German Autumn

This is a slim volume consisting of a series of articles written for a Swedish periodical by Stig Dagerman (whose own life is worth an article or two: a wunderkind of books and stage who killed himself in his thirties). He went to a defeated Germany in the autumn of 1946 and reported on the life of its citizens. The result is therefore not a complete picture like a book would be, but a series of illuminating fragments in different cities, in transit or in rural areas.Dagerman makes no excuses, nor shies away from the ugliness of struggling for survival by people who a short time earlier had been citizens of the Nazi state. There is comparatively little written about Germany in the immediate aftermath of WWII, so this is worth reading for that alone if you are interested in this period of history. The descriptions of waterlogged cellars and looted stoves, however, are surely familiar to any country that has suffered modern, total warfare and this serves as an objective commentary on the cruelty, futility and sheer bl**dy-mindedness of the human compulsion for war.

Henning Mankell says "German Autumn is one of the best collections ever writen about the aftermath of war." and I couldn't agree more. Objective and a great insight of facts during that time.

I've been reading a series of books that dealt with Germany in the aftermath of the collapse of the Third Reich. Among them has been Margaret Bourke-White's "Dear Fatherland, Rest Quietly" (1946), in which she followed Patton's army and interviewed and photographed both German civilians and American soldiers, in vivid prose but with little sympathy for any Germans.The next was Werner Sollors' "The Temptation of Despair", which examined postwar Europe from a wide variety of perspectives, ranging from a concentration camp survivor to a Black American GI who wrote a novel about his own experience. It was this book, published in 2014, that led me to discover many other books, including Dagerman's.The next book was a 1947 classic by James Stern, reissued in the 80's, called "The Hidden Damage". Stern was a civilian who interviewed German civilians as part of the U. S. Strategic Bombing Survey, and his portraits and observations are on the same level of insight as Dagerman's.Then there was Dagerman's "German Autumn", and it's everything that other reviewers have been saying. Five Stars all the way. His simple description of a train packed with starving refugees is worth reading again and again, as is his take on what he calls "the new morality", which led people to regard starvation as a worse crime than stealing. When it came to the American goal of de-Nazification, his message was that "hunger is a very bad teacher." Or as the line in "The Threepenny Opera" puts it, "First feed the face, and then tell right from wrong."One constant thought that occurred to me as I read these books, and others like them, was that all of them, in combination, could make for a movie that would be every bit as compelling as Roberto Rossellini's great War Trilogy. In fact, many of the scenes described by Dagerman and Stern could have come right out of the final film of that trilogy, "Germany: Year Zero". It's a shame that 99% of World War II movies produced in Hollywood deal only with battles, and almost none with the impact of the war on civilians, both during the war and in its aftermath.

I heard about this book through a friend and ordered it from Amazon. It arrived quickly and in perfect condition. Now I am reading about my home country and am enjoying it immensely.

Perhaps one of the most beautifully written books I have ever read.

excellent