{"product_id":"aftermath-isbn-9780593313930","title":"Aftermath","description":"\u003cb\u003eHow does a nation recover from fascism and turn toward a free society once more?\u003cb\u003e \u003cb\u003eThis \u003cb\u003einternationally acclaimed revelatory history—\u003c\/b\u003e\"filled with first-person accounts from articles and diaries\" (\u003ci\u003eThe\u003c\/i\u003e \u003ci\u003eNew York Times)—\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e\u003c\/b\u003eof the transformational decade that followed World War II illustrates how Germany raised itself out of the ashes of defeat and reckoned with the corruption of its soul and the horrors of the Holocaust. \u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eFeaturing over 40 eye-opening black-and-white photographs and posters from the period.\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e  \u003cbr\u003e The years 1945 to 1955 were a raw, wild decade that found many Germans politically, economically, and morally bankrupt. Victorious Allied forces occupied the four zones that make up present-day Germany. More than half the population was displaced; 10 million newly released forced laborers and several million prisoners of war returned to an uncertain existence. Cities lay in ruins—no mail, no trains, no traffic—with bodies yet to be found beneath the towering rubble.\u003cbr\u003e  \u003cbr\u003e \u003ci\u003eAftermath\u003c\/i\u003e received wide acclaim and spent forty-eight weeks on the best-seller list in Germany when it was published there in 2019.\u003cb\u003e \u003c\/b\u003eIt is the first history of Germany's national mentality in the immediate postwar years. Using major global political developments as a backdrop, Harald Jähner weaves a series of life stories into a nuanced panorama of a nation undergoing monumental change. Poised between two eras, this decade is portrayed by Jähner as a period that proved decisive for Germany's future—and one starkly different from how most of us imagine it today.\u003cb\u003eShortlisted for the Baillie Gifford Prize • \u003cb\u003eShortlisted for the Cundill History Prize • \u003c\/b\u003eA Best Book of the Year: \u003ci\u003eNew Statesmen\u003c\/i\u003e, \u003ci\u003eFinancial Times\u003c\/i\u003e, \u003ci\u003eThe Times\u003c\/i\u003e, \u003ci\u003eThe Telegraph\u003c\/i\u003e, the \u003ci\u003eIrish Independent\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e“[Jähner] does double duty in this fascinating book, elegantly marshaling a plethora of facts while also using his critical skills to wry effect, parsing a country’s stubborn inclination toward willful delusion. Even though \u003ci\u003eAftermath\u003c\/i\u003e covers historical ground, its narrative is intimate, filled with first-person accounts from articles and diaries.” —Jennifer Szalai, \u003ci\u003eNew York Times\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/i\u003e“The national psyche is the principal protagonist in Harald Jähner’s subtle, perceptive and beautifully written \u003ci\u003eAftermath\u003c\/i\u003e. Mr. Jähner, like Mr. Ullrich a German journalist and author, describes Germany’s first postwar decade, with more of an emphasis on its social and cultural landscape (particularly in its western segment) than the usual early Cold War tussles. \u003ci\u003eAftermath\u003c\/i\u003e is a revelatory, remarkably wide-ranging book crammed with material, much of which will, I imagine, be new to an international audience.” —Andrew Stuttaford, \u003ci\u003eThe Wall Street Journa\u003c\/i\u003el\u003cbr\u003e  \u003cbr\u003e “Harald Jähner’s highly readable account of how Germans went about leaving Nazism behind . . . is about the price and the accomplishment of a new beginning when the aggressive war the Germans had waged was reversed to utter defeat in 1945. . . . Jähner is counterintuitive but thoughtful.” —Peter Fritzsche, \u003ci\u003eNew York Times Book Review\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/i\u003e“Erudite. . . . [Jähner] puts German anguish in the essential context of a nation climbing out of an abyss that it created. . . .  \u003ci\u003eAftermath\u003c\/i\u003e is a reminder that the German experience will always stand apart.” —\u003ci\u003e\u003ci\u003eThe Economist\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e “Jähner . . . sets out to complicate our picture of those tumultuous times. . . . [O]ften intriguing social and cultural history.”  —Julia Klein, \u003ci\u003eThe Forward\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e  \u003cbr\u003e“Extraordinary. . . . One of the most evocative pieces of carefully researched history that I have ever read. It’s a remarkable piece of work.” —Cundill History Prize juror Misha Glenny, bestselling author of \u003ci\u003eMcMafia\u003c\/i\u003e and \u003ci\u003eThe Balkans\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e \u003cb\u003e \u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e “\u003ci\u003eAftermath\u003c\/i\u003e is a quirky, sometimes humorous, and at times brilliant synthesis of a great deal of secondary literature, enhanced by quotations from published primary sources, extracts from works of creative literature and discussions of art and aesthetics.  