Lara Feigel’s book, The Love-Charm of Bombs (2013), was a brilliantly sustained group portrait of writers and artists living a strangely ennervating life amidst the violent pressures of London in the Blitz. In this more harrowing follow-up, Feigel turns her attention to the aftermath of Nazi Germany’s defeat, when the apocalyptic devastation of Germany’s cities became the backdrop for a variety of British, American and German-exile writers to confront their assumptions about art, war, peace, and the possibility of European integration.

It’s doubtful if any state since ancient Carthage had been as comprehensively defeated as Germany in 1945. Its cities were in utter ruin, its economy had been destroyed and its armed forces had been shattered on the battlefields of eastern and western Europe. More than this, for the Allied powers it was as if the very souls of the German people had been corrupted by Nazism, and equally important as the reconstruction of basic services was the perceived need to reconstruct the German psyche. Culture, in terms of literature, theatre and film, was to be used as a means of re-educating the populace in the ways of democracy and peace. How this idea developed and eventually faltered, gradually becoming subsumed into the wider tensions of the burgeoning Cold War, is the main thrust of Feigel’s fascinating study.

The first wave of writers and filmmakers to enter Germany continued in a role that had sustained them throughout the conflict. Martha Gellhorn, her marriage to Ernest Hemingway slowly breaking apart, was a war reporter for Collier’s magazine. Lee Miller, the photographer and surrealist muse, was writing for Vogue, while Erika Mann (daughter of the exiled German writer Thomas Mann) was a roving correspondent who had reported for the BBC. What met them as they followed the Allied advance was a lunar landscape of shattered buildings and a starved populace whose combination of sullen obsequiousness and a refusal to admit their culpability in the Nazis’ crimes seemed outrageous and offensive. Erika Mann was appalled at her fellow Germans’ strange sense of injustice, doubly so when information about the newly-liberated death camps was becoming common knowledge. For Gellhorn, utterly unprepared for what she witnessed at Dachau, the experience was so profound that it effectively destroyed her faith in humanity for the rest of her life.

As the Allies rolled out their often inept denazification programme, and put a representative sample of the major culprits on trial at Nuremberg, the hard-bitten war reporters were joined by more reflective figures like Rebecca West, WH Auden and Stephen Spender. Spender in particular was aware that the idea of collective guilt could only be addressed at a European level, and that it was logistically pointless (as well as metaphysically impossible) to subdivide a traumatised country into ‘good’ and ‘bad’ Germans. In any case, the western Allies were inconsistently keen to use culture to help re-educate the Germans; against the brute fact of mass starvation, it was more important to ensure that people were fed. As political tensions between east and west increased, though, official policy began to see the potential of culture as an advert for the western way of life. This shifting political environment moved so quickly that artists could suddenly find themselves on the wrong side of what was acceptable. The German-born writer and director Billy Wilder, for example, whose mother and grandmother had been killed in the Holocaust, went from filming his gloriously cynical 1948 movie A Foreign Affair in the ruined streets of Berlin, to having to mock up those same ruins on a Paramount sound stage. By 1948, "Film was now officially propaganda", and anything that cast the Allies in a bad light was not to be encouraged.

As Feigel makes clear, to argue that the Allies failed in transforming German culture is to argue against present success. No country so adamantly faces up to its past today, and it is genuinely shocking to understand how simperingly self-righteous the defeated populace was in the immediate post-war era, with impoverished Germans on the outskirts of Bergen-Belsen for example keen to portray themselves as the real victims in the conflict. Post-war Germany was not truly denazified or democritised, however, and it would take another generation before the crimes of the Nazi era were fully addressed by the Germans themselves. In the end, "Culture had turned out to be decidedly secondary to Realpolitik."

Although more context about the organisational challenges of the denazification programme would have been welcome, Feigel has written a stark and moving account of a terrible period in European history. She is particularly good at portraying the hectic tempo of the lives these writers and artists lived during the war, and the odd sense of anticlimax once the war was over. If for many of them the occupation was a dreamlike opportunity for socialising (Berlin for its conquerors was "the site of a summer-long cocktail party taking place against the backdrop of an overheated morgue"), for others post-war Germany was emblematic of Europe’s terminal malaise. It was left to one writer, the forbiddingly austere Thomas Mann, to most accurately diagnose the Germans’ condition in the aftermath of defeat. From his comfortable exile in the Californian sunshine, Mann struggled with his own conflicted feelings about Germany and German culture, and in his magisterial Doctor Faustus found the perfect metaphor for what his country had done; it had bargained with the devil, and lost.