8 S UNDAY, FEBRUARY 6, 2022
LINING UP PHOTOshoots on piles of rubble;
women fondling G.I.s while “boldly return-
ing disapproving gazes”; Germans de-
nouncing fellow Germans newly evacuat-
ed from the East as “Polacks” — these jar-
ring set pieces illustrate Harald Jähner’s
highly readable account of how Germans
went about leaving Nazism behind. “After-
math” is about the price and the accom-
plishment of a new beginning when the ag-
gressive war the Germans had waged was
reversed to utter defeat in 1945. A talented
journalist, Jähner concludes with guarded
optimism: Precisely the egoism of citizens,
their loudmouthed irritation with one an-
other and ultimately their self-serving re-fusal to let the past be a burden blocked a
return to the fierce nationalism of the post-
World War I period. This unlikely mix en-
abled German democracy.
Jähner introduces Günter Eich’s 1945
poem “Inventory.” “This is my cap,/ this is
my coat,/ here are my shaving things/ in
their linen case.... This is my note-
book, /this my strip of canvas,/ this my
towel, /this is my thread.” “Inventory”
served as a “manifesto for Zero Hour,” the
blank slate of the ruined nation. It was,
Jähner writes, the “equipment for the new
beginning” minimized to jettison the past.
The spare inventory was also true to the
hard circumstances of being on the road in
the first years after the war. One-half of the
inhabitants of Germany were no longer
where they belonged or wanted to be.
There were millions of displaced persons,
former slave laborers and prisoners of war
who transitioned “from bondage to vaga-
bondage.” As long as they remained in Ger-
many, foreigners aroused the suspicion of
Germans fearful of the revenge they might
take. Neighbors were just as mistrustful of
millions of German refugees who eventu-
ally settled in their towns. For years, “ex-
pellees” remained strangers in the West.
But over time, Jähner argues, unwelcome
refugees “de-provincialized” hometowns,
mixed up local identities and caused old-
timers to abandon dialect. They contribut-
ed to a melting pot of hard-working people
anxious to make their way.
German soldiers who returned from the
war, often after years in prison camps, add-
ed to the unfamiliarity. “Limping men”
walked across everyday scenes. Veteransappeared at front doors “holding discharge
papers as if to identify themselves.” At
home, “the world war was followed by
small-scale family wars.” When men were
away, women had learned “to repair bicy-
cles, attach gutters and replace electric
wires,” and they resisted the reassertion of
male authority. “Bedrooms were the most
inhospitable rooms,” Jähner says: “a sin-
gle ceiling light” illuminating a bed sur-
rounded by “armoires with suitcases
dumped on top of them.” Waves of divorce
spilled over society. Unfamiliarity untied
people from custom and deference; they
went about finding new ways to do things
and this led to quarrels not imaginable dur-
ing the Nazi period. Germans quarreled
about family, morality, freedom, financial
restitution, and in so doing willy-nilly cre-
ated a disputatious civil society. “Not a bad
starting point for the young democracy.”THERE WERE MANY WAYSto purge the past,
and Jähner excavates different experi-
ments Germans pursued — in writing, in
lovemaking, in abstract art. Though some
people remained locked in “bastions of
their bitterness,” others dived into “un-
imaginable sociability.” They took pleasure
in music, danced when it got loud and ad-
mired the relaxed postures of American
soldiers. There was hustle and bustle in the
broken new places like Dresden, where 40
cubic meters of old rubble piled up for ev-
ery surviving resident.
In one stanza of “Inventory,” Eich refers
to his “bread bin” in which he stored his
woolen socks. And, he added, “some things
that I will reveal to no one,” a phrase,
Jähner says, that is “perhaps the key to the
whole poem,” possibly a reference to the
complicity of Germans in waging war and
murdering innocent Jews in Europe. Anearly film bore the title “The Murderers
Among Us,” but this sentiment did not
linger. Hannah Arendt, the American phi-
losopher who grew up in Germany, re-
counted a postwar visit. Published in Com-
mentary in October 1950, “The Aftermath
of Nazi Rule” summarized her impres-
sions: When the “other fellow” figured out
she was Jewish, he paused, embarrassed
and “then comes — not a personal ques-
tion, such as ‘Where did you go after you
left Germany?’; no sign of sympathy, such
as ‘What happened to your family?’ — but
a deluge of stories about how Germans
have suffered.”
Germans strained to create equivalence
between the suffering they had caused and
what they had suffered during the bomb-
ings and expulsions, often lamenting the
propensity of “mankind” to wage war.
“The average German,” Arendt com-
mented, “looks for the causes of the last
war not in the acts of the Nazi regime, but
in the events that led to the expulsion of
Adam and Eve from Paradise.”
In his final chapter, Jähner surveys si-
lence on Jewish death as well as chattiness
about German suffering, and he says that
the “loud calls” of many Germans for an
amnesty for Nazi criminals indicated that
they were, in fact, “surrogates for the ma-
jority.” On the one hand, Germans evaded
the crimes by making them universal, and
on the other, admitted their own complicity
by advocating a general amnesty. Jähner is
counterintuitive but thoughtful. The am-
nesty, admittedly “an intolerable inso-
lence,” was “a necessary prerequisite” for
“the establishment of democracy in West
Germany” because “it formed the mental
basis of a new beginning.” Such a paradox
of reconciliation is infuriating, yet hard to
dismiss. 0Leaving Nazism BehindAfter the war, traumatized Germans were strangers in their own country.By PETER FRITZSCHEAFTERMATH
Life in the Fallout of the
Third Reich, 1945-
By Harald Jähner
Translated by Shaun Whiteside
Illustrated. 416 pp. Alfred A. Knopf. $30. Dresden, 1946.PHOTOGRAPH BY FRED RAMAGE/KEYSTONE, VIA GETTY IMAGESPETER FRITZSCHEis the author of “Hitler’s First
Hundred Days: When Germans Embraced the
Third Reich.”Prepare today’s
collegestudents
to become tomorrow’s
global citizens.Get campuswide access
to The New York Times.
Learn more at
nytimes.com/campuswide