There are some surprising twists of interpretation of otherwise familiar themes. . . . [A] thoughtful and readable account . . . deserves[s] a wide readership.”  —Mary Fulbrook, \u003ci\u003eThe Times Literary Supplement\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e “This is an important addition to the library of Holocaust literature.”  \u003ci\u003e\u003cb\u003e—\u003c\/b\u003e\u003ci\u003eNew York Journal of Books\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/i\u003e“In a fascinating and critical look at the period book-ended by World War II and the Cold War, German journalist Jähner effectively combines known and unfamiliar information about significant and ordinary events and people of the day with insightful discussions of contemporaneous art, literature, film, architecture, and film. Deeply researched while at the same time eminently readable, this book successfully presents an engrossing social, political, economic, and cultural perspective on an important era that is often overlooked in traditional history texts.”  —\u003ci\u003eLibrary Journal\u003c\/i\u003e (starred review)\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“Harald Jähner’s \u003ci\u003eAftermath\u003c\/i\u003e is a transfixing account and subtle analysis of Germany after the Second World War has ended. A scrupulous investigation of the past, it reads, constantly, like a prelude to what is still unfolding.” — Geoff Dyer, One of the Best Books of the 2021, \u003ci\u003eNew Statesman\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/i\u003e“In unsparing prose, cultural journalist Jähner sets the record straight, detailing how the war's aftereffects profoundly changed the lives of those who survived Europe's devastation. . . . Revealing photographs further amplify these complex realities.” —\u003ci\u003eBooklist\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“Germans rebounded from shattering defeat with hard work, a pragmatic embrace of the new, and a willful forgetting of trauma and guilt, according to this penetrating history of the early postwar period. . . . Elegantly written and translated, Jähner’s analysis deploys emotionally resonant detail . . . to vividly recreate a vibrant, if morally haunted, historical watershed. This eye-opening study enthralls.” —\u003ci\u003ePublishers Weekly\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“In his engrossing first book, Jähner, the former editor of the \u003ci\u003eBerlin Times\u003c\/i\u003e, examines how and why Germany was capable of radically transforming from a sinister fascist mindset toward a modern democratic state. The author presents an expansive yet sharply probing overview of the period, reaching across political, social, and geographical spheres to draw a lucid portrait of a country reeling from the stark consequences of being on the losing side of a horrendous war. . . . An immediate and long-lasting bestseller when it was published in Germany in 2019 and the winner of the Leipzig Book Fair Prize, Jähner’s shrewdly balanced look at postwar Germany is sure to spark the interest of readers across the world. An absorbing and well-documented history of postwar Germany.” \u003ci\u003e—Kirkus Reviews \u003c\/i\u003e(starred)\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“Magisterial, fascinating, humane—a brilliant book of the greatest importance and achievement.” —Philippe Sands, author of \u003ci\u003eEast West Street\u003c\/i\u003e and \u003ci\u003eThe Ratline\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e \u003cbr\u003e“A fiercely compelling book that brings vivid illumination to an era of twilight and brutal ruins. Harald Jähner beautifully explores the hinterland of human nature in all its shades.” —Sinclair McKay, author of \u003ci\u003eDresden: The Fire and the Darkness\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“Harald Jähner’s deeply researched, panoramic account of how Germany rebuilt and discovered itself from 1945 to 1955 is an eye-opening, thrilling read.” —Bernhard Schlink, author of \u003ci\u003eThe Reader\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/i\u003e“Exemplary [and] important. . . . This is the kind of book few writers possess the clarity of vision to write.” —Max Hastings, \u003ci\u003eThe Sunday Times\u003c\/i\u003e (London)\u003cbr\u003e  \u003cbr\u003e “It is depressing to see how few countries encourage or even permit their citizens freely to chronicle and discuss their pasts, and how many instead forge fictional histories to support modern political purposes. In the U.S. and most of Europe, we take for granted a license to seek out truth. The Germans have an exemplary record, especially with regard to the mid-20th century, recently enhanced by Harald Jähner’s new book  \u003ci\u003eAftermath\u003c\/i\u003e, on German life after 1945.” —Max Hastings, Bloomberg.com\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“\u003ci\u003eAftermath\u003c\/i\u003e . . . provides a compendium of universally human tales that make for a moving read. Jähner is masterly in telling the tragic, despicable, comedic, and uplifting stories of those who were there as he takes his readers on a fascinating tour of rubble-strewn postwar Germany.”  —Katja Hoyer, \u003ci\u003eThe Times\u003c\/i\u003e (London)\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e “Harald Jähner’s magnificent book \u003ci\u003eAftermath\u003c\/i\u003e (fluently translated by Shaun Whiteside) is part of this continuing process [of] Vergangenheitsbewältigung, roughly translated as ‘assessing the past.’ Drawing on the huge literature listed in the bibliography, it takes a lucid overview of the astonishing decade following the defeat of Nazism and the partition of Germany between the Western allies and Soviet Russia. Although it embraces subjects of explosive ideological controversy, the story is told with judicious impartial intelligence and a light touch: Jähner has no axe to grind and he casts his net wide, fully aware of the large patches of grey morality through which he is treading. There are great lessons in the nature of humanity to be learnt here.” —Rupert Christiansen, \u003ci\u003eThe Telegraph\u003c\/i\u003e (London)\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“An extraordinary book of breathtaking scholarship. Jähner shines a light on a dark and almost forgotten period of history to find it pulsating with life.” —Jack Fairweather, author of \u003ci\u003eThe Volunteer\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e  \u003cbr\u003e “Many consider the years before 1945 to be the most crucial in understanding Germany and the Germans. Wait until you have read this book.” —Norman Ohler, author of \u003ci\u003eBlitzed: Drugs in the Third Reich\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003ci\u003e \u003c\/i\u003e \u003cbr\u003e “What does total defeat mean? Germany 1945–55. Ten years of poverty, ruins, fear, violence, black markets, manic hard work, inventive sex—and always, always, silence about the murdered millions of the Third Reich. A fascinating read.” —Neil MacGregor, author of \u003ci\u003eGermany: Memories of a Nation\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e  \u003cbr\u003e “A fascinating account of a forgotten moment in Europe’s history, of utter desperation leading to tentative hope.” —Simon Jenkins, bestselling author of \u003ci\u003eA Short History of Europe\u003c\/i\u003e and \u003ci\u003eA Short History of England\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“Harald Jähner claims to have discovered a hole in the heart of modern German history. This book triumphantly proves him right. It is absolutely extraordinary. Every page stops you dead with insight and revelation.” —James Hawes, author of \u003ci\u003eThe Shortest History of Germany\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/i\u003e“For those who want to understand the Germans, \u003ci\u003eAftermath\u003c\/i\u003e is essential reading. . . . Anyone with even the slightest interest in history and the human condition should read this book.″ —Julia Boyd, author of \u003ci\u003eTravelers in the Third Reich\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e \u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e \u003cbr\u003e   •   \u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e   • \u003cb\u003eShortlisted for the Baillie Gifford Prize • A Best Book of the Year: \u003ci\u003eNew Statesmen\u003c\/i\u003e,       \u003ci\u003eFinancial Times\u003c\/i\u003e, \u003ci\u003eThe Times\u003c\/i\u003e, \u003ci\u003eThe Telegraph\u003c\/i\u003e,       the \u003ci\u003eIrish Independent\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/b\u003eHARALD JÄHNER is a cultural journalist and former editor of\u003ci\u003e The Berlin Times\u003c\/i\u003e. He has been an honorary professor of cultural journalism at Berlin's University of the Arts since 2011. \u003ci\u003eAftermath\u003c\/i\u003e, his first book, won the Leipzig Book Fair Prize in 2019.