Germany 1945: From War to Peace
In the months after the fall of the Third Reich, Bessel writes, &#x201C;the entire country seemed to be waiting for a train.&#x201D; Bessel does an excellent job of evoking the blasted landscape of a conquered Germany&#x2014;the homelessness and the hunger, the rubble and the mass rape. (Among the book&#x2019;s fascinating details: Allied soldiers were told to look for insurgents with &#x201C;belts filled with explosives,&#x201D; who never emerged; a common postwar crime was bigamy.) There was also, belatedly, disillusionment. Nazi leaders had sacrificed or abandoned their own civilians, underscoring the &#x201C;obvious bankruptcy of National Socialism.&#x201D; Germans dissolved into pools of self-pity&#x2014;which, remarkably, helped lay the foundation (at least in the West) for a democratic and pacifist state. Bessel fully recognizes the repugnance that the Germans&#x2019; sense of victimhood and their amnesia about their culpability provokes; and yet, he notes, their eagerness to put Nazism behind them and make &#x201C;a fundamental break with the past&#x201D; was &#x201C;no bad thing.&#x201D;Copyright &copy;2008Click here to subscribe to The New Yorker--This text refers to theHardcoveredition.