Aftermath

Jähner’s Aftermath is one of the best books about post-1945 Germany. Defeated and confronted with the horrors their country had unleashed during the preceding six years of genocidal war in Europe, most ordinary Germans were keen to move on, rebuild and forget. A myth was born that saw 1945 as Germany’s ‘Zero Hour,’ a kind of tabula rasa, from which the nation could start anew. Jähner’s social history of the first ten years after the Second World War shatters this illusion powerfully and definitively. His book is a great foundation for anyone who wants to understand Germany today.

This book by Harold Jähner addresses how Germans responded to the Holocaust following their defeat by the Allies. Most Germans, it appears, not only refused to acknowledge the mass murders of the Jews, but instead, saw themselves as victims of Allied “terror” bombings, victims of rape by Russian soldiers, and victims of the mass hunger that was inflicted upon them following the war. It was only the next generation of Germans who were willing to confront what their parent’s generation ignored or passively accepted by their silence.

This is my non-fiction choice. Aftermath is a brilliant book that describes the destruction and displacement in Germany caused by World War II. Although I have studied this topic my whole life and written about it in my fiction, there is always more to learn, and this book taught me so much. It is full of rich details and top-notch scholarship. Despite the terrible destruction and misery that the author describes, the book provides us with some hope in the ability of human beings to survive the unimaginable and even to create new meaning out of the rubble.