I mean less the political divide between the Eastern Bloc countries and The West, but more ground level stuff... so what it actually would have been like as a civilian around the various countries (or maybe notable cities) in Europe at the time with destroyed cities, rampant crime, awol soldiers, etc.
Thanks so much!
This is a huge question! I recommend the first few chapters of Postwar by Tony Judt, or the Struggle for Europe by William Hitchcock for more information generally, and Anne Applebaum's Iron Curtain for a look at the early post-war period in the East.
The one thing on a Europe-wide scale you have not mentioned that is vital to understand of the immediate post-war period was the mass migrations occurring in the first years after the war. Almost certainly the largest simultaneous migration yet seen by humankind. There was somewhere around 10 million people changing where they lived between France and the USSR. Some of these people had been displaced by the war, such as the large numbers of workers forced to labour in Germany to maintain the War effort, but many also were the victims of what we would call now ethnic cleansing. German ethnic Poles, Czechs and Hungarians were all displaced at first informally, and later systematically from their homes as no longer being welcome in their lands. This also occurred to a lesser extent to other ethnic groups who were living outside of their 'native lands', such as the Poles of the Ukraine, or Czechoslovakia. There was very little protest against this in the West as well, partly through lack of reportage, but there was also a felling that the multi-ethnic states created after the first world war had failed, and so a realignment of the people rather than political borders was the logical way to ensure peace.