The Economist January 15th 2022 Books & arts 73Germanyafterthesecondworldwar
Out of the abyss
T
heroadfromtheThirdReichtomod
ernGermanybeganina fieldofrubble.
The second world war had left behind
enoughofit toforma mountain4,000me
treshigh,ifitwerepiledupontheNazi
partyrallygroundsinNuremberg.When
thewarended,citizensbeganclearingit all
up.SeveraltownsforcedexNazistodothe
heavylifting.Famously,“rubblewomen”,
wearing frocks, boots and headscarves,
formed bucket chains and made salty faces
for Allied cameras as they worked. Some
dressed elegantly, having taken only their
best clothes to the airraid shelters.
Manual labour forestalled soulsearch
ing, writes Harald Jähner in “Aftermath”, an
erudite account of the postwar decade in
Germany, now published in English. “How
does a nation in whose name many mil
lions of people were murdered talk about
culture and morality?” he asks. “Would it
be better, for decency’s sake, to avoid talk
ing about decency altogether?” The philos
opher Hannah Arendt noticed Germans
squirming to change the subject on learn
ing she was Jewish. Instead of asking after
her family, they described their own war
time suffering. Mr Jähner notes Germany’s
“extraordinary feat of repression”, but
wonders if “behind the wounding obdura
cy of [Arendt’s] German acquaintances,
rather than pure heartlessness, there
might not have been a degree of shame”.
Shame’s hue varied with experience.
German women were recovering from a
plague of sexual assaults by Soviet troops.
German soldiers, starving and humiliated,
came home to find unrecognisable chil
dren and emboldened wives who had
assumed control of society. In a queasy
stopgap measure, many of the few surviv
ing Jews were separated again, in part for
their own protection, this time in repatria
tion camps administered by the Allies.
Meanwhile a total of 40m people dis
placed in Germany had to find their way
home, or start again somewhere new. Mr
Jähner memorably portrays the crushed
and guilty nation as a busy crossroads:
“Footage from the summer of 1945 in Berlin
shows everyone charging about in all di
rections: Russian and American soldiers,
German police, gangs of youths, families
dragging their belongings through streets
on handcarts, scruffy homecomers, inva
lids on crutches,smartsuited men, cy
clists in collar and tie, women with empty
rucksacks, women with full rucksacks, and
certainly many more women than men.”
Primitive concerns dominated German
life until the late 1940s. It was a “time of
wolves” that saw widespread looting and
hoarding, excess and privation existing
side by side. One newspaper reported sev
eral people drowning in kneedeep wine
from smashed casks in a Munich cellar. Ra
tioncards guaranteed a mere 1,550 calories
per day and led to a thriving black market,
which authorities tried to combat with
everharsher sentences. Officials in Saxo
ny introduced capital punishment in 1947
to see off “foodsupply saboteurs”.
In time anarchy gave way to order, and
order to the seeds of social democracy. A
key step in this process, says Mr Jähner,
was currency reform, when the plummet
ing Reichsmark was replaced with the
Deutsche Mark in June 1948. Another stabi
lising influence was the Marshall Plan,
which lent $1.4bn to West Germany (for
mally divided from the East in 1949). It was
the only western European nation forced
to repay the funds, “in order to preserve
some sense of proportion between victory
and defeat”. Culture revived, too, theatre
receipts spiking from 1945 to 1948 before
settling again. “With affluence came
thrift,” notes Mr Jähner.
The postwar culture boom is a rare
missed opportunity in “Aftermath”. Other
art forms are neglected in a chapter fo
cused on abstract painting. For example,
Germany’s midcentury compromises
converge revealingly in the figure of Her
bert von Karajan, a classical maestro who
goes unmentioned. A Nazi party member
and favourite of Hitler, the Austrian reha
bilitated his image and became conductor
of the Berlin Philharmonic for over three
decades. Like many others in Germany, he
found respectability through a combination of entitlement and amnesia.
Midcentury Germans, says Mr Jähner,
needed to see themselves as victims. The
more they suffered during the war and its
aftermath, the less they felt complicit in
Nazi crimes. He puts German anguish in
the essential context of a nation climbing
out of an abyss that it created. As the histo
rian Tony Judt wrote in “Postwar”, the con
flict was a calamity “in which everyone lost
something and many lost everything”.
“Aftermath” is a reminder that theGerman
experience will always stand apart.nAftermath. By Harald Jähner. Translated by
Shaun Whiteside. Knopf; 416 pages; $30.
WH Allen; £20
Life amid the rubbleDystopianfictionWho knows best?
A
llparentsmakemistakes,especially
when harried or exhausted. Jessamine
Chan’s haunting debut novel unspools
from one of them. Sleepdeprived, under
pressure at work and divorced from her
child’s father, Frida leaves Harriet in a
babybouncer and heads to the office in
Philadelphia to run a quick errand. But she
loses track of time; two hours later the po
lice call to say that her neighbours heard
crying and the toddler is now in their care.
This lapse has devastating costs. Harri
et is placed indefinitely in the custody of
her father and his new partner. Frida is put
under surveillance. The Child Protective
Services have been given wideranging
new powers; they scour her house as if itThe School for Good Mothers. By
Jessamine Chan. Simon & Schuster; 336
pages; $27. To be published in Britain by
Hutchinson Heinemann in March; £12.99