In the spring of 1945, Roberto Rossellini began filming Rome, Open City in the streets of a city that had, until two months earlier, been under German occupation. He worked with a skeleton crew, used non-professional actors for many roles, and shot on raw film stock acquired piecemeal — whatever he and his collaborators could find in a city still emerging from years of privation. The professional actors, including Anna Magnani and Aldo Fabrizi, shared the frame with real partisans and real survivors; the streets they walked were real streets, scarred by the real occupation. The result — released in September 1945, barely six months after the Liberation — was a film that looked like nothing Italian audiences had seen in a generation. It looked, precisely, like the world they had been living in.
This was not accidental, and it was not simply a matter of limited resources. Rossellini had made a deliberate formal choice, shared by the other Italian filmmakers who would come to define neo-realism — Vittorio De Sica, Luchino Visconti, Giuseppe De Santis — to reject the polished studio aesthetics of the Fascist period and to work instead from the actual conditions of postwar life. The rubble was real. The poverty was real. The black market was real. The children sleeping in bombed-out buildings were real. The choice to film these things, rather than to retreat into the carefully managed falsity of the studio, was at once an aesthetic decision and a political one. To show things as they were was, after two decades of Fascist cultural management that had required everything to look as it was supposed to look rather than as it actually was, a form of moral seriousness that verged on defiance.
What Italian neo-realism established — and what makes it the essential point of departure for any account of European cultural life in the immediate postwar years — is that the reconstruction of culture after catastrophic political failure is never simply a matter of picking up where things left off. The catastrophe has to be faced. The cultural forms that served the old regime are contaminated by association, not necessarily beyond recovery but requiring a reckoning that cannot be indefinitely deferred. Neo-realism was that reckoning, enacted through form rather than argument: through the choice to film in rubble rather than on sets, to use non-professional faces rather than studio-groomed ones, to trust the texture of actual Italian life to carry the moral weight that the Fascist aesthetic had smothered in bombast and prettification.
The Ruins on Screen: Germany and the Limits of Reckoning
The impulse to film in ruins was not unique to Italy. In Germany, the immediate postwar years produced a body of work known as the Trümmerfilme — rubble films — that attempted something structurally similar: an engagement with the physical and moral devastation of the defeated nation conducted through the medium of cinema. The most significant of these, Wolfgang Staudte’s The Murderers Are Among Us, made in 1946 in the Soviet-occupied eastern sector of Berlin, was the first German feature film completed after the war. Its protagonist, a former German army surgeon haunted by the memory of a wartime atrocity — the massacre of Polish civilians on Christmas Eve, ordered by his commanding officer — is caught between the desire to forget and an emerging conviction that some things cannot legitimately be forgotten.
The film is admirable in its ambition and limited in its achievement, and the gap between the two is itself historically instructive. The Murderers Are Among Us insists on individual guilt and individual redemption: it is a film about one man’s conscience, and the resolution it offers — the surgeon eventually prevents his commander, now comfortably resettled in civilian life, from escaping justice — is morally satisfying in the way that individual agency is always morally satisfying when the alternative is to confront structural complicity. The film cannot ask the question that needs asking — how did so many ordinary Germans participate, approve, or simply fail to resist? — because that question has no cinematically manageable answer, and because, in 1946, both filmmakers and audience were too close to the experience to tolerate the full weight of the accusation. The tendency in the Western zones as well as the Eastern was to focus on German suffering: the bombed cities, the returning prisoners, the twelve million displaced persons expelled from the eastern territories. This suffering was real, and it deserved acknowledgement. But the framing of Germans primarily as victims of war, rather than as agents of it, was a displacement that would haunt German cultural life for decades.
The contrast with Italian neo-realism is instructive. Italy’s Fascist regime had been less comprehensively murderous than Germany’s, and Italian filmmakers could position themselves as survivors of Fascism, inheritors of a resistance tradition, without the same degree of implication in mass atrocity that German filmmakers were navigating. The neo-realist camera could turn outward, toward the social conditions of postwar life, without being immediately redirected inward toward a guilty interior that was almost too painful to examine directly.
