TY - BOOK ID - 8854767 TI - The Temptation of Despair PY - 2014 SN - 9780674052437 0674052439 9780674416314 0674416317 0674416325 9780674416321 PB - Cambridge, MA DB - UniCat KW - Reconstruction (1939-1951) KW - Denazification. KW - Social psychology KW - World War, 1939-1945 KW - Influence (Literary, artistic, etc.). KW - Social psychology. KW - War and literature. KW - War and motion pictures. KW - Besetzung KW - Entnazifizierung KW - Denazifiering KW - Socialpsykologi. KW - Andra världskriget 1939-1945 i konsten. KW - Andra världskriget 1939-1945 i litteraturen. KW - Film och krig. KW - Andra världskriget 1939-1945 KW - Influence. KW - Art and the war KW - Literature and the war. KW - Motion pictures and the war. KW - historia. KW - influenser. KW - Reconstruction (1939-1951). KW - World War (1939-1945). KW - 1939-1951. KW - Geschichte 1945-1948. KW - Germany. KW - Deutschland KW - Reconstruction (1939-1951) -- Germany. KW - Social psychology -- Germany. KW - World War, 1939-1945 -- Art and the war. KW - World War, 1939-1945 -- Influence. KW - Denazification KW - History & Archaeology KW - History - General KW - Influence KW - Literature and the war KW - Motion pictures and the war KW - Besetzung. KW - Entnazifizierung. KW - Art and the war. KW - Deutschland. KW - World War, 1939-1945, in art KW - Mass psychology KW - Psychology, Social KW - Human ecology KW - Psychology KW - Social groups KW - Sociology KW - Influenser. KW - Historia. UR - http://www.unicat.be/uniCat?func=search&query=sysid:8854767 AB - In Germany, the years immediately following World War II call forward images of obliterated cities, hungry refugees, and ghostly monuments to Nazi crimes. The temptation of despair was hard to resist, and to contemporary observers the road toward democracy in the Western zones of occupation seemed rather uncertain. Drawing on a vast array of American, German, and other sources--diaries, photographs, newspaper articles, government reports, essays, works of fiction, and film--Werner Sollors makes visceral the experiences of defeat and liberation, homelessness and repatriation, concentration camps and denazification. These tales reveal writers, visual artists, and filmmakers as well as common people struggling to express the sheer magnitude of the human catastrophe they witnessed. Some relied on traditional images of suffering and death, on Biblical scenes of the Flood and the Apocalypse. Others shaped the mangled, nightmarish landscape through abstract or surreal forms of art. Still others turned to irony and black humor to cope with the incongruities around them. Questions about guilt and complicity in a totalitarian country were raised by awareness of the Holocaust, making "After Dachau" a new epoch in Western history. The Temptation of Despair is a book about coming to terms with the mid-1940s, the contradictory emotions of a defeated people--sorrow and anger, guilt and pride, despondency and resilience--as well as the ambiguities and paradoxes of Allied victory and occupation. ER -