Rubble and repression: Germany after Hitler

It was a startling disappearing act, one for the ages. Right at the moment when Adolf 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.

“No one was a Nazi,” 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 halfJewish. 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.”

In “Aftermath: Life in the Fallout of the Third Reich, 19451955,” Berlin-based journalist Harald Jähner is similarly skeptical, describing how the majority of surviving Germans were

By Harald Jähner Translated from the German

by Shaun Whiteside Illustrated. 394 pages.

Alfred A. Knopf. $30. so preoccupied with their own suffering that the dominant mood was one of self-pity.

“They saw themselves as the victims,” he writes, “and thus had the dubious good fortune of not having to think about the real ones.”

The pointedness of this sentence is quintessential Jähner; he does double duty in this fascinating book (translated into English by 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. Even though “Aftermath” covers historical ground, its narrative is intimate, filled with first-person accounts from articles and diaries. The original German title was “Wolfszeit,” or “Time of the Wolf.”

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. 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.”

“Aftermath” wends its way through sex, love and modern art; the book also covers morestraightforward political terrain such as the repatriation of displaced persons and the official division of East and West in 1949.

Aftermath: Life in the Fallout of the Third Reich,

1945-1955