The temptation of despair : tales of the 1940s

Resource Information

The work The temptation of despair : tales of the 1940s represents a distinct intellectual or artistic creation found in University of Missouri Libraries. This resource is a combination of several types including: Work, Language Material, Books.

Label

The temptation of despair : tales of the 1940s

Title remainder

tales of the 1940s

Statement of responsibility

Werner Sollors

Creator

• Sollors, Werner

Author

• Sollors, Werner

Subject

• Reconstruction (1939-1951) -- Germany
• Social psychology -- Germany
• World War, 1939-1945 -- Art and the war
• World War, 1939-1945 -- Art and the war
• Art
• World War, 1939-1945 -- Literature and the war
• World War, 1939-1945 -- Motion pictures and the war
• World War, 1939-1945 -- Influence
• Denazification

Genre

• Art and the war
• Art

Language

eng

Summary

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. --Provided by publisher

Cataloging source

DLC

Dewey number

940.55/4

Illustrations

illustrations

Index

index present

LC call number

D829.G3

LC item number

S56 2014

Literary form

non fiction

Nature of contents

bibliography