Harald Jähner’s Aftermath, which is published in paperback this April, starts where most popular histories of Europe’s bloody 20th century end, with Nazi Germany’s surrender in 1945. Rather than focusing on diplomatic treaties or political decisions, it explores the overlooked decade after the end of the second world war through the lives of ordinary people, diving into memoirs and trends in popular culture.
Jähner, 69, was previously the editor of Berliner Zeitung’s arts section and is now an honorary professor of cultural journalism at the Berlin University of the Arts. Aftermath, which is his first non-academic book, won the nonfiction prize at the 2019 Leipzig book fair and Shaun Whiteside’s English translation was shortlisted for the Baillie Gifford prize in 2021.
The original German title of Aftermath is Wolfszeit, or “Time of the Wolves”. What was wolf-like about the first decade after the end of the second world war?
“Time of the wolves” was a commonly used phrase in Germany at the time, referring to the Latin “Homo homini lupus” – “man is wolf to man”. It painted a picture of a state of anarchy: everyone only cared for their own pack, their own family. The idea of community collapsed.
Nowadays we know that wolves are very flexible creatures that maintain complex relationships with one another. In postwar Germany, there was often great cohesion among people, for example among the trümmerfrauen or “rubble women” who formed chains to clear up the debris left behind by the bombs. Those who lost everything did a lot to help one another. There was an experimental approach to new forms of human interactions that also made this period very exciting. People yearned for one another as much as they were scared of one another.
There was also Goebbels’s propaganda myth of the “werewolf”: resistance fighters who would terrorise allied forces after the defeat of Nazi Germany. Apart from a small number of isolated cases, that myth never became reality. The vast majority of Germans were fed up with fighting. They had started to see the true face of nazism in the final months of the war, when the SS combed through a war-ravaged society in search for teenagers and pensioners they could send to the front. The same nation that had fought fanatically until the regime’s capitulation suddenly became very peaceful and obedient.
You were born in 1953, almost at the end of the period you describe. What was your family’s experience of the aftermath of the second world war?
I was 15 in the seminal year of 1968, and like many young people I demanded answers from my parents. I was outraged by the pictures of atrocities in concentration camps that had gradually found their way in to the press, and I wanted to know what they had done. My father had been in the navy, my mother had been a teacher in occupied Poland. Their answers were evasive, sometimes helpless. Their inability to talk about what happened to the Jews shocked us. We had a lot of fights.
Did your research for this book make you look differently at your parents’ generation?
Definitely. One question that animated me was how Germany has managed to become a reliable democracy. When did the Germans lose their narcissistic streak? When did these learning processes start? It can’t have been through reading Alexis de Tocqueville or the German constitution; the change of mentality must have happened at a deeper level.
I started to suspect early on that my own generation’s thesis, that only the student revolution of 1968 had made Germany habitable again, was false. Our parents’ generation had learned lessons of its own accord. One extremely formative experience was the black market that flourished in the years after the end of the war. For example, the black market taught them that things were relative. The kings of the black market were young traders, 15 to 17 years old, many of them former Hitler Youth, who traded with Nazi memorabilia. During the war, objects such as the SS honour dagger had a mythological value – now they went for two cartons of Lucky Strikes. This was a generation trained in looking at the world completely without pathos. It made me understand my parents differently, and better, though I wouldn’t say I have entirely made peace with their generation.
Why?
In the decade after the Holocaust, Germany tried to repress its past and it largely managed to do so. That makes it hard to love that generation. I feel very uncomfortable with Germans who stylise themselves as world champions of coming to terms with your own history and want to hand out lessons to other nations. I have the feeling that this critical engagement with the past is something that is now easily championed, but I am not sure we have all learned the lessons.
Are there lessons to be learned from the way Germany, once so notoriously aggressive, was pacified after the war?
The allied nations of the Americans, the British and the French played a key role. American entertainment culture had a very pacifying effect on Germany: its films taught us previously unknown, relaxed and laconic attitudes. It wasn’t just chocolate and cigarettes that made American GIs attractive to German women, but because they embodied a freer lifestyle. They were softer than their German counterparts: American soldiers were seen pushing prams through bombed-out cities, which was absolutely unheard of at the time. Germany learned less about liberalism through official denazification programmes than through pop culture. If there is a lesson for these modern times, it is how important it is to keep on caring for a nation even once it has been defeated.
The attitudes to war we are seeing in Germany now are also a result of the experience of the cold war, of seeing your country divided into two spheres of influence and imagining that you may have to fight against members of your own family. That created a much more dominant yearning for peace than in other European nations, like Poland. As a result, many Germans nowadays value peace more highly than freedom.
What are you working on now?
I am working on a book about the Weimar Republic, the time between the wars. As in Aftermath, I am interested in mass culture, popular song, dance styles, and the relations between the sexes.
Which books are on your bedside table?
I am reading a lot of novels from the 1920s, for example the novelist Ruth Landshoff-Yorck’s The Many and the One and Klaus Mann’s autobiography The Turning Point. When I try to relax, I pick up the collected works of Adalbert Stifter.
Which book would you give to a young person?
Show Them a Good Time by the young Irish short story writer Nicole Flattery, who has a better understanding of teenage despair and lust for life than anyone I’ve ever read.
Aftermath by Harald Jähner is published by Ebury (£9.99). To support the Guardian and Observer order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply
