The Home Front--Germany

Is it 2009 or 1939? When I see a photograph of rows of clean-cut boys in warm green wool uniform standing attention in a grid, I can imagine a 70-years-later scene of American boys and girls promising to follow their new leader down the road of "hope and change". Little do they know that this ends in starvation, tears, and mud. The average German was going along to get along, just like most of us. The German worker of 1939 was facing a similar past 20 years as American workers of post-1973 who notice that their money buys less every month, if they have a job at all. NAZI's promised millions of new jobs (not "created or saved") and delivered, but making the tools of war not consumer or capital goods. The volume has top-quality photographs of the 1936-43 period as well as modern reproductions of preserved propaganda, but you can tell that 1944-45 were times of great shortage, and quality had dropped in the photographs. US photographers were well-equipped as the invasion progressed in 1945. Never since have photographers been allowed such candid access to actual events as in WWII. The whole 1982 Time-Life series of WWII from archives is hard to beat in terms of good professional imagery of the makings and effects of war. This volume focuses on the effects of privation on women/children/old people left back at home as the armed forces are fighting (and not swiftly winning) on several far-away fronts. The parallel with the USA of 2009 is that we civilians are not being destroyed by enemy bombs (our insurgent and guerrilla enemies don't have long-range bombers of a nation-state), but rather have been hollowed-out to a shell of an industrial nation (service economy), and saddled with 4x the Gross National Product as debt. Not so different than the economy of Germany of 1919, once the chickens come home to roost.