Aftermath: Life in the Fallout of the Third Reich, 1945-1955, by Harald Jähner, translated by Shaun Whiteside (Knopf, 2022), 416 pages.

Non-German Westerners have a cliched image of Germany in the immediate postwar period as a nation comprised of incorrigible Nazis slowly coming to appreciate democratic values under the careful instruction of their American and British mentors. In this narrative, denazification of Germans was the overwhelming postwar task of both the Allied occupiers and the Germans themselves, with the core lesson in denazification offered in the Nuremberg Trials, which proved to each German his personal disgrace and responsibility in the extermination of the Jews.

The popular German account of the immediate postwar era is equally problematic. According to this narrative, postwar German society was fully committed to the restoration of a stolid and authoritarian German society, and impervious of its guilt for aggressive war and atrocities. According to this narrative, it was not until the sons and daughters (and for that matter grandchildren) of Nazis came of age and fell into the “Sixty-Eighter” movement that the German people engaged in an authentic reflection on the moral, political, and aesthetic qualities of Germany and how they lent themselves so easily to aggressive war and genocide.

The truth about postwar Germany, as unraveled in Harald Jähner’s Aftermath: Life in the Fallout of the Third Reich, is incomparably more poignant than the mundanely moralizing popular narratives about that era. With the humanity of a poet and the precision of a historian, Jähner exposes the sufferings, the creativity, the cruelties, and the lies that characterized and sustained post-war Germany. Originally released in Germany in 2019, this English translation is a faithful and skilled effort to capture the author’s tone and meaning.

Jähner’s book mostly concentrates on post-war West Germany—i.e. the parts of Germany that were occupied by the Americans, British, and French, and later became the BRD—and so too will this review. He writes about a ten-year period, 1945-1955, but it is really best to think of postwar Germany as two periods: 1945-1950, and 1950-1955, the latter representing the period immediately after the “economic miracle” in West Germany, in which West German society became much more ordered, self-assured, and conservative.

The immediate postwar period, from 1945 through the late 1940s, was in contrast to the conservatism of the 1950s a time of sexual experimentation and female defiance. Jähner details how many marriages dissolved in the aftermath of the war, and how casually wives of soldiers began to regard their marital vows after they realized their husbands’ service may not have been so honorable. Indeed, writes the author, “many soldiers only grasped that they had lost the war when they returned to their families.”

The skeptical view of men prevailing in postwar Germany was reflected by the commentary in German women’s magazines in the late 1940s—such as Constanze—which expressed frustration at the lethargy of returned German soldiers, emphasized the ability of women to provide for themselves without male support, and more generally talked about the declining social standing of men and male-oriented institutions such as soldiering.

The impression one gets from Jähner’s survey of these publications is not one of German women stewing in guilt over their nation’s extermination of the Jews—a subject scarcely mentioned in explicit terms by Germans and in the German press before the 1960s—but one of cynicism about German men and the romantic values of war, patriarchy, and victory that so many had swallowed in the Nazi era. While superficially anti-patriarchy and anti-Nazi, these commentaries can actually be interpreted as an attempt to deny specific German responsibility for the war in Europe and Nazi genocide, insofar as they revert to vapidly feminist generalizations about the supposedly male responsibility for war in general, rather than specific German responsibility for the Second World War.

The immediate postwar era was a time of increasing economic power for women, who entered the workforce in record numbers. To call this feminist would be an anachronism; German women went to work in menial labor for the same reason so many resorted to prostituting themselves to American G.I.s, namely that they had no other way of affording basic necessities. Yet this social change was romanticized in the form of the Trümmerfrauen, frequently photographed women who cleaned up the rubble in bombed-out German cities.

There was plenty of German self-pity in response to the destruction of their country and the appalling suffering it entailed; but postwar German intellectuals also saw in the hills of rubble the disintegration of German values under the Third Reich. It is noteworthy that the most striking and famous image of the destruction of Dresden—known as eine Skulptur klagt an, or “a sculpture accuses”—depicts a stone angel who appears to be not only pitying but admonishing the razed city and its miserable people.

Postwar Germany not only had to cope with its own sufferings, but the human consequences of its wartime program to annihilate and enslave neighboring countries and peoples. During the war, Germany had kidnapped millions of mostly Slavic forced laborers, who had toiled in generally miserable conditions until they were set free into German society by the Allies in 1945.

