How does a nation recover from fascism and turn toward a free society once more? This internationally acclaimed revelatory history-- filled with first-person accounts from articles and diaries ( The New York Times)-- of 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.
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..
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.
It is the first history of Germany\'s national mentality in the immediate postwar years.
Aftermath received wide acclaim and spent forty-eight weeks on the best-seller list in Germany when it was published there in 2019.
Cities lay in ruins--no mail, no trains, no traffic--with bodies yet to be found beneath the towering rubble.
More than half the population was displaced; 10 million newly released forced laborers and several million prisoners of war returned to an uncertain existence.
Victorious Allied forces occupied the four zones that make up present-day Germany.
The years 1945 to 1955 were a raw, wild decade that found many Germans politically, economically, and morally bankrupt.
Featuring over 40 eye-opening black-and-white photographs and posters from the period.
How does a nation recover from fascism and turn toward a free society once more? This internationally acclaimed revelatory history-- filled with first-person accounts from articles and diaries ( The New York Times)-- of 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