Primo Levi and the Wall of Silence
The most profound cultural work of the immediate postwar period was not always the most immediately visible, and the gap between the two is itself one of the period’s defining features. Primo Levi (pictured above), a twenty-five-year-old Italian Jewish chemist who had survived Auschwitz, began writing what would become If This Is a Man while still making his way home from the camp in the summer and autumn of 1945 — writing compulsively, he later said, as if from a physical necessity. He completed a manuscript in early 1946 and submitted it to Einaudi. It was rejected. A smaller press, De Silva, published it in a print run of 2,500 copies in 1947. Most copies went unsold. The book that would eventually be recognised as one of the supreme achievements of twentieth-century European literature entered the world in near-total silence.
Levi’s experience was representative of a much broader phenomenon. Across Europe, the survivors of the camps who tried to speak in the immediate postwar years encountered a collective reluctance to hear that was not organised or malicious but was, in its accumulated effect, devastating. The war had been total and exhausting; the societies that had survived it wanted, urgently, to rebuild. The knowledge of what had happened in the camps was available, in outline, from very early in the postwar period: the liberation of Bergen-Belsen, Dachau, and Buchenwald had been extensively photographed and reported, and the Nuremberg trials, which began in November 1945, put the evidence before an international audience. But knowledge and acknowledgement are not the same thing, and the full weight of what the camps had been — not merely as atrocities but as systematic demonstrations of what human beings were capable of doing to other human beings when all institutional restraints were removed — was a burden that daily life could not easily carry.
What Levi was attempting in If This Is a Man was something of extraordinary formal difficulty: to describe, with the precision of a scientist and the patience of a witness, the specific social world of Auschwitz — its hierarchy, its economy, its moral grammar, the ways in which it degraded and occasionally, against all probability, failed to entirely destroy the human. The challenge was not merely emotional but linguistic. The language that existed — the language of human dignity, of moral coherence, of meaningful individual action — had been designed for a world in which certain things did not happen. Auschwitz was a world in which those things happened systematically, as a matter of institutional design. The prose Levi arrived at — calm, measured, occasionally luminous, never raised above a certain conversational register that makes its content more, not less, unbearable — was a formal achievement as original as anything produced in European literature in the postwar century. The delay in its reception tells us something essential about the difference between what actually happened in the war and what postwar culture was initially able to absorb.
Existentialism and the Philosophical Reconstruction
While Italian filmmakers were rebuilding cinema from its material conditions outward and survivor-writers were struggling to find audiences for testimony, French intellectuals were conducting a different kind of postwar reconstruction: a philosophical one. Jean-Paul Sartre had been developing the existentialist framework — the insistence that existence precedes essence, that human beings are constitutively free, that this freedom entails radical responsibility, and that the attempt to evade this responsibility is a form of what Sartre called bad faith — through the years of the German occupation. Being and Nothingness was published in 1943. The Flies, a theatrical treatment of the Orestes myth that functioned simultaneously as a meditation on freedom and a veiled argument for resistance, was performed in Paris under German censorship in the same year.
The appeal of existentialism in the postwar context is not difficult to understand. A philosophy that insisted on individual freedom and responsibility — that refused all alibis, that held human beings accountable for their choices regardless of circumstances — seemed precisely calibrated for a world that had just produced the Holocaust, Hiroshima, and the systematic murder of millions by ordinary people following orders. Albert Camus’s The Stranger, published in 1942, and The Myth of Sisyphus, published the same year, posed the question of how to live with lucidity in a world that offers no metaphysical foundations — no God-given meanings, no assurance that the effort of being human is commensurate with its cost. The concept of the absurd was not a counsel of despair but, in Camus’s handling, a starting point for a kind of tough, unsentimental affirmation. Sisyphus, condemned to push his boulder up the hill forever, must be imagined happy: not because the task has meaning, but because the act of continuing it, in full knowledge of its futility, is itself a form of defiance.
The argument between Sartre and Camus — which grew into the defining intellectual dispute of postwar French culture, ending in their public rupture in 1952 — was partly a dispute about whether the abstract philosophical insistence on freedom could or should translate into specific political commitment, and if so on whose side. Sartre moved progressively toward a fellow-travelling engagement with the Communist left; Camus resisted, insisting that the horror of the Gulag was as morally relevant as the horror of colonialism or capitalism, and that no political project that required the suppression of this knowledge deserved intellectual support. The dispute was not merely personal. It mapped the central tension in postwar European intellectual life: between the desire for a politics adequate to the catastrophe just endured, and the recognition that all available political vehicles carried their own potential for catastrophe.
