At a time when the meaning of national belonging has become increasingly contested in Western democracies, this edited collection offers a far-reaching account of how the concept of citizenship was fundamentally transformed in post-World War II Europe. Scholars have often pointed to the restoration and expansion of civil, political, and social rights in the aftermath of the war. This volume challenges such teleological interpretations and demonstrates that there was no “clear arc that bends toward an extension of rights and greater political inclusions” (xiv), as the foreword by Anna von der Goltz articulates the volume’s historiographical intervention. The twelve chapters provide ample evidence that the postwar years marked a period when definitions of citizenship were subject of constant (re-)negotiations and became entangled with national reconstruction efforts on both sides of the Iron Curtain.

In their introduction, the editors seek to capture the dynamic and multi-layered nature of citizenship in postwar Europe by suggesting a “two-dimensional framework” that conceptualizes the phenomenon alongside a “vertical” and a “temporal” axis (10). The vertical dimension represents a spectrum between top-down and bottom-up perspectives. Situating debates around citizenship on such a continuum not only promises to explore the concept—beyond its narrow legal and political definitions—as a social practice, reflected in everyday experiences of marginalized people, but also to include nongovernmental and supranational institutions as crucial arbiters of civil and human rights. The second dimension refers to the centrality of “time” for the configuration of citizenship. The editors posit that, among others, the date of one’s birth, the length of residency in a country, and expectations for the future often determined what it meant to belong in the postwar era. While the usefulness of the latter category for the historical thinking about citizenship does not become fully evident in the volume’s case studies, the vertical approach proves to be highly generative because it opens the field for new research questions, methodologies, and source types.

The collection’s individual chapters largely revolve around four thematic foci that often overlap with one other: statelessness, gender, race, and the Cold War. The contributions by Laura Hilton, Dagmar Wernitznig, and Nikola Tohma shed new light on the well-studied phenomenon of statelessness after World War II, exploring such different topics as the emotional regimes of Displaced Persons, the precarious lives of stateless women in a psychiatric clinic in postwar Vienna, and Greek Civil War refugees in Czechoslovakia whose citizenship had been revoked by the military junta. Taken together, the chapters demonstrate how the interrelated discrimination based on gender, age, and race/nationality led to exclusion and enormous emotional distress. At the same time, they emphasize the agency of stateless people who evinced a strategic approach towards citizenship, oftentimes deliberately renouncing their nationality or rejecting the adoption of a new one in order to navigate the challenges of the postwar years.

Gender and race shaped the access to—and the experience of—citizenship beyond the realm of statelessness. The collection makes a particularly interesting contribution regarding the question of gendered citizenship in the Eastern bloc. Based on an analysis of so-called brigade books and petitions written by female workers in the GDR, Rachel Weiser discusses how factory work provided East German women with agency and identity and thus strengthened their role as socialist citizens. At the same time, these women used the workplace to challenge the limits and contradictions of gendered citizenship in the socialist state, a topic that is also highlighted by Anna Dobrowolska’s chapter on debates around prostitution in postwar Poland. Dobrowolska shows that state officials and the broader public viewed sex workers as morally deficient citizens and as a threat to the twin-project of national reconstruction and the building of a new socialist society. The case study elucidates how the socialist citizenship of Polish women, more than their East German counterparts, “became defined in relation to their productive, reproductive, and erotic capital” (230).

On the other side of the Iron Curtain, gendered citizenship took on different forms and often intersected with racial discrimination, as Emily Lord Fransee and Zoé Kergomard corroborate in their chapters. In France and its empire, postwar elites and intellectuals often ascribed a limited “electoral capacity” (204) to both women and colonial people, entrenching the idea of the “citizen” as predominantly white and masculine. Race also played an important role in West Germany. In the collection’s most provocative contribution, Nicholas Courtman expands the existing literature on race in postwar Germany and argues that state authorities frequently referred to biological understandings of racial difference to disqualify Eastern Europeans from obtaining German citizenship, which would justify characterizing the early Federal Republic as a “racial state” (91). Sarah Jacobson’s chapter shows that West German racism lingered on into the late 1960s when labor migrants from Southern Italy encountered signs reading “No foreigners allowed” in the Frankfurt housing market (251). But like other marginalized actors who are featured in this collection, these migrants took it into their own hands to renegotiate and expand the meanings of citizenship.

The impact of the Cold War rivalry on the formation of citizenship in postwar Europe becomes apparent throughout the volume. The case studies by Tohma, Weiser, and Dobrowolska reveal the importance of “work” for the demarcation of belonging in the Eastern bloc. In contrast to the ethnically and racially circumscribed boundaries of citizenship in Western Europe, (the much smaller number of) refugees and immigrants in socialist countries could, at least in theory, receive protection, material support, and sometimes even political rights in exchange for their contribution to economic development and their commitment to the socialist project. Focusing on the other ideological and geographical pole of Cold War Europe, Carlos Domper Lasús shows how Francoist Spain redefined the concept of democracy in antiliberal terms and resorted to corporatist ideas and practices of citizenship. The 1945 Spanish Charter of Rights and its warm reception among Western European conservatives and far-right figures serves as a further reminder of the limits and contradictions of liberal democracy in postwar Europe.

Reimagining Citizenship in Postwar Europe is an important contribution. Its trans-European perspective, which not only transcends the East-West divide and integrates “empire” into the history of postwar Europe but also includes often-neglected countries like Spain and Greece, provides many inspirations for future comparative research. Despite the diverse topics and methodologies represented in the volume, the editors have succeeded in crafting a coherent study whose individual chapters regularly reference and complement each other. The volume is a major contribution to the growing scholarship on anti-racism in twentieth-century Europe. The existing literature on the struggles of racialized people, especially on Britain and Germany, often focuses either on the years before and during World War II or on the 1970s and 1980s as periods of heightened mobilization for political and social inclusion. This collection, in contrast, emphasizes the centrality of the postwar moment, particularly the first decade after 1945, for the formation and contestation of those criteria that came to define the contours of citizenship and democracy. The fact that most contributions are written by a new generation of scholars gives reason to hope that the historical research on citizenship, belonging, and human rights in modern Europe will remain generative and dynamic for years to come.