AFTERMATH - Life in the Fallout of the Third Reich 1945-1955

2019. Softcover. 382 pages. Very good condition. Tightly bound and neat inside. 

The years 1945 to 1955 was 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 ruinsno mail, no trains, no trafficwith bodies yet to be found beneath the towering rubble. Aftermath received wide acclaim and spent forty-eight weeks on the best-seller list in Germany when it was published there in 2019. It 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.

HARALD JÄHNER is a cultural journalist and former editor of The Berlin Times. He has been an honorary professor of cultural journalism at Berlin's University of the Arts since 2011. Aftermath, his first book, won the Leipzig Book Fair Prize in 2019.