Elegantly written and translated, Jähner’s analysis deploys emotionally resonant detail-after war’s horror and exhilaration, German veterans came home to become “pitiful wraith in the unheated kitchen”-to vividly recreate a vibrant, if morally haunted, historical watershed. Aftermath received wide acclaim and spent forty-eight weeks on the best-seller list in Germany when it was published there in 2019. The following books are stories or memoirs written by or about those who have lived through experiences with. Social strife resulted, but also novel possibilities and a “bafflingly good mood,” according to Jähner: female cleanup crews became icons of solidarity a frenzied nightlife of jazz and dancing erupted respectable citizens became thieves and black marketeers abstract art and avant-garde furniture looked to the future the Volkswagen Beetle factory symbolized a gathering economic miracle and Germans swept their responsibility for the Holocaust under the rug while claiming victimhood, a maneuver that Jähner describes as “intolerable insolence” but also as a “necessary prerequisite” for breaking with the past and establishing democracy. In the bitter winter of 1946, Rachael Morgan arrives with her only remaining son Edmund in the ruins of Hamburg. Aftermath is a nuanced panorama of a nation undergoing monumental change.
Journalist Jähner surveys the decade following Nazi Germany’s surrender, when the nation lay in ruins, occupied by foreign armies, awash in refugees, and facing desperate shortages of food, fuel, and housing. Want to be the first to hear about Terris latest book release Want to get notified about FREE giveaways Enter your name and email address. Set in post-war Germany, the international bestseller The Aftermath by Rhidian Brook is a stunning emotional thriller about our fiercest loyalties and our deepest desires. Germans rebounded from shattering defeat with hard work, a pragmatic embrace of the new, and a willful forgetting of trauma and guilt, according to this penetrating history of the early postwar period. At once a personal narrative of recovery and a philosophical exploration of trauma, this bravely and beautifully written book examines the undoing and remaking.Sale Price: 16.50 / 12.