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eSHAUN WHITESIDE is a translator of French, Dutch, German, and Italian literature. He has translated many works of nonfiction and novels, including \u003ci\u003eManituana and Altai\u003c\/i\u003e by Wu Ming, \u003ci\u003eThe Weekend\u003c\/i\u003e by Bernhard Schlink, \u003ci\u003eSerotonin \u003c\/i\u003eby Michel Houellebecq, and \u003ci\u003eMagdalena the Sinner\u003c\/i\u003e by Lilian Faschinger, which won him the Schlegel-Tieck Prize for German translation in 1997.Preface\u003cbr\u003e  \u003cbr\u003e On 18 March 1952 the \u003ci\u003eNeue Zeitung \u003c\/i\u003epublished an article by the author and editor Kurt Kusenberg entitled nothing can be taken for granted: praise for a time of misery. Only seven years on, the author yearned for the weeks of confusion that had followed the end of the Second World War in Germany. Even though nothing had worked at the time—not the postal service, the railways, public transport—in spite of the homelessness, the hunger and the occasional corpse that still lay buried under the rubble, in retrospect those weeks struck him as having been a good time. “Like children,” he wrote, people after the war had begun “to mend the torn net of human relationships.” His choice of words is unusual and perhaps a little disconcerting . . . “Like children”?\u003cbr\u003e  \u003cbr\u003e Kusenberg urgently recommended that his readers imagine themselves back into the “starving, tattered, shivering, poverty-stricken, dangerous time” when, in the absence of state order, morality and social connections were redefined among the scattered people: \u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eRespectability did not exclude resourcefulness and cunning—not even the petty theft of food. But in this semi-larcenous life there was an honour among thieves that was perhaps more moral than today’s cast-iron conscience.\u003cbr\u003e  \u003cbr\u003e It is a strange nostalgia. Was there really supposed to have been so much adventure immediately after the war, so much “honour among thieves”? So much innocence? The unifying force that had held the Germans together until the end of the war had been—fortunately—completely ruptured. The old order was gone, a new one was written in the stars, and for now the Allies supplied the basic necessities needed to maintain the population. The 75 million or so people collected on what remained of German soil in the summer of 1945 hardly merited the name of a society. People talked about “no man’s time,” the “time of the wolves” in which “man had become a wolf towards his fellow man.” The ethos of everyone caring only for themselves or their wolf-pack shaped the country’s national identity until deep into the 1950s, by which point conditions had been improving for some time and yet despite this people still stubbornly withdrew into their families as self-contained refuges.\u003cbr\u003e  \u003cbr\u003e After the war over half the population of Germany was neither where they belonged nor wanted to be, including 9 million bombed-out people and evacuees, 14 million refugees and exiles, 10 million released forced labourers and prisoners, and countless millions of slowly returning prisoners of war. How was this horde of ragged, displaced, impoverished and leftover people broken up and reassembled? And how did former “national comrades” (\u003ci\u003eVolksgenossen\u003c\/i\u003e), as German nationals were known under Nazism, gradually become ordinary citizens again?\u003cbr\u003e  \u003cbr\u003e These are questions that threaten to disappear under the weight of momentous historical events. The most important changes were played out in everyday life, in the organisation of food, for example, in looting, money-changing, shopping. And also in love, as a wave of sexual adventurousness followed the war. There was some keen disappointment when much-missed husbands failed to return home, but, equally, many Germans now saw things with different eyes, they wanted to start everything afresh, and divorce rates leapt.\u003cbr\u003e  \u003cbr\u003e The collective memory of the post-war age in Germany is shaped by a few images that have etched their way deeply into people’s minds: the Russian soldier pulling a woman’s bicycle out of her hands; dim black-market figures clustering around a few eggs; the temporary Nissen huts housing refugees and people whose houses had been bombed; the women questioningly holding up photographs of their missing husbands to the returning prisoners of war. These few pictures are so visually powerful that they imprinted on the German public memory of the first post-war years like an unchanging silent film—although, it must be said, half of life ends up on the cutting-room floor.\u003cbr\u003e  \u003cbr\u003e While memory usually bathes the past in a softer light with the passing years, the reverse is true for the post-war period in Germany. In hindsight it became increasingly dark. One reason for that lies in the widespread need among Germans who had not been persecuted by the Nazi regime to see themselves, nevertheless, as victims. Many people clearly felt that the grimmer the accounts of the genuinely terrible starving winters of 1946 and 1947, the more their guilt was diminished. But if we listen carefully we can also hear laughter. A spontaneous Rosenmontag (Rose Monday) carnival procession passed through a terribly depopulated Cologne as early as 1946. The journalist Margret Boveri remembered the feeling of life being “enormously enhanced by the approaching nearness of death.” In the years when there was nothing to buy she had been so happy that she later decided not to undertake any major purchases even when times improved.