In this pioneering monograph, Christopher A. Molnar manages to use his empirical case study of Yugoslav migrations to post-1945 Germany to bring together and reassess several prominent strands of scholarship on post-war Germany (and postwar Europe more generally) that have remained surprisingly distinct, developing parallel to each other but rarely engaging directly. Molnar's first major contribution is to analyze the full range of migrations from Yugoslavia to Germany across the entire post-1945 period, from the immediate aftermath of the Second World War to the consequences of the Yugoslav civil wars of the 1990s, including the influx into post-unification Germany of some 350,000 refugees from war-torn Bosnia. Such a long-term approach brings several benefits. It casts light on continuities and changes in post-1945 migration regimes, highlighting particular turning points (such as the 1968 Yugoslav-West German labor recruitment treaty or the official ending of “Gastarbeiter” labor recruitment by Bonn in 1973) while also relativizing the immediate impact of such political milestones on complex and multi-faceted patterns of German-Yugoslav interaction. Equally importantly, this approach allows Molnar to challenge and transcend both the strict conventional categorizations of different types of migrants to post-1945 Germany and the historiographical divides that have emerged around these classifications. Rather than examining the four main migrant categories of displaced persons, asylum seekers, labor migrants, and refugees as discrete entities, Molnar embeds them all into a shared framework of migration history, stressing the relative fluidity of the boundaries between them and the added value of studying all the groups together. With this integrative approach, he builds on important previous work by scholars such as Anna Holian and Adam R. Seipp who have explored interconnections between different categories of (forced) migrants in the early post-World War II years. The much longer timeframe of Molnar's study is an extremely useful addition to the evolving scholarship.

Another particularly exciting quality of Molnar's monograph derives from its careful and balanced combination of the key aspects of two analytical paradigms that have often been presented as rivals in explaining developments in post-1945 Europe: the Cold War and the postwar. Rather than stressing the primacy of either great power rivalries and their far-ranging implications or of the manifold and persistent aftereffects of the Second World War, Molnar very persuasively zeroes in on the complex interaction of these two sets of factors. He shows how the experience and memory of the war acted as highly important background forces in shaping policies, attitudes, and behavior patterns in both Yugoslavia and Germany, all the way to the 1990s and beyond. At the same time, he highlights the interaction of political and other imperatives arising from the dynamics of the Cold War, ranging from inter-bloc tensions to attempts at bridge-building and cooperation, entangled with factors rooted in WWII, thereby weaving the complicated tapestry of post-1945 German-Yugoslav interactions. By connecting the long-term history of immigration into post-WWII Germany with the development of the Cold War and the consequences of the Second World War, Molnar builds a nuanced, multi-dimensional analysis in which key aspects of post-1945 German history that have typically been explored largely in isolation are treated as closely intertwined entities.

It is hard to find much to criticize in this fine book. In an ideal world, the very extensive German-language primary sources which Molnar employs could have been combined with materials in the main languages of the former Yugoslavia, but one author cannot master everything and—to be fair—Molnar's primary focus does lie firmly on German, rather than Yugoslav, policies and attitudes. As a study of the ways in which immigration served as a key in which post-1945 (West) Germany negotiated the legacies of the Second World War and the challenges of the Cold War, Molnar's monograph is outstanding. It is analytically consistent and sophisticated, thoroughly grounded in detailed empirical research, and very well presented, its accessibility enhanced by the numerous vignettes of individual migrants and their often very twisted pathways between Yugoslavia and Germany that the author has embedded in his analysis. Memory, Politics and Yugoslav Migrations to Postwar Germany is an important and timely book that anyone interested in postwar Germany or migration in post-1945 Europe should seek out.