Richard Bessel, Germany 1945: From War to Peace (New York: HarperCollins, 2009) 544 pp., $28.99.
Germany 1945: From War to Peace
THE CURRENT fashion for seeing disaster .all around us in the Western world, from climate change to "global" terrorism, needs to be tempered by some solid understanding of just what disaster is really like. The current fears reflect the fact that for more than half a century the West has been sheltered from the violence and hardships of many of the less fortunate areas of the world. An age of unprecedented economic growth and personal security, the absence of major wars among the great powers, the current concern with rights and enablement, all these have contributed to an exaggerated sensitivity to risk.
It is timely to recall that the violence and economic deprivation of the generation or so after 1914 overshadows everything we worry about today. The two devastating world wars are remembered as symbolic reference points in support of national myths of triumph or victimhood; the suffering is memorialized or commercialized. Children visiting museums are invited to enjoy the "blitz experience" or the "trench experience" (though neither is in fact experienced at all). But the raw reality of what happened in Europe and in Asia almost defies the modern imagination. How would the modern world cope now with the World War II death toll of 55 million (or more) and the tens of millions of displaced, disabled, psychologically damaged and homeless people who stood among the ruins of their cities in 1945?