\u003cbr\u003e  \u003cbr\u003e Misery cannot be understood without the pleasure that it provokes. Escaping death drove some into apathy, others into a passionate love of life. The old order of things had gone off the rails, families had been torn apart, connections lost—but people were starting to mingle again, and anyone young and spirited saw the chaos as a playground in which they had to seek their joy anew each day.\u003cbr\u003e  \u003cbr\u003e *\u003cbr\u003e  \u003cbr\u003e The Holocaust played a shockingly small part in the consciousness of most Germans in the post-war period. Some were aware of the crimes on the Eastern Front, and a certain fundamental guilt at having started the war in the first place was acknowledged, but there was no room in many people’s thoughts and feelings for the murder of millions of German and European Jews. Only a very few individuals, such as the philosopher Karl Jaspers, addressed the issue publicly. The Jews were not even explicitly mentioned in the much-debated admissions of guilt by the Protestant and Catholic Churches in August 1945.\u003cbr\u003e  \u003cbr\u003e In a perfidious way the unthinkability of the Holocaust also extended to the nation that had perpetrated it. The crimes had an enormity which banished them from the collective consciousness even while they were happening. The fact that even well-intentioned people refused to think about what would happen to their deported neighbours has left trust in the human species severely shaken even into the present day. And the majority of Germans at the time were guilty of this.\u003cbr\u003e  \u003cbr\u003e The hushing-up of the extermination camps continued after the end of the war, even though the Allies tried to forcibly confront the defeated German people with evidence of Nazi crimes. Post-war Chancellor Helmut Kohl used the sardonic phrase “the blessing of late birth” to suggest that the younger generation had no right to feel quite so superior to the one that came before. But there was also the blessing of the experience of terror. The nights of bombing raids, the harsh starvation winters of the first post-war years and the sheer struggle for survival under anarchic everyday conditions kept many Germans from thinking about the past. They saw themselves as the victims, and thus had the dubious good fortune of not having to think about the real ones. Because, had they still been halfway decent after all that had happened, had they been aware of the systematic mass murder committed in their name, with their tacit support and thanks to their willingness to turn a blind eye, they would hardly have been able to summon the courage and energy required to live through the post-war years.\u003cbr\u003e  \u003cbr\u003e The survival instinct shuts out feelings of guilt—a collective phenomenon that can be studied in the years after 1945 and must be deeply unsettling to anyone with faith in humanity. But how the two societies of East and West Germany, both anti-fascist in their different ways, could both be founded on repression and distortion is a mystery that this book seeks to address by immersing itself in the extreme challenges and curious lifestyles of the post-war years.\u003cbr\u003e  \u003cbr\u003e Even though books like Anne Frank’s \u003ci\u003eDiary \u003c\/i\u003eor Eugen Kogon’s \u003ci\u003eSS-State \u003c\/i\u003edisrupted the process of repression, it was only with the Auschwitz trials beginning in 1963 that many Germans began to reckon with the crimes that had been committed in their name. In the eyes of the younger generation the Germans had brought extreme dishonour upon themselves by postponing the trials, even though in purely material terms they had profited considerably from their parents’ capacity for repression. Seldom in history has a generational conflict been waged with more bitterness, rage and self-righteousness than that of the young German people of 1968 against their parents. \u003cbr\u003e  \u003cbr\u003e Today, the German people’s overall impression of the post-war years has been shaped by the perspective of those who were young at the time. The anti-authoritarian fury the children felt towards their parents’ generation—a generation that had not made itself easy to love—was so intense, their criticism so eloquent, that the myth of a suffocating layer of fustiness that needed to be eliminated still dominates the image of the 1950s held by most Germans, in spite of more sophisticated historical research. The generation born around 1950 enjoyed the role of having made the Federal Republic of Germany (West Germany) inhabitable and having given democracy a heart, and this generation continues to promulgate that picture. In reality, though, there remained a strong presence of the old Nazi