Aftermath: Life in the Fallout of the Third Reich, 1945-1955

"I had come across this book before because it deals with a moment in time and place that I’m very interested in, which is 1945 Europe and Germany. It takes a perspective that I think has not been widely focused on, which is different aspects of everyday life in Germany in the immediate period after the war. For me, personally, it was a very eye-opening account. “These books are by writers who are at the top of their game” I think it’s a spectacularly important book because it raises universal themes. We’ve been reading in our papers over the last few days and weeks what it means when war comes to an end, at least temporarily—permanently, I hope—in parts of Ukraine. In towns and small villages, the Russian occupier has been removed and a degree of normal business resumes. You begin to see the consequences in terms of getting hold of food, transportation, collaborators, culture, kids going back to school, all these issues. A lot of my work as a lawyer is dealing with horrendous international cases and it’s the same everywhere—Rwanda, Yugoslavia, Chile—what happens when a degree of normality returns. This book shows that in a powerful way. I found it very affecting."

"It’s so interesting. I imagine it was called that not because there was a sudden influx of wolves into formerly occupied spaces—although there may well have been—but because of the sense of lawlessness. We think of Germany as a place of order and discipline, what Jähner reveals here is ten years of anarchy and very naked individualism. It’s about a period that tends not to get written about. The historiography usually goes to the end of the war, the suicide of Hitler , and then forward to about 1960 and the economic miracle. It’s just very exciting to be told about this period in between where it’s awful, just out of control. It gets to the point where a cardinal says that the seventh commandment, ‘Thou shalt not steal’, no longer applies. Jähner paints this amazing picture of postwar Germany. I was always brought up to believe that it was a place of enormous collective guilt and soul-searching. What Jähner suggests is that, yes, there’s enormous unhappiness and pain and pity, but it’s the most extraordinary kind of self-pity. The Germans that he talks to and about—he amalgamates a lot of individual stories—think they’ve been badly done by. At one point an editor says, ‘I just get the feeling that the rest of Europe, the rest of the world, hates us. Why would that be?’ There’s an absolute lack of comprehension and it moves very quickly into being resentful about those Jews who survived because they appear to be getting better rations and preferential treatment. People say, ‘It was tough for them, but it was tough for us too!’ Just shocking statements. The Nuremberg Trials were just a bit of victory grandstanding, nothing to do with us. There’s a kind of Teflon coating to this, of just not taking responsibility at all. “What we were looking for as judges is the sizzle, the excitement, the moment where you pick up a book…and there’s something about it that just hooks you in” It’s a country completely in ruins, covered in rubble. All the cities have been laid waste and you have people crawling over the ruins. Women are employed as rubble collectors, going over these huge mounds, trying to sort something out, to put something together that looks like Germany. Jähner also talks about the fact that the men coming back from the front are absolutely shattered, not just physically, there’s also a psychological weariness. A lot of them are impotent and their wives are not that thrilled to see them because it’s not very sexy to have a man coming back who has been on the losing side. There’s a sense of the women, who’ve been on the home front during the war, not wanting these emaciated, puling, weaklings back—they quite like the American soldiers, who look much healthier and have nice teeth, cigarettes, chocolate. I just found this book such a revelation. It’s a beautiful work of history. Jähner is 68 now and was born in that postwar era. It must have been an incredibly difficult book to write. It is long, but it’s got this very strong human element. He just aggregates lots of individual stories, so it doesn’t feel long. You’re brought into the human stories pretty quickly. I have very little capacity to read about geopolitical history, but this book I just found fascinating."