George Clooney's 2014 film Monuments Men told the comical story of a group of American academics charged with recovering stolen art from the Nazis at the end of World War II. Matthew D. Mingus’s Remapping Modern Germany is clearly an academic book, but it could easily provide the source material for a sequel. Secret operations to capture or rescue German academics from the Soviet occupied zone (a.k.a. “Operation Dustbin”), dramatic interrogations aimed at revealing Nazi secrets, the search for buried cartographic treasure—the book has all the elements of a Hollywood blockbuster.

Remapping Modern Germany surveys the history of German cartography and geography in the postwar period, showing the transformation of a discipline closely linked to Nazi ideology and the Nazi state into a key site for the building of the new, democratic West Germany. It is part of a refreshing trend over the past decade to examine German cartography and geography beyond narrow questions related to National Socialism. Mingus argues that geography played a key role in the “reconstruction of Germany's [postwar] political identity,” helping to shape an image of national space that would be patriotic, but that would also forcefully emblazon “into the minds of the German public that potential territorial expansion would be undesirable” (2-4). Put simply, maps smoothed the way for Germans to become West (and East) Germans between 1945 and 1961.

The book is divided into four chapters, organized largely in chronological fashion; there is also an introduction and a short conclusion. The first substantive chapter surveys the rise and fall of German geography before 1945, providing a broad overview of “the popularization of geography and cartography as academic disciplines” (10). The next chapter covers the main period of Allied occupation (1945-1949), as Germans sought to reorient themselves following the collapse of the Nazi state. The evolution of geographical thinking during the foundational period of the two Germanies (1949-1952) is the subject of the next chapter, which examines how Germans wrestled with the newly imposed political divisions. The final chapter shows how Germans learned to internalize these boundaries, largely by adopting Cold War mindsets.

Covering the enormous amounts of change between 1933 and 1961 with clarity and authority, Mingus is at his best when discussing the evolution of German geographic bureaucracy. He charts with expert precision the consolidation of German geographic associations starting in the mid-1930s, showing how this process continued into the 1940s with the outbreak of war and the ever-changing needs of the German state. He also does an excellent job showing the complexities of the immediate postwar landscape, revealing the uncertainty and ambiguity often encountered in the process of occupation and denazification. For example, despite the desire of occupation authorities to purge German maps of Nazi-era content, the lack of available resources in the immediate postwar period forced them to reprint Nazi-era textbooks for use in schools. Once funding did become available, there were difficult decisions to be made about how to represent the German past (especially with respect to the former German territories annexed to Poland and Czechoslovakia in 1945) and the German present (i.e., the emerging Cold War division between East and West Germany). The geographers themselves were placed in a difficult position between Allied demands for loyalty and their own personal needs and desires. Some geographers, for example, were driven by economic necessity to develop a barter system for food, in which they sent German cartographic information to organizations abroad in exchange for CARE packages. In another somewhat comical episode, one geographer's loyalty to the occupation authorities was seriously questioned after a package from his wife was intercepted containing shoes wrapped in a Nazi-era newspaper. Suspiciously wondering why he was receiving such “pro-Nazi” materials (90), he was detained and interrogated—despite having already spent two years working for the Allies.

Remapping Modern Germany is based on Mingus’ doctoral research, and, like many first books, it has a narrow focus. The core of the study is based on the examination of archival material related to Emil Meynen (1902-1994), a prominent German geographer, and his Abteilung für Landeskunde (Bureau for Regional Geography). To be sure, Meynen was certainly a key geographer in both the Third Reich and the Federal Republic, and his centrality to Mingus's narrative makes sense. Yet, the study is hardly exhaustive. Meynen is really the only German academic examined in depth, with much of the rest of the story dominated by the actions of the Allied occupation authorities rather than by those of the Germans themselves. Some sections of the book are relatively short and could have been expanded upon. The Amerika Häuser, for example, only receive one paragraph; others, by contrast—such as a fascinating section on the use of public-relations firms to sell the idea of West Germany in the United States—might have been developed into standalone chapters.

Another area that may have deserved more attention are Germans responses to the new maps that they encountered in various school books, magazines, and bookstores. This would give us a much better sense of how cartography and geography specifically contributed to changes in (or resistance to) Cold War-era identities. Many German expellees, for example, continued to use German place names when referring to the old Eastern territories (i.e., Breslau instead of Wrocław) long after cartographers had stopped doing this. Unfortunately, Mingus's study focuses primarily on the bureaucratic and structural side of geography and cartography in the Federal Republic, leaving such questions largely unaddressed.

Despite such shortcomings, which are perhaps characteristic of a first book, Mingus's scholarship is excellent, making Remapping Modern Germany a useful contribution to the field. Well-written and well-researched, the study fills a significant gap in the English-language literature about the evolution of German geography and cartography after 1945, and it will be of interest, no doubt, to cartographic specialists and postwar historians alike.