In the shadow of war.

• Author: Overy, Richard
• Position: 'Germany 1945: From War to Peace' by Richard Bessel - Book review

Richard Bessel, Germany 1945: From War to Peace (New York: HarperCollins, 2009) 544 pp., $28.99.

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?

The publication of Richard Bessel's harrowing and intelligent account of the end of World War II in Europe, Germany 1945, is an important corrective to the self-indulgent panic of the present day. The portrait he paints of a Germany in the very depths of an abyss of violence and social disaster is a necessary curative to the often-passive way in which defeated Germans are portrayed in triumphalist military histories of Allied victory. Germans were people too, and the terrible things that happened in their country in the final months of defeat and the years of slow readjustment to peace exposes the shallowness of the view, widely held among the Allied populations, that Germany just had to be brought to his knees to make the world a better place. The suffering experienced by ordinary Germans was a very human suffering, visible since 1945 in a hundred other civil wars and wars of liberation where the civilian population has been abused, bombed, deported or forced to flee.

Bessel's account is not an attempt to revisit the theme of "Germans as victims" in which victimhood is shared irrespective of the historical circumstances that produce it. The mass murder of millions of Jewish and non-Jewish Europeans is victimization of a quite-different kind. It cannot be thought of in the same terms as the messy consequences of defeat experienced by the society that generated the mass murder in the first place. What Bessel does is simply record what a society facing exceptional violence and social crisis is like. The situation in Germany was unique. No other state in World War II fought to the very end. No other state turned its own territory into the site of battle and its own population into the object of terrible violence. Italy and Japan both surrendered before that happened (although half of Italy was made a German battlefield between 1943 and 1945 and both societies were heavily bombed). Millions of German soldiers died in defense of their homeland in battles in the eastern part of the country and the storming of Berlin; German civilian casualties were twenty times as high as those of Italy and six times those of Japan. But, the German armed forces and German society continued to function and fight until the very day that the Wehrmacht unconditionally surrendered on May 7, 1945. The experience was unparalleled in another sense too. Not...