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i havent really thought much about the massive cultural and societal coordination and effort required to clean up a bombed out town

Ramma Damma feels like the tip of an iceburg - do you have any references (ideally translated to english, but ill try to make due if in their native language) of how a town/region dealt with the destruction and infrastructure reset?

Like theres the vivid memory of first hand death and destruction to process, and likely the absence of many able bodied people whod traditionally lead the cleanup but were lost in the war itself, but then theres a collosal amount of work ahead to return to s steady state, and all the idealic potential of how to improve things once theres a blank slate, and the realities of how to reuse/recover resources like stones and pipes and such

It seems such an intense era just thinking shallowly about it, and id like to understand more what that it was like, the problems that arose and how they resolved, and how it got organized

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Multiplexer@discuss.tchncs.de ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago
Did a little search on youtube and found a documentary with English narration about the first months after the war in the rubble of Berlin.
Consist entirely of remastered and colorized original film material and is quite good and held in a neutral tone (a concerning amount of the other stuff I found was more or less obvious recent right wing propaganda…), so you might want to have a look:
www.youtube.com/watch?v=GKJ_PPg9aVE&t=585s

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Multiplexer@discuss.tchncs.de ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago
Well, regarding the able bodied people left over…:
Women. The building up again was largely done by women. Most men either were dead, maimed or still in war imprisonment.
There is a recognized German word for these women and the hard work they did: “Trümmerfrauen” (rubble women).

But apart from the very hard early years, I think the transition back to “normal” went surprisingly fast.
After all, the core of Germany still was the remains of the probably most industrialized nation on Earth at the time, and a lot of the infrastructure was outside of the devastated main city centers and could be reactivated again rather quickly.

Also, with the cold war starting, the winning powers (mainly the US on the one side and the USSR on the other side) took a huge interest in bringing the parts of Germany situated in their respective regions of influence back to some decent level of economic and industrial standard (as opposed to forcing the whole country to become a de-industrial agrarian country, which had been one of the proposals before).

I unfortunately don’t have any readily available links to material about the time, but I suspect that there must be a lot available.
The “Wiederaufbau” (“reconstruction”) and “Wirtschaftswunder” (“economic miracle”) time and the whole early cold war in Europe with the two Germanys and Iron curtain is fascinating time period after all…

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