One of the characteristics of Yugoslavia's distinctive path to socialism was that, in contrast to other east European communist states, it allowed its citizens to seek work abroad. They did so in massive numbers, finding work as temporary migrants throughout western Europe, but especially in West Germany. Officials in Yugoslavia and the host states planned for these guest workers (in German, Gastarbeiter) to return home when their labor was no longer required. Most Yugoslav migrants had the same intentions. In this innovative and illuminating book, Deutsch Marks in the Head, Shovel in the Hands and Yugoslavia in the Heart: The Gastarbeiter Return to Yugoslavia (1965–1991), Sara Bernard examines a complex migratory phenomenon that social scientists have long studied and historians have long neglected: return migration. The result is an impressive work that combines rigorous historical research with analysis that draws upon insights from social scientific research on immigrant transnationalism, return migration, and the migration-development nexus. She argues that “although the ruling government feared the migrant workers’ period of residence abroad represented a possible threat to Yugoslav stability and overall unity, it was the return of these workers that contributed to delegitimizing the Yugoslav leadership and the political project of socialism it represented” (2). In making this argument, Bernard draws on a rich source base comprised of documents from federal and state archives in the former Yugoslavia as well as Yugoslav films, the press, and interviews with returnees.

The first and longest section of the book provides a chronological overview and analysis of the Yugoslav state's ill-fated efforts to use emigration and return migration to foster economic development. The Yugoslav government encouraged emigration from less-developed parts of the country, particularly from the southeast, hoping that migrants’ remittances and eventual return would spur economic development in these areas. In the 1960s, however, the opposite often occurred: workers from the more developed north, especially Croatia and Slovenia, found work abroad, and their remittances flowed back to the developed areas they came from. This only exacerbated disparities in regional development within Yugoslavia.

The oil shocks of 1973 and 1979 led significant numbers of Yugoslav labor migrants, facing unemployment in their host societies, to return to Yugoslavia. The Yugoslav government negotiated return and reintegration development programs with host societies in collaboration with the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) in the mid-1970s, but Yugoslavia's decentralizing reforms made it impossible to carry out a coordinated reintegration plan at the federal level. The result was a crippling battle between localities and republics for economic resources. Migration and return migration, Bernard convincingly argues, pitted Yugoslavia's republics against each other, and thus represented a centrifugal force within the fragile Yugoslav federation. One sign of this is what the author calls the “ethnicization” of migration, especially during the 1980s (2). In the highly developed republic of Slovenia, for example, officials exhibited xenophobic and protectionist attitudes towards migrants from the less-developed south of the country. At the same time, the return of overwhelmingly peasant Serbian migrants to Serbia bolstered that republic's emerging ethno-national politics.

The second section, focused on labor migrants’ investment patterns and family networks, paints a bleak picture of the migration experience for the Yugoslav state as well as for migrants and their families. In an interesting chapter, Bernard claims that migration and return led to “modernisation without development” in Yugoslavia (151–52). Migrants often spent their savings on huge houses and consumer goods, which did little to spur economic development. Moreover, Yugoslav labor migrants and their children had little chance for economic mobility either in host countries or in Yugoslavia. This was especially true for those who were peasants and for women. The final section shows that while the state depicted migrants as a key part of the Yugoslav working class, in Yugoslav culture they gradually came to be portrayed as dangerous people who were corrupted during their time abroad and thereby deserved all of their suffering.

The material presented on the ethnicization of migration during the 1980s is fascinating and tantalizing, and it brings migration into debates about the Yugoslav crisis and eventual collapse in an original fashion. This reviewer, however, would have liked to see more substantial evidence of this development. The author also could have done more to define her terminology. What, for example, are the “postulates of transnationalism” (18)? Nonetheless, this is an important book that will be read with great profit by historians of Yugoslavia, scholars of migration in postwar Europe, and social scientists interested in immigrant transnationalism and the migration-development nexus.