Postwar: A History of Europe Since 1945

by Tony Judt

For men like the writer Günther Grass, or the social theorist Jürgen Habermas, both born in 1927, West Germany was a democracy without democrats. Its citizens had vaulted with shocking ease from Hitler to consumerism; they had salved their guilty memories by growing prosperous. In the German turn away from politics towards private accumulation, Grass and others saw a denial of civic responsibilities past and present. They ardently seconded the dissent from Bertold Brecht’s aphorism ‘Erst kommt das Fressen, dann kommt die Moral’ (‘Eating comes first, then morality’) expressed by Ernst Reuter, the mayor of West Berlin, in March 1947: ‘No sentence is more dangerous than “Eating comes first, then morality”. We are hungry and freezing because we permitted the erroneous doctrine which this sentence expresses.’