Over the past several decades, historians of Germany have examined country's relationship with eastern Europe in the modern era from social, cultural, and political perspectives. In this edited volume, Mirna Zakić and Christopher A. Molnar have assembled an international group of experts to approach this issue from a different geographical perspective and, the editors claim, a new focus on entangled histories. The new geographical focus centers on Germany and southeastern Europe, which, as the editors point out, is a region often ignored in the literature, given the greater concern in German historiography with the relationship between Germany, Poland, and the western territories of the Tsarist Empire, and later, the Soviet Union. Instead of examining the relationship between Germany and southeastern Europe through the frame of “perceptions of the East,” which, the editors rightly claim, can have the effect of reifying the categories of Germany and the East, the editors have deployed the concept of “entanglement” as the central frame for this edited volume. In this sense, they follow broader trends from outside central and eastern European history, which have examined “entanglements” around topics as wide-ranging as empire, the slave trade, and global capital, just to name a few. The timeframe of the essays in the volume is largely confined to the period from the First World War forward, with a few brief glimpses backward into the late nineteenth century. In a series of sharp and impressively researched contributions, the contributors explore subjects that range from the economic relationship between Imperial Germany and Romania during World War I; to the image of Prince Eugene among the Banat Germans during World War II and the occupation; to the global entanglements of the Gottscheer Germans of Slovenia during and after the Second World War; to post-1945 entanglements, including those involving Croatian emigres in West Germany and ethnic Germans’ wartime memories of their resettlement in and then expulsion from the Bukovina. Of course, a short review cannot do justice to the richness of the essays in this volume. Broadly speaking, the bulk of the essays deal with issues of memory, resettlement, mass violence, and the quandaries of identity in this region in relation to Germany. They begin to open the door to a history of complex and, for historians of Germany, potentially startling interrelationships between the German nation-state(s) as they existed over the course of the twentieth century and places like Croatia, Slovenia, Romania, and Serbia. In this respect, Christopher A. Molnar's essay on Croatian emigrés in West Germany and the politics of memory during the 1960s is exemplary. Amidst a volume that often focuses on ethnic German communities in southeastern Europe and their relationship to Germany, this essay is also especially important for reminding us about the different constellations of relationships between southeastern Europe and Germany. Molnar's essay is especially good at showing how Croatian emigré politics shaped the memory culture of West Germany, showing that entanglements could also carry influence outside southeastern Europe and influence politics and memory outside the confines of emigre communities.
As a whole, there is no doubt that the authors have produced a very valuable volume for historians of the relationship between Germany and southeastern Europe. While this volume begins to fill the gap, especially in English, that the editors identify when it comes to Germany and southeastern Europe, I am less convinced that a compelling case is made consistently across the essays for the importance of the “entanglement” frame. At one level, not all essays really make use of this concept beyond paying lip service to it. Some of the essays are really just short histories of what 30 years ago would have been called “relationships.” That said, some essays do make excellent use of entanglement to guide their path of inquiry. In this respect, the standout essay of the volume is Jannis Panagiotidis’ family history of Gottscheer German families from Slovenia (including, it must be said, his own family). This essay places the families in an often counterintuitive web of local and global networks established by politics and immigration in which the actors involved activate and reactivate these networks for their benefit in the midst of war and expulsion from the late 1930s and beyond. Through this essay, one begins to see how multiple entanglements held the Gottscheers in their grip even long after most Gottscheers had left Slovenia following World War II. This essay aside, the degree to which this volume really advances our understanding of entanglement as a historical category beyond using it as a catchall term to order the new case studies on offer here, is debatable.
Finally, as is true of all interesting books, this volume raises other questions through the nature of its intervention. While this collection often deals with Germany's relationship with southeastern Europe from a nationalized perspective, we might consider other frames for some of the entangled histories presented here. One could also think about how the areas of southeastern Europe featured in this volume, almost all of which were part of a post-imperial Habsburg space, had entanglements with Austria or Hungary that superseded German ones. Consideration of this post-imperial element could have made the volume stronger. Such consideration might make German entanglements with southeastern Europe across the twentieth century look more exceptional than they are portrayed in the volume. A nationalized vision of the twentieth century makes some connections between ethnic German communities and the German nation-state appear natural when they were anything but. A volume looking at Austrian or Hungarian entanglements with southeastern Europe over the twentieth century perhaps deserves a place alongside this one.
In the end, this collection will be of real use to scholars of Germany and eastern Europe during the twentieth century, while providing paths toward future research.
