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During the war, women drove trams and operated bulldozers they learned that cities didn’t need men in order to function. The soldiers who did return were often maimed or psychologically destroyed. The Trümmerfrauen also happened to reflect the country’s postwar demographic reality: In 1950, there were 1,362 women for every 1,000 men. Even though any number of those women had been pressed into service as punishment for their Nazi pasts, the photographs of them in their aprons and kerchiefs, surrounded by ruins to be painstakingly removed with their shovels, were appealing and ultimately useful, offering “an excellent visual metaphor for the sense of solidarity that the broken-down German society urgently needed.”
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There were Trümmerfilme (“rubble films”) and Trümmerliteratur (“rubble literature”) the women known as Trümmerfrauen would be retrospectively remembered as “mythical heroines,” Jähner writes. Jähner gives over an entire chapter to the rubble, which was everywhere not only was it an overwhelming physical fact, but it also made for a potent cultural symbol.
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With their defeat, “laws had been overruled,” he writes, “yet no one was responsible for anything.” A recent book by Volker Ullrich, “Eight Days in May,” minutely chronicled what happened in the days between Hitler’s suicide and the Wehrmacht’s unconditional surrender on May 8, 1945, pointing out that most Germans didn’t consider it a day of liberation but “an unprecedented catastrophe.” Jähner’s “Aftermath” gets going where Ullrich’s epilogue leaves off, with the Germans assiduously avoiding any reckoning with what the Nazi regime had done in their name, devoting themselves instead to clearing the rubble with what Ullrich aptly described as “grim diligence.” Jähner sets out to tell the tumultuous story of the postwar decade in all of its contradictions, conveying the breadth of experiences amid the “extreme challenges” the German people faced. Those who stockpiled supplies were “hamsters,” while those who stole from the hamsters were “hyenas.” One could never be sure what the wolf was up to, “since the ‘lone wolf’ had just as frightening a reputation as the whole pack,” Jähner writes. The original German title was “Wolfszeit,” or “Time of the Wolf.” The postwar Germans were fond of animal metaphors. Even though “Aftermath” covers historical ground, its narrative is intimate, filled with first-person accounts from articles and diaries. The pointedness of this sentence is quintessential Jähner he does double duty in this fascinating book (translated into English by the gifted Shaun Whiteside), elegantly marshaling a plethora of facts while also using his critical skills to wry effect, parsing a country’s stubborn inclination toward willful delusion. “They saw themselves as the victims,” he writes, “and thus had the dubious good fortune of not having to think about the real ones.”
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In “Aftermath: Life in the Fallout of the Third Reich, 1945-1955,” the Berlin-based journalist Harald Jähner is similarly skeptical, describing how the majority of surviving Germans were so preoccupied with their own suffering that the dominant mood was one of self-pity. The photojournalist Margaret Bourke-White heard the phrase “We didn’t know!” with such “monotonous frequency” that it sounded “like a kind of national chant for Germany.” “No one was a Nazi,” the journalist Martha Gellhorn wrote about the end of World War II in Europe, mordantly recalling how all the Germans she met insisted they had hidden a Communist or were secretly half-Jewish. Right at the moment when Hitler killed himself in his bunker on April 30, 1945, Germany was magically transformed from a genocidal Reich to a place where there were barely any Nazis to be found. It was a startling disappearing act, one for the ages.