Title: Aftermath
Rating: 3 Stars
Can you imagine what it must have been like? It’s April 1945. You’ve been mesmerized by a hypnotic leader for over ten years that has promised you a thousand year empire. You’ve been at war for six years. After experiencing amazing initial success, things have turned. You suffer nightly bombing raids. Getting food is ever more difficult. Perhaps you’ve been drafted and have fought under horrific conditions. Perhaps you’ve been captured by the Soviets and are now more than half dead as a result.
Now, your charismatic leader, Adolf Hitler, is dead. Your house is a pile of rubble. Food is nowhere to be found. Millions of foreign workers, treated little differently than slaves, have been cut loose and are wandering around the country. Your husband has returned home but is an empty shell of the man that he once was. You find out that your Jewish neighbors have all been murdered. All nations look upon you as unquestionably evil and hold you responsible for the global devastation that has been wreaked upon the world.
Aftermath, by Harald Jähner, covers the history of Germany from 1945 – 1955. Having read the excellent Japanese postwar history, Embracing Defeat (read about it here), I had high hopes. Alas, Aftermath did not rise to the level of that history, but I still found it interesting and informative.
Perhaps learning from their WWI mistake where Germany was defeated without imposing the devastation of defeat upon Germany, in 1945 there was no question that Germany was defeated. Half of the German population was dislocated. There were millions of non German displaced persons roaming around Germany. A huge percentage of buildings, including housing, was destroyed. Rail systems were inoperable. Many people were grouped together living in cellars. Some forty percent of German men born between 1920 to 1925 never came back from war. Germany borders were changed when it surrendered. This in of itself caused massive population migrations.
One interesting aspect is how fast parts of German culture bounced back. Some of this had to do with the fact that since there was very little food to purchase, they had some disposable income to spend on surprising things. A number of dance clubs opened in Berlin within a month of the surrender. Orchestras were giving concerts in damaged structures in the early months. A number of German filmmakers took advantage of the German hellscape to create films that were classified as rubble films (Trümmerfilm). Similarly, there was rubble literature (Trümmerliteratur). After the oppressive Nazi regime, artists could suddenly express themselves, even if under desperate conditions.
I usually think of German people as being somewhat homogeneous. With the collapse of the German government and the massive population displacement, schisms appeared. There is the obvious Catholic vs Protestant differences. There were also differences between the conservative rural and the more liberal urban population centers (sound familiar to anyone?). Various subcultures were geographically segregated and had developed their specific local customs in isolation over a period of centuries. With German population on the move, suddenly these came into conflict with each other. These German subcultures judged each other harshly, held each other’s cherished traditions in contempt, and tried to levy various levels of blame for the war upon each other.
In the early months after the surrender, food was a critical shortage. Ration cards were distributed. Even the face value of these ration cards were of insufficient calories for an adult. What made the situation even worse was that there was such a food shortage that people weren’t even able to cash in their ration cards. Rural farms were producing goods but there was no reliable transportation to get the food to the starving people. This led to a thriving black market. In turn, this led to a culture of mass criminality for the typical German consumer just to get enough food to survive.
The Allied governments had to step in. They provided a massive amount of food aid to the German people. What really turned the corner was the issuing of a new currency that effectively reset the German economy.
With the dearth of men, German women stepped up in the days after the surrender. It was women that formed the first clean-up brigades that started clearing cities of debris. With men gone so long during the war, women accumulated many additional responsibilities. With the men coming back from war so physically and psychologically damaged, there was substantial conflict when the men tried, however ineffectually, to reassume their place of prominence in a household now being run by independent women.
One thing that the Allied occupying forces were worried about was guerilla warfare. Considering the fact that, up to the surrender, Germans were desperately still fighting, even to the extent of sending their children off to slaughter, this seemed to be a legitimate concern. Strangely enough, once a local government surrendered and the Allied forces occupied an area, all German resistance immediately faded away. Instead (well, except for the Soviets and their brutal vengeance), German citizens greeted Allied forces in a friendly manner.
Because of these security concerns, Allied forces had strict rules against fraternizing with the German citizens. Given the friendliness of the citizenry as well as the relative wealth of the soldiers, these rules were almost immediately violated.
One final interesting idea brought out was war guilt. Not only were many Germans reluctant to acknowledge the Holocaust, but they preferred to paint themselves as the victims. After all, they did suffer severe hardship during the war. Many refused to recognize their participatory role in the Nazi government and its evil deeds. In the years after, many people tried to obfuscate or offer up rationales for their party membership. Even in the immediate years following, although Nazism was universally condemned, some German politicians still took pretty extreme antisemitic positions. It was only when the children of the war generation came of age that they insisted upon a true reckoning and judgment of their parent’s actions.
As I’ve said, it was an interesting book. However, and I can’t say rather this is a product of the original text or the translation, it was a bit tedious to read. I simply was not as engaged as I was when I read Embracing Defeat.
dorkenstein 