The Bitter Taste of Victory: Life, Love and Art in the Ruins of the Reich - Softcover

Feigel, Lara

Softcover

ISBN 10: 140884513X ISBN 13: 9781408845134

Publisher: Bloomsbury Paperbacks, 2016

Synopsis

Shortlisted for the HWA Non-Fiction Crown 2017

As the Second World War neared its conclusion, Germany was a nation reduced to rubble: 3.6 million German homes had been destroyed leaving 7.5 million people homeless; an apocalyptic landscape of flattened cities and desolate wastelands.

In May 1945 Germany surrendered, and Britain, America, Soviet Russia and France set about rebuilding their zones of occupation. Most urgent for the Allies in this divided, defeated country were food, water and sanitation, but from the start they were anxious to provide for the minds as well as the physical needs of the German people. Reconstruction was to be cultural as well as practical: denazification and re-education would be key to future peace and the arts crucial in modelling alternative, less militaristic, ways of life. Germany was to be reborn; its citizens as well as its cities were to be reconstructed; the mindset of the Third Reich was to be obliterated.

When, later that year, twenty-two senior Nazis were put in the dock at Nuremberg, writers and artists including Rebecca West, Evelyn Waugh, John Dos Passos and Laura Knight were there to tell the world about a trial intended to ensure that tyrannous dictators could never again enslave the people of Europe. And over the next four years, many of the foremost writers and filmmakers of their generation were dispatched by Britain and America to help rebuild the country their governments had spent years bombing. Among them, Ernest Hemingway, Martha Gellhorn, Marlene Dietrich, George Orwell, Lee Miller, W.H. Auden, Stephen Spender, Billy Wilder and Humphrey Jennings.

The Bitter Taste of Victory traces the experiences of these figures and through their individual stories offers an entirely fresh view of post-war Europe. Never before told, this is a brilliant, important and utterly mesmerising history of cultural transformation.

About this title

Review:

The Bitter Taste of Victory is more than a group biography. Threaded throughout is the role of culture in a nation's psyche ... Urgent, absorbing, and quietly devastating, The Bitter Taste of Victory is a superb achievement. Few books catch so well the strange energy of the war's immediate aftermath, the half-crazed adrenalin and slow-burning despair (Frances Wilson Daily Telegraph)

Feigel entwines politics and passion, the wide screen of history and the close-up of desire among the ruins ... Always illuminating and richly textured (Boyd Tonkin Independent)

In this panoramic book, which manages to blend a grand historical sweep with fascinating personal detail, Lara Feigel succeeds brilliantly in capturing life in post-war Germany, as filtered through the eyes of British and American intellectuals ... Feigel does a brilliant job of shining a spotlight on this complicated moral universe. Without pause or stumble she takes us from champagne receptions to bombed-out factories. Along the way we meet a fascinating cast of characters, all attempting to make sense of a unique historical moment, one where the distinction between good and evil is no longer clear for all to see (Kathryn Hughes Mail on Sunday)

Stealing up from the mound of corpses and fallen masonry come glamour, famous names and an account of the collapse of the most famous literary relationships of the mid-twentieth century, the marriage between Ernest Hemingway and Martha Gellhorn ... She [Lara Feigel] is excellent on the constant attempts to domesticate the evil that welled up on all sides . the long-term cultural consequences of 1939-1945 are still being worked out, but this is a fascinating account of the early field work that kicked them into gear (D. J. Taylor The Times)

Well researched and beautifully written (Dominic Sandbrook Sunday Times)

An ambitious book, ranging across a sea of events and characters and filled with enjoyable details (Caroline Moorehead Literary Review)

Feigel has an affinity with rubble. a scholarly and engrossing book (Robert McCrum Observer)

A brilliant depiction of the Allies' encounter with the broken soul of Germany (Juliet Gardiner)

Lara Feigel's absorbing book relives the era in all its uncertainty, and delves into the irreconcilable differences and contradictions that would come to thwart the project . She makes a sympathetic narrator, and has certainly unearthed some fascinating material (Anthony Quinn Guardian)

Innovative, entertaining and worthwhile (Daily Express)

From the Author:

I am a literary critic and cultural historian teaching in the English department at King’s College London. I am fascinated by the relationship between life, literature and history and in my books I attempt to find new ways of writing that can allow the three to intertwine. My most recent book The Bitter Taste of Victory is an account of the experiences of twenty of the British and American cultural figures sent in to Germany after the war. Before that I wrote The Love-charm of Bombs, which is about five writers in London in the Second World War. Both these books move fluidly between cultural and political history, collective biography and literary criticism while also attempting to create a narrative that unfolds with drama and suspense. Both books are set in war zones and I am intrigued by the way that war acts as a catalyst in transforming lives and creating art. I grew up in London and studied English at Oxford University, going on to do an MA at University College London and a PhD at the University of Sussex. I have been teaching at King’s since 2008 and all my books have been in part the result of conversations with colleagues and students in the English department and the School of Arts and Humanities. Since 2013, I have been the recipient of a generous European Research Council Starting Grant, which has brought a team of researchers into King’s for a project about culture in postwar Germany called Beyond Enemy Lines. I am also the beneficiary of an immensely supportive Philip Leverhulme Prize, awarded by the Leverhulme trust. At King’s I co-direct the Centre for Modern Literature and Culture and run the Ivan Juritz Prize, which celebrates creative experiment in all art forms. I review regularly for various publications (most frequently the Guardian and the Observer), have judged the Biographers’ Club Tony Lothian Prize and the PEN Hessell-Tiltman Prize panel and am pleased to be judging the Observer/Anthony Burgess Prize for Arts Journalism in 2017. I live in West Hampstead with my husband and four-year-old son. I write at the London Library and in cottages by the sea, often in Norfolk and Suffolk.

About this edition

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Paperbacks
• Publication date: 2016
• ISBN 10: 140884513X
• ISBN 13: 9781408845134
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 464