In view of recent surveys that indicate growing racist sentiment across Europe since the 1990s and the open disparagement of Islam in the wake of 9/11, this could not be a timelier book. After the Nazi Racial State urges us to consider the centrality of race thinking and racism to the history of the Federal Republic, usually celebrated for its overt commitment to “human rights,” as part of the history of western European racisms in the latter half of the twentieth century. It does this by exploring the ways in which the political-cultural dynamics of the Federal Republic have been predicated on the marginalization or exclusion of essentialized “others” throughout its history.

In their introduction, Heide Fehrenbach and Rita Chin argue that this process of exclusion was intrinsic to a persistent “nationalizing politics of difference” (p. 16), which replaced previous biological versions of racism with new schemas of incommensurable and hierarchical cultural difference across a variety of ideological and policy domains in the Federal Republic after 1945. In chapter one, Fehrenbach explores the “devolution” of the Nazi racial state in the postwar years, when the dominant black/white binary of U.S. racism was imported into western Germany in the context of U.S. military occupation and the presence of Afro-German children born to African-American troops and German women. She shows that despite the Federal Republic's constitutional rejection of racial discrimination, the roughly 6,000 Afro-German children born by 1955 were officially singled out by social scientists as “farbige Mischlinge” and subjected to a new “psychology of race,” which defined Black Germans as fundamentally different in terms of their allegedly unique speech patterns, capacities for physical movement, manifestations of advanced sexual maturity, and “tendency for hotheadedness, impulsiveness, and disobedience” (p. 41). This construction of innate difference informed social policy fears about the inability to “integrate” Black Germans into West German society during the 1950s and the celebratory but no less essentializing media representations of the successful integration of (prominent) Black Germans and the sexualized images of Black German women in the 1960s and 1970s.

In chapter two, Atina Grossmann examines the embattled communities of German-Jewish and eastern European Jewish Holocaust survivors, classified as Displaced Persons (DPs), in the decade after 1945. Caught between the demands of different occupation and United Nations authorities, Jewish survivors built surprisingly resilient camp communities capable of securing reparations from the West German government. The response of government officials and other Germans was increasingly to stigmatize Jewish DPs and treat them as unwanted foreigners. In this context, anti-Semitic stereotypes of Jews as criminal elements, greedy black marketeers, and lazy extortionists and slurs about the camps as sites of crime, disorder, “dirt,” “vermin,” and “infection” made their way into postwar German representations of Jews, now shorn of the overt racialism of Nazism. In chapter three, Rita Chin traces processes of (re)racialization in relation to “guest workers,” who were recruited to satisfy the growing demand for labor entailed by the West German “economic miracle” of the 1960s. After the late 1970s, when the residentially segregated guest workers and their families who lived in the Federal Republic were recognized as immigrants, the CDU-led rightward trend in West German politics fueled a renewal of race thinking expressed in the language of culture and religion, which especially targeted Turkish guest workers and their descendants as a threat to an imagined homogeneous German “culture.” Essentializing claims of this kind, Chin argues, were not the exclusive preserve of the political Right; they also took hold to varying degrees among leaders of the SPD and progressive social workers, teachers, and feminists, who seized on the image of the Turkish woman enslaved by benighted village customs and an inherently patriarchal religion to articulate a “leftist discourse” (p. 96) that targeted Muslim practices, including the wearing of the headscarf, as a threat to the democratic, secular values of the “west.”

In chapter four, Fehrenbach and Chin argue that different attempts to introduce or deepen democracy in the Federal Republic, including the reeducation and de-Nazification programs of the occupation years; economic and labor recruitment policies aimed at generating prosperity in the 1950s and 1960s; the New Left critique of capitalism and fascist continuities after 1945; CDU attempts to normalize German nationalism in the 1980s; and even much Holocaust commemoration have variously ignored “questions of difference” within Germany itself and thus reinforced definitions of an ethnically homogeneous German nation. The pervasive tendency to see cultural difference as an “import” (p. 108) and to assume a homogeneous German-national culture, they maintain, have made it more difficult to identify the specific forms of cultural racism at work throughout the history of the Federal Republic and especially in more recent attacks on minority citizens, residents, and immigrants in the wake of unification in 1990.

Finally, Geoff Eley brilliantly analyzes the recent emergence of “culturalized” versions of racism across the European Union (EU) in relation to the longer trajectories of western European encounters with non-European people of color since the nineteenth century. He locates the deeper structures of “racial formation” after the French Revolution in four historical developments: the emergence of new, racialized technologies of social hygiene, public health, population management, and planning in the early twentieth century; the new imperialism from the 1880s to 1914 and its “colonial effect”: the production of deeply embedded “racialized systems of distinction” (p. 155) that have shaped European subjectivities and all manner of popular cultural and everyday social practices in the imperial metropoles well into the present; the postwar labor migrations, which brought increasing numbers of non-Europeans to Europe after 1950; and the rise of more recent discourses about “fortress Europe” (p. 158), which have been articulating hostility toward nonwhite labor migrants, asylum-seekers, refugees, residents, and citizens, especially Muslims, as threats to European “civilization” in the wake of 9/11. Eley proposes a model of historical analysis that identifies racism in certain systems of thought about essential human difference and in the complex and uneven “materialities”—macroeconomic and immigration policies, hiring and employment practices, housing markets and residential patterns, and everyday interactions—through which racist thought became material and was perpetuated in enduring institutional forms and social relations. Only by explicitly addressing the real-world effects of race in these ways, he maintains, can we explain the nature of recent conflicts and controversies, ranging from the uprising in the banlieus of Paris in 2005 to the broadcast of Dutch politician Geert Wilders' anti-Islamic film Fitna in 2008, in a Europe that has increasingly “become a margin, an edge, a boundary, defined literally and metaphorically by its gates” (p. 181).

These pathbreaking essays lay out an important new framework for exploring the ways in which, to borrow from Robert Miles, overtly racist discourses about human biology became “silent” but remained operative in new discourses about cultural difference in the history of the Federal Republic. They also suggest ways of making better sense of more recent developments in the Federal Republic, including the radical Right's fulminations and acts of violence against minority citizens, growing hostility toward immigration, Orientalist invocations of a common European culture aimed at preventing the admission of Turkey to the EU, and the surprising ease with which German troops were sent to Afghanistan, a Muslim country, to participate as part of a NATO deployment in a U.S. imperial war.