‘A Demon-Haunted Land’ by Monica Black
Review: Black, Monica; A Demon-Haunted Land: Witches, Wonder Doctors, and the Ghosts of the Past in Post-WWII Germany, New York: Metropolitan Books, Henry Holt & Company, 2020, ISBN 978-1-250-22567-2
“The crisis consists precisely in the fact that the old is dying and the new cannot be born; in this interregnum a great variety of morbid symptoms appear.”
Monica Black opens A Demon Haunted Land with the description of a witch trial.
At its center is Frau N., who lived with her family in a village in Franconia in Southern Germany. A wandering lay healer or cunning man, Herr C., arrived in town, performed healing rituals and other magical acts, and “said he could establish the sources of illness by reading signs – bits of bread, charcoal, and broom straws floating in water.” He also began putting it about that Frau N. had been seen reading a book of spells (possibly the wildly popular Sixth and Seventh Books of Moses, which gets its own chapter later in the book, or another mass-produced grimoire, possibly a prayer book or Bible), and stated that she was responsible for several sudden deaths and illnesses in the village, including that of a hog, and threatened the lives of the children of the hog-owner’s family.
In the end, Frau N. took Herr C. to court for defamation and won. Black notes that this positive twist differentiates this witch trial from those happening in early modern Europe, but that otherwise, the case could have occurred hundreds of years in the past in every detail.
Black was able to find “scores of ‘witchcraft trials’” “between roughly 1947 and 1965”, as well as “sources in which people talk of being pursued by devils and hiring exorcists”, “a wildly popular healer who claimed the ability to identify the good and the wicked, to heal the former and cast out the latter”, “police records describing prayer circles whose members convened to combat demonic infection”, “mass pilgrimages to holy sites in search of spiritual cures and redemption”.
This was a society that has been literally and figuratively blown apart by World War I, the Treaty of Versailles which brought peace and a punishing reparations regime to go with it, the rise of Naziism, World War II, Allied occupation, denazification, and division into East and West Germany. German cities that had been bombed to rubble were rebuilt, half as historical replicas of themselves and half with glossy modern architecture. The papers, as Black notes, had advertisements about modern appliances next to articles about masses of bodies found buried in schoolyards.
As Black says, although these were timeless or anachronistic stories with a fairy-tale quality, it was no accident that they appeared at this time. In the aftermath of the war, Germans’ individual and collective souls were profoundly injured. Not only their physical environment and nation-state had been obliterated, their social connections and inner narrative had also been atomized.
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The central focus of the book is on the rise and fall of the lay healer Bruno Bernhard Gröning. Even more, it is about the crowds of people who gathered around him in “Biblical” proportions; the photographs and descriptions call up the King James Edition word “multitudes”. They surrounded houses where he stayed, they blocked traffic, they did everything but lower paralyzed patients through a hole in the roof.
The ailments that troubled these people were of a “seelisch” or spiritual nature. They were “herzkrank”, heart-sick. Many of them exhibited what we would call psychosomatic ailments – hysterical blindness, paralysis – post-traumatic stress disorder, or simply a profound loss of purpose and function in daily life.
Gröning’s healing first and foremost consisted of attending to the patient.
Freud and Jung’s psychoanalysis worked by this same means. Oliver Sacks would later have notable success with patients on this basis: as the recent documentary Oliver Sacks: A Life put it, he saw them as a person, not a set of symptoms, as someone who could do many things, if not everything they used to do; in doing this, he put them back at the center of their own story.
This was a crucial process in the postwar period. Consider the rebuilding efforts: half the cities were reconstructed in the fashion of the distant past, the other, next door, in a stainless vision of the future. The architectural stories were jumbled together, unconvincing, disconcerting in the way that the ads for appliances next to stories of mass graves must have been.
His second function was to help resolve the issue of sin and forgiveness, to sort out good from bad people. Gröning specifically stated that his healing powers could only help the good and would banish the bad.
Imagine: You have been shot at, bombed, assaulted, pillaged. You have been victimized by the occupying armies, by your own government, by your friends and relatives. Your mayor is the same person who was mayor during the Nazi years. Your doctor recommended you be sterilized for racial impurity. Your neighbors informed on you. The police, the judges are the same people who inflicted punishment on you. You have done terrible things to survive. You lied. You stole. You committed acts of violence. You stole the home and business of the Jewish family who lived next door. You fought in the war. You remember things that keep you awake at night. You survived. Others died, some because of things you’d done or not done, because of your speech or silence, sins of omission and commission. Black refers to the Nazi period, rightly, as a “physical and moral catastrophe” that reached every member of the society.
What Gröning offered was a story of exoneration. If you could be healed physically, that meant you deserved to be healed morally, relieved of the “sin” that produced the disease.
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As I am writing this, we are in the middle of the second year of a pandemic. Reading A Demon Haunted Land, I’m unavoidably brought to think of the behavior of crowds, of the numerous quack cures and conspiracy theories that have become common currency in a subset of the population in recent years, some preceding the pandemic, some worsened by it.
People are heartsick. People are soulsick. People have gone right off the rails. They have lost their own narrative. They are, to use another King James word, perplexed.
Some have constructed villains – the specter of a pedophile ring operating out of the basement of a pizza parlor that has no basement. Some have anointed prophets – a group waits on the grassy knoll in Dallas for John F. Kennedy’s son to return from the grave to declare that the second coming of Trump is also at hand.
They take fish tank cleaner and horse parasite medicine and shun a simple and effective vaccine.
All of this from a physical and moral injury a thousandth the magnitude of that suffered in Germany from the beginning of WWI through the end of WWII.
Still, there’s a gap in the narrative. There’s perplexity. That’s the demon that haunts the land.