Aftermath: Life in the Fallout of the Third Reich, 1945-1955

by Harald Jähner

Anyone who had a uniform preferred to take it off and burn it, or maybe dye it a different colour. Senior officials poisoned themselves, lower-ranking civil servants threw themselves out of the window or slit their wrists. It was the start of no-man’s-time; laws had been overruled, yet no one was responsible for anything. Nothing belonged to anyone anymore, unless they were sitting on it. No one was responsible, no one was ensured protection. The old power had run away, the new one hadn’t yet arrived; only the noise of artillery suggested that it would come eventually. Even the most sophisticated people engaged in looting. In little hordes they broke into food stores and roamed through abandoned apartments in search of food and a place to sleep.

(View of Dresden from the Rathaus Tower)

While some people barricaded themselves away in the bastions of their bitterness, others immersed themselves in new acquaintances, friendships and love affairs. Migration and evacuation did not lead only to hostility, but also to attraction and curiosity. The fact of families being torn apart created misery and distress in some cases, but in others a liberation from oppressive relationships. The boundaries between rich and poor were also blurred; the experience of potentially losing everything overnight and the omnipresence of death took differences that had previously been fundamental and consigned them to the margins.

committees developed into powerful political associations, which enjoyed their greatest victory when the lawyer Elisabeth Selbert—one of only four women out of a total of 65 members of the Parliamentary Council—was able to introduce a controversial passage into the constitution of the soon-to-be-founded Federal Republic: “Men and women have equal rights.”[12]