Aftermath: Life in the Fallout of the Third Reich, 1945–1955 by Harald Jähner
In the aftermath of the Second World War many Germans, instead of succumbing to guilt about the horrors they had brought upon the world, indulged in an orgy of self-pity. In January 1947 a writer in the magazine Der Standpunkt asked: “What makes us so unpopular around the world? Germany is the problem child of Europe, the whipping boy of the world.”
Harald Jähner, the author of this important, exemplary account of postwar life in the defeated Reich, writes that most older Germans embraced a narrative of their own victimhood. This displaced compassion for others, notably for six million Jews.
