An African-American studies professor’s bleak postwar Germany
When he began the research for his new book about Germany in the years directly after World War II, Harvard professor Werner Sollors says he intended to focus on the lighter aspects of Germans’ encounter with Americans in the 1940s and ’50s: genial GIs, children lining up for candy and gum, the “fraternizing” between American men and German women. Born in 1943, Sollors spent his formative childhood years in a village near Frankfurt. His childhood fascination with things American led, indirectly, to his earning a PhD in American studies (in Berlin), writing a dissertation on the poet Amiri Baraka, and eventually moving across the Atlantic to teach in the United States.
But as he worked on the project, he soon realized that was not the kind of book he had on his hands. The diaries, novels, reportage, photographs, and films he was examining were permeated with darkness. Germans at the time didn’t want to look back at the war, not only because of the overwhelming defeat—which involved the leveling of cities and the widespread rape of German women by Soviet troops—but because of the monstrousness of the crimes committed by the Nazi regime. Yet they saw nothing to look forward to either, given the destruction of the institutions necessary for a functioning state and economy. The story of that time, he found, was the story of a people stuck in a kind of bleak limbo.
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While the World War II literature is vast and Germany’s post-war democratization and economic “miracle” well-known, the period immediately after the war remains underexplored, Sollors argues in “The Temptation of Despair: Tales of the 1940s.” Yet that period also sowed the seeds for Europe’s rebirth as a remarkably peaceful and productive part of the world in the second half of the 20th century.
The book also stakes out new territory for Sollors, who is the longest-tenured member of Harvard’s African and African American studies department—at a low point in its institutional history he was the lone member—and also an English professor. Though deeply informed by his family history, the book is far more scholarly than it is a memoir; in the book, his personal reminiscences occur only within brackets.
Ideas spoke with Sollors by phone from his home in Cambridge. The interview has been edited and condensed.
http://www.bostonglobe.com/ideas/2014/05/03/african-american-studies-professor-bleak-postwar-germany/JYP8hqb5Y0K4w8Wu5hbLlN/story.html
