After The NazisA newly translated history brings much-needed nuance to our understanding of postwar German society.
By Matthew Ghobrial Cockerill
February 25, 2022
Aftermath: Life in the Fallout of the Third Reich, 1945-1955, by Harald Jähner, translated by Shaun Whiteside (Knopf, 2022), 416 pages.
Non-German Westerners have a cliched image of Germany in the immediate postwar period as a nation comprised of incorrigible Nazis slowly coming to appreciate democratic values under the careful instruction of their American and British mentors. In this narrative, denazification of Germans was the overwhelming postwar task of both the Allied occupiers and the Germans themselves, with the core lesson in denazification offered in the Nuremberg Trials, which proved to each German his personal disgrace and responsibility in the extermination of the Jews.
The popular German account of the immediate postwar era is equally problematic. According to this narrative, postwar German society was fully committed to the restoration of a stolid and authoritarian German society, and impervious of its guilt for aggressive war and atrocities. According to this narrative, it was not until the sons and daughters (and for that matter grandchildren) of Nazis came of age and fell into the “Sixty-Eighter” movement that the German people engaged in an authentic reflection on the moral, political, and aesthetic qualities of Germany and how they lent themselves so easily to aggressive war and genocide.
The truth about postwar Germany, as unraveled in Harald Jähner’s Aftermath: Life in the Fallout of the Third Reich, is incomparably more poignant than the mundanely moralizing popular narratives about that era. With the humanity of a poet and the precision of a historian, Jähner exposes the sufferings, the creativity, the cruelties, and the lies that characterized and sustained post-war Germany. Originally released in Germany in 2019, this English translation is a faithful and skilled effort to capture the author’s tone and meaning.
Jähner’s book mostly concentrates on post-war West Germany—i.e. the parts of Germany that were occupied by the Americans, British, and French, and later became the BRD—and so too will this review. He writes about a ten-year period, 1945-1955, but it is really best to think of postwar Germany as two periods: 1945-1950, and 1950-1955, the latter representing the period immediately after the “economic miracle” in West Germany, in which West German society became much more ordered, self-assured, and conservative.
* * *
Source:
https://www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/after-the-nazis/
