The Temptation of Despair: Tales of the 1940s by Werner Sollors (review)

In his afterword to The Temptation of Despair, Werner Sollors recounts that he began the book with the intent of writing about the Americanization of Germany during the occupation period after World War II. He imagined that he would write about the American-German encounters that made such an impact on him as a child growing up in Germany during this time, even intending to go so far as weaving personal memories into his narrative. Given the widely held view of Germany’s successful reconstruction into a prosperous democracy, he anticipated that it would be “a rather cheery study” (289). But as he delved deeper into the sources, he was drawn to a much different story, one that he saw as belying the “mythic success story” (12) that so often characterized this era. Instead he found himself recovering those voices that captured the despair and helplessness that pervaded many Germans, those sources that conveyed a “sense that going on with their lives was futile and that a wish to die was more appropriate” (7). Sollors tells this story in an episodic fashion, diving deeply into a few representative artifacts.

Sollors draws from a variety of sources to show how these iconic images and texts were edited or emended to reflect a triumphalist occupation narrative, and in the process often softened or eliminated the grimness of their depictions. To understand German responses to the end of the fighting, for example, he takes a close look at the various editions of diaries and photographs to illustrate how ambivalent and ambiguous sentiments were often minimized. He gives the backstory to George Rodger’s famous Life photograph of a young boy walking near corpses by the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp, showing that the young man was not a well-fed, indifferent German, as widely-believed at the time, but in fact a Dutch Jew. And he traces the evolution of Billy Wilder’s famous A Foreign Affair to show how the original story was tempered, but still able to retain much of its punch.

He broadens his treatment of sources when he talks about depictions of German ruins, displaced persons, and Black gis in occupied Germany. The very nature of these topics invite despair, as all subjects stubbornly resisted efforts to weave them into a “tale of a mission accomplished” (2). As Sollors confesses, the story of African-American soldiers in occupied Germany has a special place in his heart, and so he spends two chapters examining how stories about them underscore the deep hypocrisy present when the victory against totalitarianism abroad was won before the victory against segregation at home had occurred. He concludes that perhaps the most effective antidote to dealing with these difficult subjects is the dark humour present in artifacts like A Woman in Berlin and A Foreign Affair.

The Temptation of Despair has much to recommend it. It addresses a highly relevant and significant subject matter, offering an important corrective to the myth-making that often accompanies narratives of the American occupation. Reflective of his aim to appeal to a general audience, Sollors’s narrative is highly readable, and he excels when he engages in close reading of his texts. While distracting and awkwardly inserted at times, his personal remembrances from the time period add a layer of insight and analysis that are quite frankly impossible for almost anyone else to pull off.

But at times the argument can be hard to follow. While fascinating, the book sometimes has the feel of loosely-connected essays. Although seemingly centred on German despair, the book nevertheless spends more time on non-German sources and subjects. Sollors points out that George Rodger and his famous subject, the boy Sieg Mandaag, are both miserable in their experience, but neither are German. Many of the narratives of German ruins and displaced persons are composed by American, British, or Swiss observers. Disenchanted, perhaps to the point of despair, Black...