By the summer of 1945, West Berlin had been reduced to rubble. Allied bombing, the Soviet ground assault and Hitler's insistence on Götterdämmerung had destroyed roughly a third of the city's buildings and left most of the rest damaged. There was no functioning government, no reliable electricity, no clean water in large sections of the city, and somewhere around 75 million cubic metres of debris where neighbourhoods used to be. The women who cleared that debris by hand, the Trümmerfrauen, became one of the defining images of the postwar period. Three years later, when the Soviets blockaded the city and tried to starve it into submission, the Western Allies mounted the Berlin Airlift, flying in food and fuel for over a year. And then, against every reasonable prediction, Germany rebuilt. Within a decade, it was the jewel of the Western world, a functioning democracy with a growing economy, universities and civic life, constructed on top of what had been, not long before, a moonscape of broken concrete and ash.
This is a companion discussion topic for the original entry at https://www.joanwestenberg.com/a-soft-landing-manual-for-the-second-gilded-age