What happens to a people whose country has been destroyed by years of war - entire cities reduced to rubble by relentless firebombing, a nation reviled internationally as a pariah for its perpetration of the Holocaust? They find a way to keeping living, and, eventually even thriving. That is the gist of Harald Jähner's wildly entertaining book Aftermath ( Shaun Whiteside's translation of Wolfszeit). Jähner's focus is on the lives of ordinary Germans, not the postwar geopolitical situation. And he covers the key stages of Germany's recovery: the almost giddy exhilaration in the immediate aftermath of having survived the war, the harsh conditions of hunger an lack of housing which led to Cardinal Frings' blessing of petty theft of coal and food (which coined a new verb: fringsen), the social upheaval caused by millions of displaced persons and expellees from the former Sudetenland and East Prussian who transformed both cities and rural villages, the critical role of the Black Market which vanished virtually overnight with the 1948 Currency Reform. All of this is covered by Jähner in the early chapters of Aftermath.
The later chapters deal with the beginnings of the Wirtschaftswunder - Germany's "Economic Miracle" as it rose from the rubble to become Europe's economic powerhouse. Jähner focuses here on key individuals who are representative for this astonishing transformation: there is Beate Uhse, a wartime pilot who became a household name as a sex entrepreneur and brought the sexual revolution to Germany a decade before the hippies and the "68ers"; there was Heinz Heinrich Nordhoff who led Volkswagen from 1948, making the car manufacturer an icon of Germany's newfound economic power; there was Hans Habe, a writer and publisher who was initially installed by the American occupiers to create 18 regional newspapers but who later "went native" and was instrumental in building West Germany's vibrant independent free press; and there was Willi Baumeister, an abstract painter and designers, whose art was promoted by the American CIA to counter Soviet-style socialist realism. If I have any criticism of Harald Jähner's book is that he barely mentions the Gruppe 47 of writers and poets who reconnected Germany to modern world literature.
The final chapter of Aftermath deals with how many German's "repressed" their involvement in the Third Reich as well as their horrific experiences during the war. This was a 'willful amnesia' - perhaps necessary to some extent to move on and focusing on creating a new future. In this context, the attempt by the American Occupation Forces at "denazification" of the German population was an abject failure. Still, the United States -through its culture - played the essential role in postwar Germany's embrace of democracy, as Jähner points out in a recent interview in The Guardian:
American entertainment culture had a very pacifying effect on Germany: its films taught us previously unknown, relaxed and laconic attitudes. It wasn’t just chocolate and cigarettes that made American GIs attractive to German women, but because they embodied a freer lifestyle. They were softer than their German counterparts: American soldiers were seen pushing prams through bombed-out cities, which was absolutely unheard of at the time. Germany learned less about liberalism through official denazification programmes than through pop culture. If there is a lesson for these modern times, it is how important it is to keep on caring for a nation even once it has been defeated.
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