Aftermath

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

By: Harald Jähner, Shaun Whiteside - translator

Narrated by: Rob Shapiro

Length: 12 hrs and 36 mins

Publisher's summary

How does a nation recover from fascism and turn toward a free society once more? This internationally acclaimed revelatory history of the transformational decade that followed World War II illustrates how Germany raised itself out of the ashes of defeat and reckoned with the corruption of its soul and the horrors of the Holocaust.

The years 1945 to 1955 were 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 ruins - no mail, no trains, no traffic - with bodies yet to be found beneath the towering rubble.

Aftermath received wide acclaim and spent 48 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.

©2022 Harald Jähner; Shaun Whiteside - translation (P)2022 Random House Audio

Critic reviews

2022 Cundill History Prize, Short-listed
2021 The Baillie Gifford Prize, Short-listed

A Best Book of the Year: New Statesmen, Financial Times, The Times, The Telegraph, the Irish Independent

“[Jähner] does double duty in this fascinating book, 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.”—Jennifer Szalai, New York Times

“The national psyche is the principal protagonist in Harald Jähner’s subtle, perceptive and beautifully written Aftermath. Mr. Jähner, like Mr. Ullrich a German journalist and author, describes Germany’s first postwar decade, with more of an emphasis on its social and cultural landscape (particularly in its western segment) than the usual early Cold War tussles. Aftermath is a revelatory, remarkably wide-ranging book crammed with material, much of which will, I imagine, be new to an international audience.”—Andrew Stuttaford, The Wall Street Journal

“Harald Jähner’s highly readable account of how Germans went about leaving Nazism behind . . . is about the price and the accomplishment of a new beginning when the aggressive war the Germans had waged was reversed to utter defeat in 1945. . . . Jähner is counterintuitive but thoughtful.”—Peter Fritzsche, New York Times Book Review