For several years following World War II, occupied Germany was the center of Jewish life in Europe. In 1947 close to a quarter million Jews resided there, the majority of them in the Displaced Persons (DP) camps in the American Zone. And, yet, the social history of the Jews, Germans, and Americans in this period, so important to future developments both in Germany and internationally, has been neglected by historians. Atina Grossmann has done much to fill this gap in our historical knowledge by focusing on the “historical triangle” of Germans, Jews, and Americans that defined the immediate postwar era. Rather than viewing the three groups in isolation, her book examines the “interactions, encounters, and confrontations” among them, and effectively challenges the “persistent division between German history and the history of Jews in Germany that still characterizes much of our work on modern and contemporary Germany” (p. 13). She effectively weaves personal and journalistic accounts with extensive archival research to create a compelling narrative.

The first three chapters focus on Berlin; the second half of the book examines the American Zone of occupation. The author effectively describes the lack of any widespread sense of responsibility for the crimes of Nazism and the pervasive sense of victimhood among the Germans. This “discourse of victimization,” she points out, frustrated and angered not only Jewish survivors but also many (Jewish and non-Jewish) American observers. “The Germans,” complained one American officer, “act as though the Nazis were a strange race of Eskimos who came down from the North Pole and somehow invaded Germany” (p. 38). Furthermore, the suffering of Germans was by no means a “taboo” subject among the Germans; on the contrary, such narratives were “noisily expressed and contested” (p. 31). The experience of defeat, Grossmann emphasizes, was deeply gendered, characterized by the mass rapes of German women by Soviet soldiers and the absence of men, so many of whom had been killed or were imprisoned. And, contrary to the widespread belief that discussion of the rapes was taboo, Grossmann points out that there was a “plethora of talk in many different voices and venues” (p. 58). Such themes are not entirely new, but Grossmann effectively links the “discourse of victimization” to the dramatic rise in abortion and decline in fertility, as well as to increased tensions between the returning soldiers and their wives.

Grossmann goes on to discuss the relationship of the Jews in Berlin to the Berliners and to the Americans. Suddenly, a Jewish identity meant access to benefits such as somewhat improved food rations, leading to widespread resentment among the defeated Germans (who considered themselves victims). And, as Grossmann points out, the new status of Jews led to an “extraordinary amount of pained energy” devoted to determining “who was Jewish and who was not” (p. 96). What, for instance, about “non-Aryans” who were not “confessionally” Jewish? The petitions to the Jewish community asking for reinstatement “highlight the irony” of those petitioners “being denied their Jewish identity now that being Jewish could mean life rather than death” (p. 98).

The difficult decisions that Berliner Jews had to make about their lives in their former homeland, particularly those who had fond memories of their lives in pre-Nazi Germany, are illustrated wonderfully by Grossman in the discussion of her maternal grandfather Heinrich Busse. Busse regained his German citizenship after the war but, as he painfully found out, the lack of any acknowledgment of the enormity of the crime perpetrated against the Jews of Europe (even among those who had helped him survive), made it psychologically impossible for him to reintegrate into German society. Grossmann's account demonstrates the “bitter gulf of experience and memory that separated those who had once been fellow Berliners after 1945” (p. 113).

The decision to leave Germany was, by contrast, much easier for the majority of the Jewish DPs made up either of survivors of the Holocaust or Polish Jews who had spent the war years in the Soviet Union (a group which, as Grossmann rightfully points out, has been neglected by historians). Grossmann focuses on the DP camps in the American zone, where the majority of them lived. The Harrison report, submitted to the U.S. president in August 1945, decried the poor treatment of the Jews in the DP camps, leading to the establishment of separate camps for Jews. These camps, in turn, became the incubator of an intensified Jewish national identity, and the Jews in them demanded not only justice and restitution but also “emigration to Palestine.” Zionism quickly came to be the dominant political ideology among the DPs (p. 137). The rapid development of a Jewish national consciousness in the DP camps has been written about by historians such as Hagit Lavsky and Zeev Mankowitz, but Grossmann adds another dimension to the story. The camps did not exist in isolation from the world around them; on the contrary, the DPs continually interacted with the Germans in very basic ways. Germans provided all sorts of services for the Jewish DPs, working as cleaning women and men, drivers, mechanics, and doctors. Moreover, they entered the Jewish family's most intimate domain: given the baby boom among the Jewish DPs, which Grossmann describes as a “specific and direct response to the catastrophic losses of the Holocaust,” Germans from neighboring villages and towns were frequently used to help the new Jewish mothers with childcare (p. 194). And some Jewish men entered into romantic relations with German women. The relationships with the Germans were, to be sure, emotionally laden: Grossmann points out how Jews often viewed the experience of being catered to by Germans as a type of revenge. At the same time, the birth of children and the formation of new families also contributed to the fragile sense among Jewish survivors that they were building new lives and constructing a new “normality.”

In her conclusion, Grossmann covers the period from 1948 through 1957, when the last DP camp closed. The Cold War decisively transformed American attitudes toward the Germans: no longer viewed as Nazi villains, the Germans had become friends and allies in the fight against Communism. Consequently, Americans became “more impatient with the dependent Jewish refugee population” (p. 237). With the establishment of the state of Israel in 1948 and the Federal Republic in 1949, the great majority of Jews left the camps. The small Jewish community that remained (about 25,000) continued to struggle with issues of memory, Jewish identity, and anti-Semitism. They also created the organizational basis for the revival of Jewish life in Germany following the collapse of the Soviet Union and the mass influx of Russian Jews.

Grossmann has succeeded marvelously in reintegrating the history of Jews into the history of postwar Germany. Her book touches on a crucial moment in the formation of a post-Holocaust Jewish identity, as well as on the relationship of the Germans to the surviving victims of the Nazi dictatorship. It is an essential contribution to the social and cultural history of the immediate postwar era.