Eighty years ago, Europe and the entire world experienced the first winter of peace after the most violent conflict in history . The end of hostilities between nations, however, did not mark the end of problems and tragedies. In many parts of Europe, peace was merely an illusion, as ethnic cleansing and the expulsion of entire communities from their homelands were taking place . Germans were being driven out of all of Eastern Europe, but fighting continued in Ukraine, Yugoslavia, and Greece. Furthermore, entire cities were destroyed, housing was lacking, food and medicine were scarce, and disease was raging. Postwar Europe was a savage continent, in many cases reverting to the Middle Ages. It was a lawless land on the brink of new wars between peoples for survival.
Yet, the fears and hardships of those first months after the war gave rise to a better era than the one that had preceded it. And this was possible because nothing was stronger than people's hopes and will to live. Nothing was stronger than that sense of good that people preserved even in the darkest periods of the Nazi advance, when Evil seemed to have gained the upper hand.
In those months immediately following the catastrophe of World War II, the words of German writer Ernst Wiechert—sadly more timely than ever—resonated. These words are now collected in the book Digging Up Love (Bompiani, 2026, pp. 96, also available as an e-book), out on February 3. But who was Ernst Wiechert? He was a survivor of Nazism. In 1933, Ernst Wiechert decided to leave his job at the Berlin Education Authority because, as an educator, he did not want to be responsible for spreading the dictates of the Nazi regime among young people. He ended up under the scrutiny of the Gestapo, and in 1938 his anti-Nazi stance led to months of internment in the Buchenwald concentration camp.
These experiences were the fruit of Wiechert's words on November 11, 1945, in a Munich theater. It was one of the first public speeches in which a German writer openly reckoned with the previous twelve years of Nazism. A speech to German youth, but delivered before a diverse, desperate, and bewildered audience. Present on that November 11, 1945, in the Munich Kammerspiel were former members of the Hitler Youth and soldiers returning from the battlefields, citizens and refugees affected by the bombings, the wounded and war widows, people who had opposed the regime and those who supported Nazism, women and men for whom the lost world war, the defeat of the Nazi regime, and Germany's capitulation on May 8, 1945, were still vivid, painful, and intolerable. Wiechert spoke clearly and unequivocally about what had happened in the years since. Above all, he made a clear appeal: "You must unearth love from beneath the ruins of hate. And you must still unearth truth, justice, and freedom." His words were addressed to everyone, but Wiechert was thinking especially of the young people who had been robbed of the possibility of imagining a different future , yet who embodied the principal hope for rebirth after the catastrophe of those years. A hope that could only come through an awareness of what happened and the rediscovery of feelings too long forgotten. Unearthing love shows, in fact, that the only answers to destruction must be hope, forgiveness, and all that is good and just in the human soul.