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The earth was about to shift on its axis or the guilty would be swept away in a flood of biblical proportions. So common were these by 1949 that they amounted, he concluded, to a kind of mass psychosis. The blind faith people had placed in Hitler, now destroyed, was, he thought, finding an outlet in warnings of a coming apocalypse, amplified by the emerging sensationalist popular press. “Fears of spiritual defilement, toxic mistrust, and a malaise that permeated daily life” were widespread deep-rooted anxieties “churned away throughout the 1950s against the backdrop of consumerist forgetfulness.” In the university town of Göttingen, the folklorist Alfred Dieck was collecting the rumors and prophesies he encountered in the region. This situation, Black argues, persisted well after the process of reconstruction and rehabilitation in Germany had got underway, undermining the common portrayal of early postwar history as a story of gritty and determined Germans heroically working to rebuild their shattered land. The moral, social, and epistemic void in which Germans found themselves after defeat was filled, at least for a time, by the irrational. Nobody was willing, or perhaps able, to discuss these and projected them onto smaller and more manageable psychic dramas of faith healing and witchcraft, the inexplicable and the supernatural. In her new book, she looks at how Germans more generally sought to come to terms with their sudden disorientation through fantasies about “good and evil, innocence and guilt, sickness and healing.” These were displaced from the horrors of the Holocaust and the Nazi mass murders of the mentally ill and handicapped, of resisters and homosexuals, of Poles, prisoners of war, and millions more. In her prizewinning book, Death in Berlin: From Weimar to Divided Germany (2010), Monica Black charted the impact of two world wars on Berliners’ attitudes toward death and mourning.
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The present was unbearable, the future uncertain.
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The values inculcated by the Nazi regime had been upended. What had been the point of all the hard work and sacrifice? Inflation was out of control, and the basic necessities of existence had to be acquired from a black market mired in violence and criminality. Even before the end of the war, reports from the Security Service of the SS had described popular feelings of “mourning, despondency, bitterness, and a rising fury,” expressing “the deepest disappointment for having misplaced one’s trust.” In the months that followed the war’s end, such feelings became ever more widespread. Entire cities had been shattered by bombs and artillery, expanses of land left bare where every tree had been cut down for fuel, parts of the country practically erased.” For 12 years, Germans had lived under a regime that had shaped their lives in ways so intense that large numbers of them could not imagine a life without Hitler and the Nazi Party and killed themselves in one of the greatest waves of mass suicide in history. “When World War II came to an end,” Monica Black notes, “Germany lay in ruins.