The moral, social, and epistemic void in which Germans found themselves after defeat was filled, at least for a time, by the irrational. This situation, Black argues, persisted well after the process of reconstruction and rehabilitation in Germany had got underway, undermining the common portrayal of early postwar history as a story of gritty and determined Germans heroically working to rebuild their shattered land. “Fears of spiritual defilement, toxic mistrust, and a malaise that permeated daily life” were widespread deep-rooted anxieties “churned away throughout the 1950s against the backdrop of consumerist forgetfulness.” In the university town of Göttingen, the folklorist Alfred Dieck was collecting the rumors and prophesies he encountered in the region. The blind faith people had placed in Hitler, now destroyed, was, he thought, finding an outlet in warnings of a coming apocalypse, amplified by the emerging sensationalist popular press. So common were these by 1949 that they amounted, he concluded, to a kind of mass psychosis.
The earth was about to shift on its axis or the guilty would be swept away in a flood of biblical proportions. Many if not most people, Dieck observed, “felt largely blameless” for the horrors the Nazis had inflicted on the world, and there was still a widespread belief that “American financial circles” (code for Jews) had brought about both world wars and the defeat and humiliation of Germany in 1918 and again in 1945. But the apocalyptic rumors he collected, Black says, also surely expressed a sublimated consciousness that Germans were guilty of the horrendous crimes that none of them wanted openly to discuss.
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