Summer of Freedom: How 1945 Changed the World

Historian Hilmes (Berlin 1936) recreates the concluding months of WWII in an enthralling you-were-there style narration that covers May through September 1945. In California’s Pacific Palisades, Thomas Mann—who fled Germany in 1933—is only mildly nonplussed at the May 8 news of his homeland’s surrender, even as his son Klaus, writing for a U.S. Army newspaper, makes his way to Munich to find out what happened to his family’s home. In mid-July, Churchill, Truman, and Stalin meet at the Potsdam Conference, where they negotiate the new postwar order even as Truman mulls the results of the first atomic bomb test. Meanwhile, Margot Bendheim and Adolf Friedlander, newly liberated from Theresienstadt, are so overwhelmed they remain at the camp for several weeks, and Berlin empty-nester Else Tietze frets over the fates of her scattered adult children. Hilmes has a gift for bringing the mighty down to human level, so that Stalin’s irritation that, since he’s unable to ride a horse, he can’t have his own military parade, or director Billy Wilder’s lambasting of another director’s serious attempts to reckon with concentration camps (“Films have to entertain!... We’re alienating them with your movie!”) blend seamlessly with the everyman and -woman accounts. The result is an immersive mosaic of a world in flux. (June)