The 1948 Italian neorealist film "Germany Year Zero" is about a German family surviving in bombed-out Berlin, the capital of a defeated and humiliated nation: a young woman who goes out with Allied soldiers, steals cigarettes and sells them, a young man who is hiding from the police because he is afraid of punishment for war crimes, and a boy who meets a Nazi pedophile schoolteacher, who manipulates him into poisoning his invalid father. There were scenes such as shown in the film all over the world in 1945: now that the deadliest war in human history is over, having left ruins and invalids behind, what do we do now?For starters, people must be fed so there are no famines and epidemics, which the victorious Allies did in occupied Axis countries, unlike what Axis countries did when they occupied other countries. There were no famines, although some liberated concentration camp inmates died from not being able to digest food that was too rich for their malnourished bodies. Having eaten, people want to have sex, especially after millions of overwhelmingly male Allied soldiers poured into a subcontinent with a dearth of young men. In the Netherlands, more than 7 thousand out-of-wedlock babies were born in 1946, 3 times as many as in 1939, out of the total of 284 thousand; for comparison, in 2007 40% of all Dutch babies were born out of wedlock - yet another data point that shows that the past is a foreign country. War criminals must be tried, and they were, though far too inconsistently and in courts of too dubious a legality for us to say earnestly that justice was served. Shiro Ishii, the microbiologist who developed biological weapons by infecting and vivisecting Chinese and other Allied POWs, was not prosecuted because he shared all his knowledge with the Allies; he died peacefully in 1959. In contrast, General Tomoyuki Yamashita was tried and executed, even though his trial was more of a personal vendetta by General Douglas MacArthur than a fair trial. Although the United States Supreme Court upheld Yamashita's conviction, one Justice dissented: "It is not in our tradition for anyone to be charged with crime which is defined after his conduct, alleged to be criminal, has taken place; or in language not sufficient to inform him of the nature of the offense or to enable him to make defense." Finally, some sort of postwar world political order must be established so the horror of the war won't happen again: the Atlantic Charter was proclaimed and the United Nations were established, though much of the non-European world was still colonial. Does the principle of self-determination in the Atlantic Charter apply to South African blacks? Does it apply to the Indonesians, whose nationalist leader Sukarno, imprisoned by the Dutch, eagerly collaborated with the Japanese invaders, who conscripted millions of Indonesians for war labor, including building the hellish Burma-Siam railway? Does it apply to the Vietnamese, whose country was still claimed as a colony by victorious France? It is these contradictions between the dream of starting from zero and political reality that drove the history of the postwar decades.This is a history of the entire humanity of my grandparents' generation in the half of 1945 after the war ended, so naturally Buruma tells his family stories. Buruma's Dutch father was a law student when he was conscripted for forced labor in Germany; he went hungry and was bombed, but after the war ended, he went back to the Netherlands and resumed his law studies. He rejoined a fraternity and underwent traditional hazing, even though he and his fellow students have gone through much more horrible things - Buruma did not understand at first why his father and other students would submit to such a thing but then realized that they considered it a return to prewar normalcy. My grandmother told me that when they war ended, people celebrated by kissing on the street, so she caught typhus, which was treated with penicillin, a new medicine. As I was reading, I remembered a story an Austrian garage owner told my mother circa 1990: when the war ended, he was 17 years old and had a motorcycle, so he rode it to France; the only thing he could say in French was, "I want to sleep with you," and because of the postwar shortage of men, many women did - at least that's what he told my mother 45 years later. 1945 was certainly a bloodthirsty year. Vast populations were on the move back home only to find in many cases they weren't welcome there anymore. Early chapters are hard to read. Chapter 3 'Revenge', one of the longest in the book, details the grisly end for most collaborators. The British sending Cossacks back to Russia and certain death doesn't make easy reading either. A good piece on the Nuremberg Trials is compromised by an odd comment, not followed up on, that the reason the British and Americans under publicized the trials is because they didn't want people to think the war had been fought to save the Jews. A very debateable point of view to say the least. The book ends with the setting up of the United Nations where at least the ideals were high.
Do You like book 1945 - Biografie Van Een Jaar (2013)?
A good book to read regarding the post WWII implications of one year - 1945.
—byaleeb
I received this book for free through Goodreads First Reads.
—Pam