The presence of these “displaced persons” in postwar Germany was a major social issue in postwar Germany, and one with which the Allied occupiers struggled to cope. Initially, the Allies were sympathetic to the D.P.s, and not at all inclined to punish these former slaves for the crimes of plunder and vengeance they committed against Germans. But eventually, Allied soldiers came to see themselves “less as caregivers and more as wardens” of a traumatized and anarchic D.P. community, which the Americans policed rigorously.

The Allies themselves embarked in a monstrous ethnic-cleansing program after the war.  This entailed the removal of millions of Germans from their homes in Eastern Europe—regardless whether they had any affiliation with Nazism. Jähner is to be commended for acknowledging this atrocity for what it was, rather than obscuring the issue—as German historians such as Walter Schlesinger have tried to do with references to Nazi Germany’s wartime program of ethnically cleansing Poles and other Eastern European populations. He also tells the less-known story of the cruel reception these Eastern Germans received from the natives upon their return to Germany.

While postwar discourses in Germany could be transgressive—on matters of sex, on questions of nationality and identity, and on music and the arts—Germans were not ready to talk in specific terms about Germany’s responsibility for the genocides carried out by the Nazi regime. As Jähner confirms, the Holocaust played a “shockingly small part in the consciousness of most Germans in the post-war period.” It is not that the Germans failed to acknowledge any national guilt for the war and its atrocities; contempt for Hitler and acceptance of his responsibility for provoking war were widespread.

Yet in statements of atonement such as the October 1945 Stuttgart Declaration of Guilt by the Evangelical Church in Germany, the extermination of the Jews is not mentioned. Nor—following the wave of public disgust that attended the liberation of the concentration camps, and another brief moment of outrage during the main Nuremberg Trial—did the Western Allies and the Soviets have any desire to emphasize Nazi genocide in their propaganda directed at the German people.

Both the Soviets and the Western Allies had clear motives to de-emphasize German atrocities. The reality of the Holocaust contradicted the Soviet narrative of the “Great Patriotic War,” which had not been a war for the Jews, but a struggle in which the Soviet peoples and indeed communists in general suffered equally. Following the emergence of the Cold War, American leaders concluded that an emphasis on atrocities would demoralize the nationalistic and conservative Germans, who could otherwise serve as a bulwark against the spread of communism.

The Holocaust only began to receive serious public attention in the early 1960s, when the Eichmann Trial of 1961 in Jerusalem, as well as the Frankfurt Auschwitz trials of 1963-1965, brought publicity to the extermination of the Jews and its perpetrators. The German youth movement of 1968 would transform German society in many ways, including through its demand to root out and prosecute Nazi killers and its call to memorialize the German legacy of genocide during the Second World War.

Jähner mentions in general terms the transition of the Holocaust from a marginal topic in the immediate post-war era to the central role it holds in German culture today. However, his discussion would have been more engaging had he described more precisely how the Holocaust went from being a marginal topic in post-war German discourses to obtaining a defining role in Germany’s cultural life, educational system, and the historical memory of its people.

While Jähner’s treatment of postwar German culture is subtle and fascinating, one shortcoming of this book is that the author rather robotically accepts the Sonderweg view of German history, according to which Nazism was the inevitable culmination of German history, and (therefore) that the pre-Nazi German past must be repudiated along with Nazism. This view, which is taken for granted in German intellectual culture, is certainly open to question, rooted as it is in a moralizing teleology rather than in historical empiricism.

Yet Jähner swallows the Sonderweg uncritically. This leads him to dismiss out of hand—rather than seriously engage—the arguments of conservative and nationalistic postwar German intellectuals. These men did not defend Nazism, but called for a revitalization of traditional German political values while simultaneously insisting that Nazism was a barbarous anomaly. Perhaps these arguments were scurrilous, and the men who made them bigots; but this needs to be demonstrated, not simply asserted.

Despite this nearly inevitable flaw, Jähner’s book is a triumph. The historian has the daunting task of producing work that is as literary as it is empirically rigorous. No praise is too high for he who can fuse those disparate attributes into a single work.

Matthew Ghobrial Cockerill (follow him on Twitter) is a doctoral student in international history at the London School of Economics.