postwar

Something I found very interesting in the Retribution chapter is that according to Judt, "Germans in the 1940s had little sense of the way the rest of the world saw them." (57) They did not understand the full extend of what their countrymen and leaders did during the war. Instead, they were inclined to view themselves as victims of their own post-war difficulties-- "food shortages, housing shortages, and the like." (57) The rest of Europe, while wanting to move on past the difficult memories of the atrocities, very much blamed the worst crimes against humanity on the Germans and expected accountability and justice to be served. It's mindblowing to imagine the German people of that time as being detached from the actions of their state leaders, as feeling victimized while so many others were being hatefully targeted and murdered. Of course to a certain extent, the Germans would have been conditioned by their government and used to the propaganda and exploitation as simply what happened to other people, not them; they had their own problems. This mentality shows just how subjective and relative history can be depending on the perspective of the teller. Human selfish need can blindsight even the most guilty away from objective analysis to biased interpretation. Of course, everyone in that generation was struggling with post-war difficulties. There were bigger problems than economic strife though. Everlasting dilemmas had arised due to ethnic cleansing, and the Germans were standing around asking why the finger was being pointed at them so harshly. This is hard for me to conceive, but I suppose we humans are that capable of convincing ourselves what we want to believe. There may not always be a definitive, mutually agreed upon right or wrong, even if there are exact accounts of history, because of what side of the line we were standing on at the time of the events.