A TIME OF WOLVES

A DECADE IN PICTURES 1945 - 1955

  • This book of photographs to accompany the bestseller A Time of Wolves which was awarded the Leipzig Book Fair Prize 2019.
  • The deciding decade in which the Germans became what they are today, shown in largely unseen, surprising images. 
  • For this volume with around 150 outstanding photographs, Harald Jähner has written an entirely new 100-page text.
  • "This book opens a window to a time that has a lot more to do with us today than we probably expect." Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung
  • Rights to Wolfszeit were sold to: Bulgaria (Emas), China (Beijing Imaginist Time Culture), English World (Penguin Random House), Netherlands (De Arbeiderspers), Poland (Wydawnictwo Poznanskie) and Sweden (Daidalos).

Beauty and horror amid the rubble: the decade between the end of the war and the economic miracle reconstruction offers images that have not been seen in this form before. In their visual strength, they form a panorama of the era, in which horror and joy lie close together. No wonder that cameras were in such high demand on the black market: the "rubble women" as an icon of the reconstruction, citizens looting and town folk cultivating the land, a pig in a pram and a herd of cows in the middle of Berlin, people dancing among the rubble, and among the Carnival ruins. And you can clearly see how east and west grow apart.

During his research for the book A Time of Wolves, which was awarded the Leipzig Book Fair Prize, Harald Jähner came across a treasure trove of photographs. Now he gives the images their history back, retelling it in the same brilliant way that made A Time of Wolves a bestseller. The mentality and the daily routine of the era, which no one has depicted in such detail, is rediscovered in a new way. Only now can the true significance of the decade be understood: during these years, the Germans became what they are today.

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  • Publisher: Rowohlt Berlin
  • Release: 15.09.2020
  • ISBN: 978-3-7371-0101-1
  • 264 Pages
  • Author: Harald Jähner

Please be advised that the book cover may be used in its original design only. Details and distortions are not permitted under copyright law.

A TIME OF WOLVES
Harald Jähner A TIME OF WOLVES
Barbara Dietl
© Barbara Dietl
Harald Jähner

Harald Jähner , born in 1953, was the head of the feuilleton at Berliner Zeitung until 2015 and a honorary professor for cultural journalism at the University of the Arts Berlin. In 2019, he published Wolfszeit , which won the Leipzig Book Fair Prize and remained on the Spiegel bestseller list for months. It was published in several countries, including the USA and the UK, where it was nominated for the prestigious Baillie-Gifford Prize. The Times called it "a moving, fascinating read" , praising Jähner’s masterful ability to tell the tragic, horrific, comical, and inspiring stories of those who lived through it. His latest book, Höhenrausch (2022), was also a bestseller and translated into many languages.