March 7, 2016
In this colorful narrative, Feigel (The Love-charm of Bombs), a senior lecturer in English at King’s College, London, uses the lives of 20 American, British, and German cultural figures as a lens through which to examine post-WWII Germany, from the Nazis’ surrender to the early fall of 1949. Some of Feigel’s subjects are well known, such as novelist Thomas Mann, filmmaker Billy Wilder, and poet W.H. Auden; others, considerably less so, including photographer Lee Miller, journalist Martha Gellhorn, and novelist Rebecca West. Feigel is at her best in describing the immediate year after Germany’s defeat, when rubble was “spread for mile after mile, scattered with corpses,” and the occupiers treated civilians harshly. Vivid chapters address the Nuremberg Trials and the Berlin Airlift, and Feigel shows how the politics and sensibility of the early Cold War period led to a measure of growing Western sympathy for Germans and the abandonment of an in-depth denazification of German culture and society. Unfortunately, in her last three chapters, she focuses too heavily on Mann and his oldest children, Erika and Klaus; she also writes too little on life in the Soviet sector. Despite these flaws, this is a well-constructed, fascinating, and anecdote-rich work about the early Cold War and the influence of postwar Germany on Western culture.