think so. I appreciate that.

Michelle: Thank you so much. And like I said, I will make sure all of those are easily signposted so that people can hopefully dive into for themselves and find out more about this topic. So thank you for your time and I'll say goodbye to everybody listening. Bye, everybody.