elite in the offices of the Federal Republic during this time, which was a source of revulsion for many, as was the readiness with which Nazi criminals were granted amnesties. However, the post-war era in Germany was more exciting, its sense of life more open, its intellectuals more critical, its spectrum of opinion broader, its art more innovative, and its everyday life more contradictory than the impressions that have prevailed from 1968 until the present day might suggest. It is something that research for this book has revealed time and again. \u003cbr\u003e  \u003cbr\u003e There is another reason why the first four post-war years in Germany represent a relative blind spot in historical memory. Between the big chapters and research headings of history they form a kind of no-man’s-time for which, loosely speaking, no one is really responsible. One major chapter in German school history deals with the Nazi regime, ending with the capitulation of the German Wehrmacht, while the next, which begins in 1949, tells the story of the Federal Republic of Germany (West Germany) and the German Democratic Republic (East Germany) and is concentrated at best on currency reform and the Berlin blockade as a backstory to the foundation of the two states. The years between the end of the war and the currency reform, the economic Big Bang of the Federal Republic, are in a sense a lost time for historiography, because they lack an institutional subject. German history-writing is essentially still structured as a national history, which places the state as a political subject at its centre. But from 1945 four political centres were responsible for German history: Washington, Moscow, London and Paris, each exercising authority over their designated occupation zone—hardly ideal conditions to construct a national history.\u003cbr\u003e  \u003cbr\u003e The classroom appraisal of the crimes perpetrated against the Jews and forced labourers also ends, as a rule, with the happy liberation of the survivors by Allied soldiers. But what happened to them after that? What about the 10 million or so starving prisoners, already dragged from their homelands and now dumped unsupervised in the land of their torturers and murderers? How did they react? The way the Allied soldiers, the vanquished Germans and the liberated forced labourers behaved towards one another is one of the saddest, but also one of the most fascinating, aspects of the post-war years.\u003cbr\u003e  \u003cbr\u003e Over the course of this book the focus shifts from the societal aspects of everyday life—from clearing up, making love, stealing and shopping—to the cultural features: the life of the mind and the efflorescence of a radical new visual aesthetic. Here, questions of conscience, guilt and repression are asked more pointedly. Instances of denazification, which also had its aesthetic side, are treated with appropriate care. The fact that the arts (broadly taken to mean architecture, painting, etc.) of the 1950s found such lasting fame may be traced back to one surprising factor: by altering their surroundings the Germans changed themselves. But was it really the Germans who so radically transformed the shape of their world? A fight broke out around concepts of design and abstract art, in which the occupying powers of America, Britain, France and Russia all pulled strings; it concerned the aesthetic decoration of the two German republics, pitting the socialist realism of the East against the abstract art of the West, and would defi ne the sense of beauty during the Cold War. Even the CIA was involved.\u003cbr\u003e  \u003cbr\u003e Even more than is the case today, German people tended to present themselves as refined, sophisticated and tirelessly involved in serious discussions, as if it were possible to pick up seamlessly from the manners of the nineteenth century, which had been transformed into “the good old days.” 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. How does a nation in whose name many millions of people were murdered talk about culture and morality? Would it be better, for decency’s sake, to avoid talking about decency altogether? To let one’s children find out for themselves what is good and what is evil? In the years immediately following the war analysts in the media were working overtime, along with other institutions, to take part in the reconstruction of society. Everybody was talking about a “hunger for meaning.” Philosophising on “the ruins of existence” meant searching for meaning, just as many were reduced to searching for scraps among the rubble.","brand":"Vintage","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":46304793067749,"sku":"NP9780593313930","price":20.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/1842\/7735\/files\/9780593313930.jpg?v=1767721115","url":"https:\/\/k12savings.com\/products\/aftermath-isbn-9780593313930","provider":"K12savings","version":"1.0","type":"link"}