RaveDublin Review of Books (IRE)... a lucid, exhaustively researched and compelling account of a Germany which rises much more rapidly from the rubble than we had previously imagined ... Jähner brings out well the paradoxes in many areas of life as Germans struggled to find their way back to what they had previously known ... Jähner’s book is replete with fascinating case studies of all kinds, thoroughly researched and offering much illumination on how Germany became the society it is today. My only reservation relates to the extent to which each of these studies can be said to support the book’s central thesis about the character of the 1945-55 period. While the accounts of, for example, artistic activity, media proliferation and entrepreneurship do indeed demonstrate the richness, diversity and originality of much creative endeavour in Germany in the first years after the war, some of the other material assembled seems less germane ... But this is a minor quibble. If the whole is slightly less than the sum of its parts, that does not take away from the magnitude of Jähner’s achievement. The range and volume of his research and the quality of his analysis are extraordinary. He brings to life a society struggling to survive amid, and beyond, the ruins of a cataclysmic defeat.
