‘The Temptation of Despair’
It is one thing to survive a war — a consequence of luck, perhaps, or skill. It is another thing to survive the aftermath of a war — an interval marked by death, ruin, guilt, the irony of survival itself, and the hubris of the triumphant that follows an uneasy peace. War’s aftermath, in this case the late 1940s in Germany, is the subject of a new book by Werner Sollors, “The Temptation of Despair,” out this month under the Belknap Press imprint of Harvard University Press. The author, who was a child in the ruins of the Germany he describes, spoke Wednesday night in Sever Hall during a book talk sponsored by the Mahindra Humanities Center at Harvard. Moderator Homi K. Bhabha, director of the center, was happy to see “a wonderfully packed room” and to hear Sollors discuss a book in which “every page is also a record of survival.” The...