Rebuilding Culture: The American Shadow and the Soviet Constraint
The cultural reconstruction of postwar Europe did not occur in a political vacuum, and the Cold War framework that crystallised between 1947 and 1949 shaped what was possible in ways that progressively narrowed the available options. In the Western sphere, American cultural influence — underwritten by Marshall Plan money, by the Congress for Cultural Freedom’s covert funding of intellectual publications, and by the overwhelming commercial power of Hollywood and the American recording industry — created pressures toward a particular vision of Western modernity. In the Eastern sphere, the Zhdanov decrees of 1946 and 1948, which imposed Socialist Realism across the arts and condemned “decadent bourgeois formalism,” created a stifling orthodoxy that stunted creative possibility in the countries under Soviet influence for a generation.
The rebuilding of German culture under both occupations was a peculiarly painful process. The decision to restore cultural institutions — the opera houses, concert halls, theatres, and universities — before the political reckoning with Nazism had been conducted produced a postwar cultural establishment that included, by necessity and sometimes by design, figures whose relationship to the recent past was far from resolved. The conductor Wilhelm Furtwängler, who had remained in Germany throughout the Nazi period, conducting at the Berlin Philharmonic while occasionally using his position to protect individual musicians from persecution, became the most famous and contentious case: cleared by a denazification tribunal in 1947, he returned to the podium and to international celebrity, while the argument about what his continued presence in Germany had meant raged intermittently for decades after his death. Furtwängler was not an isolated case but a representative one. The practical demands of cultural reconstruction required the services of people who had been present during the Nazi period and had, in various degrees, accommodated themselves to it.
In Italy, neo-realism itself proved short-lived as a formal movement. By the early 1950s, economic recovery and a reviving commercial film industry had transformed the conditions that had produced it. The neo-realist directors moved in different directions: Rossellini toward the intimate domestic drama, De Sica toward a gentler social comedy, Visconti toward a grand operatic naturalism. The movement as a formal project was over even as its influence was beginning to spread internationally — to the French New Wave, to British kitchen-sink realism, to the Indian cinema of Satyajit Ray. What neo-realism had demonstrated — that formal honesty and social seriousness were not incompatible with popular art — would prove to be one of the most durable legacies of the postwar cultural moment.
The Optimism That Was Not Naive
To read the cultural history of the immediate postwar years only through the lens of reckoning and constraint is to miss something genuine and important. The years between 1945 and the full freezing of the Cold War in the early 1950s were also years of real, sometimes exhilarating optimism — an optimism that was not naive but grounded in the experience of having survived something that might have destroyed everything. The founding of the United Nations, the drafting of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the establishment of the welfare state in Britain and the beginnings of social democracy in Western Europe: these were cultural facts as well as political ones, expressions of a collective determination, forged in the experience of catastrophe, that the conditions which had produced fascism should not be allowed to recur.
The arts of this moment carried this double register — of loss and possibility, of the ruins and what was being built among them — with a fidelity that no political programme could match. Benjamin Britten’s Peter Grimes, premiered at Sadler’s Wells in June 1945, days after the German surrender, set the story of a Suffolk fisherman’s persecution by his community in music of piercing emotional complexity: not triumphant, not celebratory, but fully alive to the ambiguities of human solidarity and its failures. In France, the poet René Char, who had commanded a Resistance unit in Provence, wrote his wartime notebooks in a language pared to essentials by the necessity of concealment and the imminence of death, and found in that language a luminosity the prewar literary world had not produced. In Italy, Alberto Burri, a prisoner of war in Texas when he began making his first canvases from burlap sacks and industrial adhesives, produced work whose beauty was inseparable from the textures of damage and repair.
The cultural history of the postwar years is, in the end, a history of survival learning to do more than survive. The artists and writers and filmmakers who worked in this period did so in the knowledge that the world they were making culture for had demonstrated its capacity for barbarism on a scale that no previous generation had faced in quite that form. That knowledge is present in everything they made — in the specific gravity of Levi’s prose, in the way Rossellini’s camera lingers on ordinary faces caught up in events they did not choose, in the existentialist insistence that freedom and responsibility cannot be separated even when their exercise costs everything. The ruins were real. The rebuilding was slow, compromised, and incomplete. But the work done in those ruins — the effort to find forms adequate to what had happened and true to what was possible — constitutes one of the most significant bodies of cultural achievement in the modern European tradition.
Image credit: Monozygote
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