“This reissue of Buller’s 1943 publication could not be more timely or relevant. Kurt Barling’s 2017 foreword summarizes Buller’s thesis: postwar peace must be contemplated during the war, making talking to the enemy a necessity. A British national with personal and professional connections in Nazi Germany, Buller dedicated her life to education and discourse, both verbal and written. She sought to understand how ordinary Germans came to their decisions while the Nazis were in power and challenged representations of German citizens that did not include nuance, intelligence, and struggle. A German educator chose to stay in a school run by Nazis who taught falsehood and prejudice in hopes of counterteaching. The publisher of a Catholic paper endured Nazi censorship rather than have the paper permanently banned, reasoning that people facing ever-increasing oppression would benefit more from edited faith than nothing. Buller’s extraordinary work was to engage in conversations, transcribe them, and allow German voices to speak for themselves. She sought to complicate the convenient, dualistic narrative that the righteous Brits were fighting the universally bad Nazis. These testimonials have much to teach modern-day readers, as does Buller’s belief that postwar healing had to come from within Germany.” — Booklist (starred review)

“[A] book to remember… reports of her conversations with a wide range of ‘ordinary’ Germans in the 1930s, pointing up what happens when national confusion, mistrust in public servants and public service, cynicism, xenophobia and economic chaos take over a society. If we want to know — and we ought to want to know just now — what prompts the collapse of law-based democracy, this is a good place to start.” — Rowan Williams, former Archbishop of Canterbury, now head of a Cambridge University, writing in The New Statesman

“I have been thinking about the youth of this country. I took from my bookshelf a very remarkable book written by a godmother of mine, Amy Buller. It is called Darkness over Germany and it was written during the war. It explains the almost religious grip that Nazism had over the youth of Germany… Of course, we are dealing with different fundamental spiritual needs, but if we are to play our part in trying to provide the answers that our youth require to today’s problems, it is vital that we understand and repair our national strengths and weaknesses with regard to the protection and projection of the values that we as a country maintain.” — Lord Ramsbotham