Two new books offer very different takes on the utter ruination of Germany in 1945. Each in its own way shows the enfeebling results of our modern obsession with amateur psychologising.
Françoise Meltzer’s Dark Lens is based around a couple of dozen snaps which her mother, a Frenchwoman who had been in the Resistance, took of ruined German cities immediately after the war. This personal angle whets the reader’s appetite, as does the reminder of just how strangely fascinated we all are by ruins. Meltzer quickly delivers riveting information about how truly insane the Third Reich was: when Albert Speer was designing his megalomaniac new Reich capital for Hitler, they deliberately planned that ‘after hundreds or (such were our reckonings) thousands of years the ruins would more or less resemble Roman models’.
Unfortunately, this book isn’t really about information.
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