The empty heart of Germany: Levi and the shadow of the post -war period

The empty heart of Germany: Levi and the shadow of the post -war period

In 1958, the Italian writer Carlo Levi went on a trip to Germany and found that the country was built on the outside after the war, but was deeply divided on the inside. "This heart, this strong heart, this mysterious heart, is an empty heart," he noticed when he saw the devastated psyche of the Germans. Despite the stories of the "economic miracle", Levi found a dark reality in which small mut, hatred and envy were hidden under a veil of silence, such as Tagesspiegel reported.

This desolate situation can be illustrated in the last days of the war in Annarode, a small village in Central Germany. During the advance of the Allied troops, the mood in town was tense. The Red Army pushed from the east and American troops moved closer from the west. The population was characterized by fear and disillusionment. The young men who belonged to the Reich Labor Service (Rad) were driven into a cruel tragedy in their high spirits and belief in the final resistance against the Americans, as Rudolf Herz's memories show. The cycling soldiers had set up in the vicinity of the village, during the day and night in constant alert. When the American troops finally arrived on April 12, 1945, there was a tragic incident in which the young bike man Helmuth S. was fatally wounded, which could possibly hold many soldiers from their dangerous project. dhm describes as the continued hope in a chaos of despair and violence broke.

On the morning of April 13, the situation was ultimately inevitable: the American troops had already reached the village undetected and encountered the young soldiers that were trembling but determined. There were unexpected clashes in which several young men lost their lives. Against the background of these violent arguments, Levi’s feeling of an "empty heart" is particularly apt, since it describes the inner emptiness and the loss of hope for the people in Germany who had to struggle not only with the physical but also with the emotional ruins of the past.