On 18 March 1952 the Neue Zeitung published an article by the author and editor Kurt Kusenberg entitled NOTHING CAN BE TAKEN FOR GRANTED: PRAISE FOR A TIME OF MISERY. Only seven years on, the author yearned for the weeks of confusion that had followed the end of the Second World War in Germany. Even though nothing had worked at the time - not the postal service, the railways, public transport - in spite of the homelessness, the hunger and the occasional corpse that still lay buried under the rubble, in retrospect those weeks struck him as having been a good time. "Like children," he wrote, people after the war had begun "to mend the torn net of human relationships." His choice of words is unusual and perhaps a little disconcerting . . . "Like children"?
- From Aftermath: Life in the Fallout of the Third Reich, 1945-1955 by Harald Jähner
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