Summer of Freedom
How 1945 Changed the World
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- $11.99
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
This colorful post–World War II history brings to life a crucial yet understudied period, through the eyes of both major figures and ordinary people.
It was a summer like no one had ever experienced: in the four months from May to September 1945, the old world collapsed, and a new one opened up. The heinous Third Reich was over, ushering in an era of freedom, but also fresh conflicts.
With a gripping historical panorama, Oliver Hilmes offers insight into this unprecedented summer, from the perspectives of the victors and the vanquished, victims and perpetrators, celebrities and unknowns. The “Big Three”—Harry S. Truman, Winston Churchill, and Joseph Stalin—determine the course of history at the Potsdam Conference. German housewife Else Tietze fears for her son’s safety. US soldier Klaus Mann tracks down Nazi criminals. And in Berlin Billy Wilder plans a comedy about life in the ruins. Cafés and restaurants reopen their doors, and Red Army soldier Vasily Petrowitsch is begged for bread by German children.
Through a series of scenes that lead from Berlin to Tokyo, from Munich to Paris, from Bayreuth to Moscow, Hilmes captures the unique atmosphere of this time of extremes: the great happiness and hope of the liberated; the misery, grief, and fear of the defeated; and the uncertainty that comes with freedom.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Historian Hilmes (Berlin 1936) recreates the concluding months of WWII in an enthralling you-were-there style narration that covers May through September 1945. In California's Pacific Palisades, Thomas Mann—who fled Germany in 1933—is only mildly nonplussed at the May 8 news of his homeland's surrender, even as his son Klaus, writing for a U.S. Army newspaper, makes his way to Munich to find out what happened to his family's home. In mid-July, Churchill, Truman, and Stalin meet at the Potsdam Conference, where they negotiate the new postwar order even as Truman mulls the results of the first atomic bomb test. Meanwhile, Margot Bendheim and Adolf Friedlander, newly liberated from Theresienstadt, are so overwhelmed they remain at the camp for several weeks, and Berlin empty-nester Else Tietze frets over the fates of her scattered adult children. Hilmes has a gift for bringing the mighty down to human level, so that Stalin's irritation that, since he's unable to ride a horse, he can't have his own military parade, or director Billy Wilder's lambasting of another director's serious attempts to reckon with concentration camps ("Films have to entertain!... We're alienating them with your movie!") blend seamlessly with the everyman and -woman accounts. The result is an immersive mosaic of a world in flux.
