Review of "Aftermath: Life in the fallout of the Third Reich" by Harald Jahner

 

What an absolutely amazing book.  I thought I'd done all the reading that I needed to about the Third Reich, and the de-Nazification process. But I learned so much from reading this - about the way that the Black Market re-socialised Germans, about the craze for American music (and American soldiers, for the German women) that swept through the ruined cities, about the revival of businesses that underlay the economic miracle. 

Two things in particular stood out for me - first, the experience of the Jews in the DP camps around Europe. I'd been busy composing some words about the nature of Zionism before I started to read that chapter, and it was along the lines of "Zionism says that the Jews of each country, whatever their citizenship, are Jews by nationality". And as I read the chapter, I considered that it wasn't at all surprising that this was how the Jews of the DP camps came to view themselves, whatever they may have thought about themselves before. Even within the camps Polish Jews were persecuted by their "fellow" Poles, and the same happened in other nationality camps like Ukrainians. It must have seemed natural to regard oneself as of Jewish nationality - the more so because Poland, and Czechoslovakia, and the USSR (and no doubt other countries) always designated the Jews as a nationality. 

And for the survivors of the Holocaust and also the aftermath, the Nakba in Palestine might not have seemed so bad. The number of Palestinians displaced was big in absolute terms, and relative to the size of the Palestinian population, but it was a drop in the ocean compared to the displacements that were taking place in Europe.

The last chapter of the book, about the extent of de-Nazification, and about all the functionaries that were allowed to return to their posts despite their Nazi pasts, and about how the Germans came to regard themselves as the victims of Nazism rather than the perpetrators, was really enlightening too.