What now?
As the Second World War ended, it was a question people around the globe were asking themselves
Two significant days in 1945 are the days in which the Second World War ended. VE Day on May 8 and VJ Day on August 15 brought the bloodiest conflict known to man to an end. It would change the face of continents and society would never be the same. In villages, towns, and cities all over the world people were asking: ‘What Now?’
The end of the war may, for many soldiers and civilians, felt like a day that would never come. Millions suffered around the world, but by mid-1944 the tide of the war turned in favour of the Allies. Following the successful D-Day invasion in June, soldiers pushed on through occupied Europe.
The question of ‘What do we do now?’ is one which features at the very end of the film ‘JoJo Rabbit’. In Germany, the end of the war brought an end to the Third Reich and a Nazi regime fuelled by hatred. JoJo and Elsa, a Jewish girl kept safe from the Nazi’s by Jojo’s mother, go out onto the streets of what is a defeated nation.
American and Russian soldiers swarm the streets and they turn to each other and ask the question: ‘What Now?’. Their answer? They both begin dancing, something which is a theme of what people wanted to do after the war ended.
The rebuild of the world and post-war society would be a gradual process, but those initial days and weeks after the war would have been filled with relief and jubilation. A dream of peace had become a reality, and millions of people displaced by six years of war returned home.
Yet despite this joy, in reality most of Europe was not far away from being unsettled again. The tensions between the USA and the Soviet Union led to the Cold War, and the Iron Curtain was pulled across Europe barely a year after the war ended.
Elsewhere in the world, freedom was more forthcoming. India and Pakistan gained independence from the British Empire in 1947 and began building towards a future on their own two feet. They were two of the last nations to gain independence from an Empire which had occupied them for decades, and it was a further step towards the free world which was the dream for many leaders in the 1940s.
As Germany moved forward from the 12 year Nazi rule, it was left with plenty of hurdles. It was split into four following the end of the war, and by the early 1960s the tensions of the Cold War and diplomatic uncertainty resulted in the construction of the Berlin Wall.
Peace turned out to be fragile across the world in the late 1940s, and by the time the Berlin Wall was erected a war had dragged in dozens of countries in Korea and then Vietnam.
But those first days, weeks and months of peace would have felt like a dream to people across the world following the horrors of the Second World War. The switch from being in constant fear for their lives, not knowing if they would see a peaceful world again, to a world intent on progressing forward out of the shadow of war would have been the best kind of mental upheaval.
