A new beginning

After 80 per cent of its housing was destroyed, the city of Rikuzentakata is now being rebuilt

In a few days of fighting in spring 1945, the German city of Danzig was destroyed. Günter Grass, a teenage Danziger of the time, did not see it happen (as we now know, he was away in the Waffen-SS) but he later evoked the scene in his great novel The Tin Drum. In a lyrical roll-call of Danzig’s dead neighbourhoods, he wrote: “Rechtstadt, Altstadt, Pfefferstadt, Vorstadt, Jungstadt, Neustadt and Niederstadt, which people had been building over more than 700 years, burned in three days … Only the building of the West Prussian Fire Insurance, on purely symbolic grounds, refused to burn down.”

Before the Red Army arrived, almost all Danzig’s inhabitants were Germans. By the end, about one Danziger in five was dead. Almost all the survivors fled to Germany. Perhaps 90 per cent of the old town had been destroyed, and what remained was suddenly in a different country. Danzig vanished. The new Polish city of Gdańsk replaced it.

Having his hometown wiped out turned Grass into a different person: a survivor. Survivors – the subjects of today’s magazine – think differently from the rest of us. When I began reading Grass in 1990, he had evolved into a bluff pipe-smoker with a walrus moustache and forever warning of apocalypse. He predicted that a reunited Germany would commit another Auschwitz. This struck me as hysterical. In fact, I later realised, there was an unbridgeable gap between survivors such as Grass and innocents like me.

I expected a linear existence of study, work, insurance, pension and death in bed. Survivors do not. Once your hometown has been destroyed, it is easy to imagine the world destroyed.

The survivors photographed in this magazine range from the Japanese to South Sudanese, but Grass would recognise them instantly. Hometowns still get destroyed. Only the causes of destruction change.

A girl learning new skills at the Don Bosco school in Wau, South Sudan

The global death toll from war seems to have been falling steadily since 1945 (though some experts disagree). The hopeful South Sudanese portrayed in Laura Pannack’s photo-essay are making a new start after one of the planet’s last wars of independence. Our generation has grown intolerant of actual (as opposed to virtual) violence, demonstrated by the shock at last summer’s British riots. Simon Roberts’s pictures of his native Croydon capture some of the destruction. Two men died in the London riots, and three more in a hit-and-run accident in Birmingham. It was gruesome, but it was not Danzig 1945, or London 1666 or 1940.

The citizens of Sidi Bouzid, a year after the Tunisian revolution

Other afflictions of poverty are also waning. We owe this progress partly to the spread of democracy. In December 2010 the Tunisian town of Sidi Bouzid – photographed by Davide Monteleone – unleashed the Arab spring. This year, Tunisia, Egypt and Libya could all become democracies.

Nowadays, catastrophes tend to be natural rather than man-made. Japan’s earthquake and tsunami last March “almost completely wiped out” the town of Rikuzentakata, said the local fire department. The town’s former inhabitants photographed by Toshiki Senoue, like the residents of the flooded Italian villages photographed by Massimo Vitali, are the spiritual descendants of Grass’s Danzigers.

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Whinlatter Forest in north Cumbria

Natural disasters are growing deadlier, but it is not yet because of climate change. Rather, it is because ever more people (the earth’s population hit 7bn last year) live in vulnerable areas. Climate change will eventually take its toll. We’re doing almost nothing to stop it. Some of the English forests in John Davies’s photo-essay may be as doomed as Danzig.

We photographed last year’s survivors partly because it may be decades before they can speak. The Tin Drum, practically the first novel about the German experience of the war, appeared only in 1959. Most Jewish survivors spoke even later. Some never could. Visiting Norway in November, I asked people about Anders Breivik’s July massacre. Most only managed to call it “the 22nd of July thing” or “what that guy did”. Marcus Bleasdale’s photograph of deserted Utøya Island – the crime scene – is an appropriate wordless testimony.

And we photographed the survivors partly because they are already being forgotten. That is how news works. “If it bleeds, it leads” is a motto in TV news. When it stops bleeding, it is not news anymore. Only survivors never forget. I knew a man who was young during the Great Depression. Just before he died aged 92, a multimillionaire, he was still clipping supermarket coupons. He was still a survivor, just as today’s American poor, whose little livelihoods are photographed by Jim Dow, will carry the great recession with them forever.

All survivors should be treated as Eric Abidal is. In March, FC Barcelona’s defender was diagnosed with a liver tumour. After a successful operation, he was holding aloft the Champions League trophy in May, cheered on by the world. He had made a new beginning. Still, he will never be the same Abidal again. The man peering out from Antoine Doyen’s photo is a survivor.

Simon Kuper was voted Cultural Commentator of 2011 in the Comment Awards. His regular column returns next week

simon.kuper@ft.com

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Reconstruction: after Japan’s earthquake by Toshiki Senoue

Opening up Tunisia by Davide Monteleone

Rescuing England’s forests by John Davies

Getting by in America by Jim Dow

Beating cancer by Antoine Doyen

Italian flooding by Massimo Vitali

Rebuilding looted London by Simon Roberts

New lives in South Sudan by Laura Pannack

Saving Middleport pottery by Michael Collins

Norway’s resilience by Marcus Bleasdale