In Traces of Aerial Bombing, Eloise Florence is concerned with what she calls “unfinished business in Anglo-American cultural memory of the violence visited on German cities during the Second World War” (12). She finds problematic the Anglo-American bombing narratives and the underlying assumptions they display. Florence identifies the remembrance of the air war as “positioned outside of the dominant Anglo-American articulations of cultural memory” (8), since it does not fit neatly into the glorification of Allied war narratives. Florence thus calls for “additional and complicating perspectives” to disrupt “foundational mythologies of the former-Allies” regarding historical accountability and questions of responsibility (11–12). She goes about to illustrate a possible path to achieve such a disruption in Berlin by engaging in productive interactions through “experiential encounters” of a visitor with the remaining material traces of the bombing war and of Nazism (13). She focuses on the Anglo-American tourist, which is represented by Florence herself (87).

In the first three chapters Florence describes her methodology. She calls for complicating the approach to the Second World War and the bombing of German cities by exploring not only cultural meanings, but also the materiality of the places where they manifest. Florence draws on posthuman theories which emphasize the agency of matter and how interactions between matter, including humans, create entanglements within materials and thoughts. These interactions expand beyond individual sites to form networks of meaning. Within such multiplicity, Florence claims, one can remember the Second World War in all its facets without diminishing questions of guilt and responsibility, suffering and victimhood. According to Florence, this approach allows for acknowledging victims of the Holocaust and victims of the bombings and opens up avenues to explore the Allies as perpetrators when bombing German civilians without denying their role in ending Nazi rule and the Holocaust.

Florence illustrates these processes with case studies in the following four chapters. She draws on her field work in Berlin, which mainly consisted of taking personal notes and photographs while walking the sites. She highlights the Teufelsberg, a mountain constructed with Berlin's rubble after the war and then greened and reforested, as a place where the interaction with material manifestations of bombings complicates the Allies’ dominant discourses about their responsibilities for violence. Teufelsberg can also highlight Nazi crimes, since it covers the never-completed building shell of an institute of military technology which was to be part of Hitler and Speer's vision of a new National-Socialist Berlin. American and British military used the mountain to spy on the Eastern Bloc and installed a secret listening station on its top. In several instances, Florence connects this complex site with others in Berlin which are implicated in the Holocaust. One of them, the historic Jewish Cemetery Große Hamburger Straße is particularly interesting since it was desecrated and then used as a mass grave for bombing victims during Nazism. She concludes that this methodology of exploring the city's assemblage is fitting in complicating the dominant cultural memory underpinning the “perspectives of the perpetrators of area bombing” (218): it can challenge the assumption of “objective distance” identified with the aerial perspectives (218), the moral framework of “either-or” (221), and the “linear model of cause-and-effect” (223) which make up such cultural memory.

Traces of Aerial Bombing in Berlin offers the reader a lot to reflect upon. Florence introduces a theoretical landscape based on the intersection of memory, place, and materiality. Her insistence on the possibilities to complicate discourses on the Second World War by expanding more traditional memory approaches to include materiality and cultural geography is convincing. It can serve as an excellent introduction to new theories of violence within the urban environment, and in its complexity offers new and exciting views on our understanding of memory. However, this approach would be more convincing if it were paired with research methods in history and political science. A multitude of relevant publications are not considered, and archives were not consulted. German sources that have not been translated into English were ignored. Florence does not offer sources for her definition of the “dominant Anglo-American articulations of cultural memory,” and much of the background of the discussed sites stays unexplored. There is no clear concept of who “Anglo-American tourists” are and none were interviewed. The term “Anglo-American” remains obscure and seems a poor choice considering the term's propagandistic use in the GDR that defined the air war as “Anglo-American terror bombings” by the fascist-capitalist West. In fact, the book does not problematize how the politics in East and West influenced the rebuilding in the city or the memorialization of the bombing war and the Holocaust, even though the listening station on top of the Teufelsberg invites such discussion.

Florence tells us she modeled her work after W.G. Sebald's “palimpsestic writing and publishing style” (92). She indeed privileges personal impressions. These experiential encounters lead her at times to conclusions which should have been tested against available evidence. For example, she describes and offers photographs of supposed rubble of the war-torn Berlin on the Teufelsberg as “sometimes … half the size of a car” (108–109) or as strewn around on the ground (139). Yet if one surveys the Teufelsberg's history, such encounters with actual war rubble turn out to be unlikely. The Teufelsberg served as a dump site for 22 years, from 1950 to 1972, including for industrial and building debris from construction at the Messedamm. The rubble was crushed into small particles and deposited and compacted in layers which grew into the Teufelsberg. For landscaping, topsoil needed to be applied on the surface. Florence does allow the possibility that she might have encountered simply rocks instead of rubble but wonders whether it matters as long as the perception of the material challenges dominant assumptions. However, when does the meaning of material traces become so multiplied that these traces are rendered meaningless? What if, by the same measure, a visitor to the Jewish cemetery where Florence senses the “sadness … of the absence of millions of people” (119) only senses the bombing victims buried there and thus inadvertently continues the Nazi desecration of the space?

That said, Traces of Aerial Bombing in Berlin: Entangled Remembering is a fascinating book when read as a theoretical and personal exploration of new avenues into how to conceive the past. Florence correctly calls attention to the role of matter in urban histories and their power to unlock unforeseen insights. We need to make assumptions when exploring an urban space to recognize the networks of historical traces surrounding us. Yet digging into historical records helps us detangle where our senses went wrong. A productive excursion into the past needs both.