The aftershocks of war

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

Author: Harald Jahner

Publisher: Penguin

Pages: 381

Price: Rs 1,657

War clouds darken Europe after eight decades of peace in what historian Timothy Snyder termed the “bloodlands” — Ukraine and Eastern Europe that bore the brunt of Hitler and Stalin’s murderous regimes. The World War II generation is passing and with it memories of Europe’s devastation. Weakening public memory is also the result of the remarkable post-war resurrection of Western Europe, which hindsight views as the start of the West’s victory in the Cold War.

In this crude assessment, post-war Germany enjoys a fairy-tale narrative as a nation that picked itself up from the ruins of war and its Nazi past and, after a forgettable four-decade interregnum as two nations, emerged as the economic, technological miracle and sophisticated society that dominates Europe. The sub-text is that Germanic discipline and traditions of technical excellence reasserted themselves once Adolf Hitler was dead. Aftermath offers a less heroic and more nuanced picture of a forgotten period in post-war history. It is a portrait of the many facets of German society in the immediate post-war years showing how its citizenry responded to defeat, occupation and the revelations of the concentration camps after 12 years of relentless rhetoric about their master race status.

Harald Jahner, a cultural journalist, begins with a simple question: “How could a nation that perpetrated the Holocaust become a dependable democratic country?” He recognises that there is no “all-encompassing formula”. It’s a “sum of experience that tells a story that can’t be defined as concept”. 

Some German readers have grumbled that Aftermath offers an incomplete picture. But Mr Jahner has not conceived of his book as comprehensive history. He has attempted to create a cultural and social picture of Germany at the moment of its greatest humiliation. He builds this portrait from private diaries of the time, the abundance of Trummeliteratur , literally “rubble literature”, spare stripped-down accounts of survival in ruined cities on the minimum of food and without light, heating or water, and the explosion of newspapers, magazines and radio programmes, often sponsored by the Allied occupying forces.

Two elements stand out in this detailed book: The role of women and the rise and fall of the black market. The first is a traumatic recounting of the burden that fell on German women as the Allied armies closed in. With German men absent or physically and emotionally emasculated, it was women who bore the burden of defeat. One of the facts researchers discovered in the nineties was the rape of millions of German women by Russian soldiers, a fact vigorously suppressed by Warsaw Pact governments. Mr Jahner shows that it was a repressed memory in Germany, too, imposed mostly by men.

The experience was best illustrated by an unsentimental account titled A Woman in Berlin. The book was published anonymously in Germany in 1959, and caused no ripples. But the English translation in 2003 attracted widespread attention. The writer was found to be a well-travelled journalist called Marta Hillers. Repeatedly raped when the Russians entered Berlin, she eventually sought the protection of a senior Russian officer to save herself from predations of others. Yet, her soldier fiancé responded to her trauma with disgust and desertion, a recurring experience throughout the country as defeated German men sought to suppress ignominy with machismo.   

Also fascinating is the trajectory of black markets that flourished on shortages. Mr Jahner describes how otherwise disciplined citizens learnt to loot and establish well-run informal markets as the Allies introduced food ration cards and currency controls, a predicament with which Indians will be familiar. It was currency reform in 1948 in the western occupied territories that abruptly ended that underground economy. During a visit to a ration store on the first day of currency reform, one writer recalls the transition from “ration card buyers and supplicants to being customers.”

From the extraordinary integration of settlers expelled from Eastern Europe, to Germans’ encounters with their occupiers to the rise of the avant garde art scene as a response to the depredations of the Third Reich, Mr Jahner’s clear-eyed but empathetic portrait offers a view unfiltered through the prism of British and American historians, excellent though some of them may be.

Mr Jahner also raises the more uncomfortable questions. “Today we know a great deal about the Holocaust. What we know less about is how life in Germany continued under the shadow it cast across the country’s future.” That latter issue looms today as we watch the steady rise of the far-right Alternative for Germany or AfD and its shrill anti-immigrant agenda.

Given the deadly accounting of the Final Solution, how does the space for racism expand in this vibrant country? Part of the answer, Mr Jahner shows, lies in the fact that Germans mostly skirted the issue in the interests of survival and forgetting. That’s because Germans saw themselves as victims too — of Allied destruction, of Nazi brainwashing and the terror apparatus that the Hitler regime turned on its own citizens when defeat was at hand.

In the context of Vladimir Putin’s anti-Nato adventurism, a nuclear-powered, 21st century version of the Hitlerian stab-in-the-back myth, this book offers a grim reminder of the consequences of 1939.