The history of old age, a field that has been in abeyance in recent years, is making a comeback—and in the wake of COVID-19, it seems likely to become even more relevant. The history of aging in Germany has been, comparatively speaking, well studied. Christoph Conrad, Alfred Mierzejewski, and Cornelius Torp have written outstanding studies on the imagination and administration of old age from the Bismarck era to the present, focusing especially on the pension system. And yet that is only one piece of the puzzle. The elderly require funds for their sustenance, of course, but they also require care. This theme has been rather neglected by historians: we know little about the history of nursing facilities and regulations, or about everyday life inside them.

The historian Nina Grabe has already begun to address this lacuna in her 2016 volume on eldercare in Lower Saxony. That volume broke new ground by showing how eldercare was professionalized and medicalized in the wake of the Second World War. In her new book, she mines a similar timeframe and source base to ask about the care of a specific group: the elderly displaced persons (DPs) who remained in West Germany, for all sorts of reasons, after the end of the war. The volume thus brings together two interesting streams of research: the history of aging and the history of migration. This particular intersection is crucial to understanding our times and has hardly been explored at all by historians. The result is a fine-grained study of an important topic. Grabe has a sure command of the archives, which are mainly but not entirely religious. She leaves no stone unturned in her quest to reconstruct the experience of the elderly DPs.

Of the 12 million DPs in postwar West Germany, about 13 percent were, due to age or sickness, in need of long-term care in camps, nursing homes, or other facilities. In five substantive chapters, Grabe explores this phenomenon from multiple angles, focusing on the 1960s but tracing the story forward in some cases to the 1980s. The first chapter focuses on the nursing homes themselves. Readers learn a great deal about the physical plant of the homes and their improvement over time (residents eventually had access to televisions and other wonders of the economic miracle). This chapter focuses, too, on the funding and administration of the homes, which were largely Christian. The second chapter explores the population of the various facilities, emphasizing their great diversity. The third chapter focuses on the health issues, including alcoholism, that plagued them. The fourth and longest chapter concerns the “milieu” of the home. It treats everything from religious and ethnic conflict to the mundanities of birthday celebrations and meal service. The last chapter explores the care workers and physicians who staffed the facilities.

For this reader, the most interesting theme, which appears in almost every chapter, was the way in which the tumultuous history of central and East Europe found itself replicated in these homes. The residents were a diverse group, as were the DPs more generally: most of them were from Poland, Ukraine, or the Baltic states. Some of them had been Nazi collaborators, whereas others had been in the resistance; some were well-educated authors, and others were illiterate laborers. Grabe provides potted biographies of a few of them, and they have the sorts of eventful lives one would expect from such a group. One, for instance, had been born to a German and a Cossack in the Caucasus, before joining the Red Army and serving on the Chinese front in the late 1930s. Sentenced to the gulag for anti-Soviet activities, he fled and made a new career as a German soldier. After the war, he scraped together a living and a family in West Germany before finally entering an eldercare facility for DPs in 1980. Conflict seems inevitable if we imagine bringing together dozens of people like this into one building, and it was persistent in the homes. Russians and Poles, especially, caused problems when housed together, but that was just one axis of conflict: each element of the tragic history of Europe appeared in the facilities, and of course the residents consistently interacted with the German population, as well.

Grabe's account is meticulous and thorough more than it is path-breaking in its argumentation. It can be a challenge to understand precisely what Grabe wants us to take away from her story: how it might better our understanding of postwar European history or the growing issue of caring for elderly migrants. She devotes most of a comparatively short book to summarizing her archival sources. She does very little to root her analysis in the broader secondary literature on postwar German history, nor even in the narrower discussions of eldercare, on the one hand, and migration, on the other. It would be fascinating to know, for instance, how Ostpolitik was experienced by elderly Poles residing in Germany, or what impact, if any, the various Holocaust trials had inside the facilities. Alternatively, it would be interesting to know more about gender relations among this population and about how, if at all, the sexual revolution among middle-aged and young Germans affected the residents.

This is, in short, a highly competent and sober analysis of a neglected theme. Readers should not expect groundbreaking new insights into postwar German history. At the same time, they will find an exemplary work of archival scholarship about a theme that has been neglected for too long.