Normalverbraucher: die harten Jahre der Nachkriegszeit 1945 - 1948

A grandmother in 2000 writes down her experiences as a young girl of post-WWII in Frankish Bavaria. Her home Neustadt on the river Aisch has survived the war with little damage and they have been lucky enough to draw the American occupation forces. She is also not actually a “standard consumer” but part of a pastor family dynasty which assures her advantages within the general privations. They have to share their house with a parade of refugees, but their house is not requisitioned by the Americans. She includes many details about the Americans, for example their de-nazification efforts. Her former teachers lose their positions because they were in “the party” while she remembers them as critical of “the party” and additionally they had had no choice but to be in “the party”. It was only the “youth amnesty” that allows her (she had worked in the Reichsarbeitsdienst at the airport) and others to remain enrolled at the university. She goes on to teach in the village schools filled with refugee children, no books, no paper, no heat, she experiences the currency reform of 1948 and her marriage in 1950 which means the end of her teaching as a law prohibited double earners in order to accommodate the returning soldiers. She tells a straightforward story which will help the reader understand what happened to the German people during this important time.