The Germans are never (quite) as bad or as good as they seem. In the 1930s and 1940s, during the Third Reich, the Germans were, of course, very bad. More recently, especially between 2015 and 2020, they seemed rather good. The Germans, John Kampfner’s recent book told us, “did it better”. They made stuff that people actually wanted to buy, were mastering the “energy transition”, did a good job during Covid, and, having admitted a million Middle Eastern refugees, were celebrated as a “moral superpower”. In fact, as Frank Trentmann shows in his absorbing new book, Out of the Darkness:...