Aftermath
Life in the Fallout of the Third Reich
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3.7 • 3 Ratings
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- £8.99
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- £8.99
Publisher Description
THE TIMES TOP 10 BESTSELLER
***SHORTLISTED FOR THE BAILLIE GIFFORD PRIZE FOR NON-FICTION***
***SHORTLISTED FOR THE BRITISH ACADEMY BOOK PRIZE***
***SHORTLISTED FOR THE CUNDILL HISTORY PRIZE***
A Book of the Year
The Times * Sunday Times * Telegraph * New Statesman * Financial Times * Irish Independent * Daily Mail
'A masterpiece' SPECTATOR
'Exemplary [and] important... This is the kind of book few writers possess the clarity of vision to write' MAX HASTINGS, SUNDAY TIMES
'Magnificent... There are great lessons in the nature of humanity to be learnt here' TELEGRAPH
Germany, 1945: a country in ruins. Cities have been reduced to rubble and more than half of the population are where they do not belong or do not want to be. How can a functioning society ever emerge from this chaos?
In bombed-out Berlin, Ruth Andreas-Friedrich, journalist and member of the Nazi resistance, warms herself by a makeshift stove and records in her diary how a frenzy of expectation and industriousness grips the city. The Americans send Hans Habe, an Austro-Hungarian Jewish journalist and US army soldier, to the frontline of psychological warfare - tasked with establishing a newspaper empire capable of remoulding the minds of the Germans. The philosopher Hannah Arendt returns to the country she fled to find a population gripped by a manic loquaciousness, but faces a deafening wall of silence at the mention of the Holocaust.
Aftermath is a nuanced panorama of a nation undergoing monumental change. 1945 to 1955 was a raw, wild decade poised between two eras that proved decisive for Germany's future - and one starkly different to how most of us imagine it today. Featuring black and white photographs and posters from post-war Germany - some beautiful, some revelatory, some shocking - Aftermath evokes an immersive portrait of a society corrupted, demoralised and freed - all at the same time.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Germans rebounded from shattering defeat with hard work, a pragmatic embrace of the new, and a willful forgetting of trauma and guilt, according to this penetrating history of the early postwar period. Journalist Jähner surveys the decade following Nazi Germany's surrender, when the nation lay in ruins, occupied by foreign armies, awash in refugees, and facing desperate shortages of food, fuel, and housing. Social strife resulted, but also novel possibilities and a "bafflingly good mood," according to Jähner: female cleanup crews became icons of solidarity; a frenzied nightlife of jazz and dancing erupted; respectable citizens became thieves and black marketeers; abstract art and avant-garde furniture looked to the future; the Volkswagen Beetle factory symbolized a gathering economic miracle; and Germans swept their responsibility for the Holocaust under the rug while claiming victimhood, a maneuver that Jähner describes as "intolerable insolence" but also as a "necessary prerequisite" for breaking with the past and establishing democracy. Elegantly written and translated, Jähner's analysis deploys emotionally resonant detail—after war's horror and exhilaration, German veterans came home to become "pitiful wraith in the unheated kitchen"—to vividly recreate a vibrant, if morally haunted, historical watershed. This eye-opening study enthralls. Photos.
