August 1, 2021
Published in Germany in 2019, this account of the country post-World War II was a best seller for nearly a year and won the Leipzig Book Fair Prize. As he surveys an occupied country with its cities in ruins and more than half the population displaced, J�hner, a cultural journalist and former editor of the Berlin Times, focuses on how Germans thought and felt as they faced up to the horrors of their immediate fascist past and tried to make a better future.
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October 4, 2021
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. Journalist Jähner surveys the decade following Nazi Germany’s surrender, when the nation lay in ruins, occupied by foreign armies, awash in refugees, and facing desperate shortages of food, fuel, and housing. Social strife resulted, but also novel possibilities and a “bafflingly good mood,” according to Jähner: female cleanup crews became icons of solidarity; a frenzied nightlife of jazz and dancing erupted; respectable citizens became thieves and black marketeers; abstract art and avant-garde furniture looked to the future; the Volkswagen Beetle factory symbolized a gathering economic miracle; and Germans swept their responsibility for the Holocaust under the rug while claiming victimhood, a maneuver that Jähner describes as “intolerable insolence” but also as a “necessary prerequisite” for breaking with the past and establishing democracy. Elegantly written and translated, Jähner’s analysis deploys emotionally resonant detail—after war’s horror and exhilaration, German veterans came home to become “pitiful wraith in the unheated kitchen”—to vividly recreate a vibrant, if morally haunted, historical watershed. This eye-opening study enthralls. Photos.
December 1, 2021
The decade following the defeat of Nazi Germany in 1945 has been obfuscated by a lot of myth and propaganda spread by different interests. In unsparing prose, cultural journalist J�hner sets the record straight, detailing how the war's aftereffects profoundly changed the lives of those who survived Europe's devastation. New national borders for Poland forced Poles to flee from now-Russianized land, and Germans in the western part of the new Poland had to leave their homes. Polish Jews who had barely survived extermination found themselves unwanted by their Polish former neighbors. Troops on all sides took brutal advantage of German women. J�hner documents how even starving Germans still found joy and ways to celebrate in the midst of chaos, turning national defeat into a sort of personal victory. Jazz became the era's musical idiom. Gradually returning from the eastern front, German soldiers were often unrecognizable to their families, and sometimes found themselves rejected. War's end marked the halt of bombs and bayonets, but both military and civilian survivors witnessed more horrors and violence. Revealing photographs further amplify these complex realities.
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Starred review from January 1, 2022
How does a nation recover from a decade of totalitarian dictatorship, devastating military conflict and defeat, a broken infrastructure and economy, destroyed cities and towns, and a dispersed and starving population? In the aftermath of World War II, Germany lay in ruins, teetering on the edge of chaos. While the immediate post-war years were difficult for the Germans who survived, it was also in this environment that a strong civil society, a powerhouse global economy, and a way to come to psychological terms with Hitlerism and the Holocaust came into being. In a fascinating and critical look at the period book-ended by World War II and the Cold War, German journalist J�hner 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 imminently 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. VERDICT Highly recommended for readers of modern European political and cultural history, especially those with little knowledge of the period.--Linda Frederiksen
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Starred review from November 1, 2021
An illuminating study of the decade following the defeat of the Third Reich. In his engrossing first book, J�hner, the former editor of the Berlin Times, 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. "The intention of this book," writes the author, "has been to explain how the majority of Germans, for all their stubborn rejection of individual guilt, at the same time managed to rid themselves of the mentality that had made the Nazi regime possible." J�hner chronicles the political events that transpired during the time period and weaves in personal stories from the correspondences of ordinary citizens and eyewitness accounts from noted writers such as Hannah Arendt that articulate the desperate spirit of the era. The author vividly describes the physical chaos impacting cities such as Dresden, Berlin, and Hamburg that were slowly trying to rebuild. As J�hner notes, "the war had left about 500 million cubic metres of rubble behind," and he offer striking portraits of the grim realities faced by the millions of forced laborers and prisoners of war returning home to strained marriages and relationships. "Many marriages with the Heimkehrer[homecomer] husbands collapsed because each partner felt nothing but disdain for what the other had endured," he writes. "It wasn't just women who felt a lack of recognition, the men did too. Many soldiers only really grasped that they had lost the war when they returned to their families." An immediate and long-lasting bestseller when it was published in Germany in 2019 and the winner of the Leipzig Book Fair Prize, J�hner'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.
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