Aftermath: Life in the Fallout of the Third Reich

Superb insightful view of the immediate aftermath from 1945 till about 1950 . More to do with the societal changes and how the male female Roles were viewed and how they changed based on one instinct - survival.

Just to give some context - I am a complete World War 2 nerd and have a cupboard full of books on WW2. For months I had been wanting to read about what happened immediately after the end of WW2 - after the capitulation of Nazi Germany in 1945. This book sounded very promising. However, when I started it and went through the first few chapters I was appalled. First of all, the author is not a serious historian, and should not be considered as such. Too often he lets his own opinions and beliefs get mixed with the facts from his research. He makes sweeping statements like "Most Germans made their acquaintance with hunger only after the war. Until then they had lived reasonably well by plundering the occupied territories". As if the people lived heartily in full stomachs amidst the bombed-out buildings and the rubble! More egregious is his comment that the rapes of the German women by Russian soldiers at the end of the war could be justified, in part, because of the heinous crimes committed by the Nazis on the Soviet population. We are talking about what probably was the most systematic and violent campaign of raping ever perpetrated by a group of men in history, and for this author it was just a case of tit-for-tat! Reading that chapter made me sick to my stomach. Basically, the author fills the whole book with the "Allies were good, Germans were evil" sentiment. Felt like I was reading from an 8th grader's history project. However, the saving grace to some extent are the interesting facts one can find here. Such as the British and Americans rationing the local population in the occupied zones to 1,550 calories daily - which represented only 65% of what doctors at the time considered necessary for the nutrition of the average adult. A deliberate strategy of starving the Germans and making sure a whole generation would grow up malnourished and weak - bet you wouldn't know that from any history book or movie where the brave American or English soldier fights the evil Germans!

It’s almost impossible to sum up this book.The critical question was how a democracy managed to emerge from a past of repression and fascism - how did modern Germany reconcile itself with its Nazi past? And the answer seems to be - there was no reconciliation. The past was ignored and dismissed for many, former members of the Nazi Party and SS carried on with their pre-war careers and collected their pensions. The Nuremberg Trials of the 1940s were similarly ignored. The rationale for the German public seemed to be: it doesn’t matter where you came from it matters where you’re going. And most Germans wanted to head towards a future that left their Nazi past with all its attendant guilt, far behind. They wanted to remake themselves and their future. It was only their children who, in the 1960s, as buried truths emerged about the death camps, hurled furious accusations at their parents and grandparents and demanded an accounting.I wonder what my German side felt? They were in Magdeburg but once the wall went up they were silenced. When the wall came down they could no longer be located. So all I ever knew about them was old postcards in German that had been collected in the late 40s and 50s.An extraordinary book, very readable, and well worth your time in coming to an understanding of modern Germany as well as the modern Europe of which it is such a strong and crucial element.

Superbly written and amazingly cited. Full of interesting facts about life in post war Germany. Definitely recommend it to anyone who’s interested in the topics!

Hundreds of volumes have been written about the Second World War, with more on the way. Hundreds more are devoted to the Cold War that followed it. But what about life in Europe in the years following VE Day? We get glimpses here and there and some resources on the internet, but there are few studies in print.Harald Jãhner fills this void in this well-researched, yet readable book. Jãhner avoids the dry, fact-by-fact approach, telling the story from the perspective of those who lived it. He uses quotes from articles, interviews, biographies, and diaries; cites speeches and poetry, takes us into cinemas and dance halls.Though Jãhner is a German journalist, he takes an even-handed approach, looking dispassionately at how post-war Germans dealt (or did not deal) with guilt. He shows the often callous manner with which the Allies dealt with German suffering, while acknowledging the formidable task of feeding and housing the post-war population they inherited. He documents the resentment rural Germans felt toward their displaced urban "immigrants," the tensions when different German cultures were forced to live side-by-side, and even the cold reaction of surviving secular German Jews to the deeply religious DPs from Eastern Europe.This book is a must for anyone trying to understand the war in Europe and its aftermath.

There are many accounts that look at Germany in the immediate context of defeat. Jahner does that but takes the story into the 1950s and beyond. He examines how German society was shaped by the aftermath, the ruins and wreckage of summer 1945. It is a good read, though weighted to the federal Republic and focusing on the cultural. There is much that was new to this reader and fascinating. I was not persuaded of his main conclusion.Jahner draws on diverse sources, including music, cinema, and magazines, to analyse social life. Occasionally, one feels a lack of hard data and a reliance on impression, some of the writing veers towards the anecdotal. This is particularly so in the sections on youth and sexuality. Frauleins and GIs by Maria Hohn is more anchored, Katya Hojer is far better on the aftermath in the DDR. That said, much of it is illuminating. I was amazed how modern art entered the West German home and office with a nudge from the CIA.His main object was to explain how Germany as “a nation that perpetrated the Holocaust became a dependable democratic country”. Hahner believes a booming economy was only one reason. More important was a culture of amnesia, a refusal or failure to reckon with Naziism. Instead, it was chosen to forget and move on, to look forward not back. The settling of accounts and admission of guilt came much more recently, when the Federal and then unified state was on secure foundations. There is only some truth here. Jahner ignores the political culture that was interrupted from 1933 to 1945 and assumes that the other democracies had an unblemished past in other regards.For all that a very interesting book with a provocative thesis.

Un relato fascinante de la Alemania de la postguerra contado por un alemán, que ayuda a entender a los alemanes. Una visión humana e inteligente de una década olvidada. Absolutamente recomedable.