Following a series of local case studies of postwar Germany in recent years, Adam Seipp sets out to tell the “international history of a very small place” (1). His focus is on the small town of Wildflecken in northern Bavaria, which was located close to what eventually would become the inner-German border. Initially a Wehrmacht-base community in the 1930s, Wildflecken became the site of an important camp for Displaced Persons (DPs) after 1945, as well as a destination for ethnic German refugees and expellees from Eastern Europe. By the early 1950s, the construction of a major American military facility transformed Wildflecken into a garrison town at the forefront of the Cold War. The author argues convincingly that the interaction of these three groups—DPs, expellees, and American occupation officials—with one another and with the local indigenous population, shaped the transition from “a defeated and destroyed Reich to a Cold War border state” (231). In particular, Seipp highlights two main findings: the centrality of the refugee crisis for American occupation policies (and vice versa); and the significance of non-German DPs as a catalyst for the integration of ethnic German refugees and expellees into the local community.

The advantage of a local case study is the ability to hone in on tensions and conflicts that can become obscured in studies with a national focus. Seipp's study demonstrates not only the heterogeneity of postwar society, but also the extent to which a small rural community was transformed by external influences. His is a truly “integrated history” (3) that brings into focus the triangular relationship among American occupiers, local Germans, as well as (German and non-German) “foreigners.” The result is a much messier, conflict-ridden picture of postwar German society than linear narratives of “democratization” or “Americanization” might suggest. The author points out, for example, the real and imagined threat that emanated from the DP camp in Wildflecken for local Germans: the notion of “DP criminality.” This was not just a figment of the postwar German imagination; rather, it was grounded in the reversed power relations between, on the one hand, former slave laborers now protected by the occupation forces, and, on the other, completely disarmed postwar Germans. Yet, at the same time, local farmers were inventing stories of alleged robberies by DPs in order to conceal the selling of their own livestock on the black market. In addition, the study provides a more concrete picture of the abstract category of DPs in Wildflecken: most were ethnic Poles who refused to be repatriated to their homeland. The biographical vignettes that the author intersperses in the narrative succeed in humanizing DPs and reflect their tumultuous life courses during this period.

The other dynamic factor in the region was the arrival of refugees and expellees from the Soviet zone of occupation and from Eastern Europe. Because of housing shortages in cities, the expellee story was largely a rural one, with expellees accounting for 20 percent (sometimes even more) of the local population. Housed initially in a series of smaller makeshift camps, as well as in private homes, they eventually constructed new refugee communities that sought to replicate the lost communities in the East. Expellees also became active in local politics: the first Landrat in the region was an expellee, for example (his alleged Nazi past eventually led to his resignation). Expellees joined forces with the local population in blaming the DP camp for supposedly impeding economic development in the region. The presence of “foreigners” thus facilitated the integration of ethnic German refugees into the local community.

Finally, the study casts new light on the history of the American occupation. It reveals the extensive grumbling and popular dissatisfaction of ordinary Germans that is often lost in more celebratory accounts of the occupation as the kernel of postwar democratization. Germans—locals and expellees alike—especially resented the practice of housing requisitions by the occupation authorities. In addition, they mobilized local resistance against American plans to establish a military base in Wildflecken, which would have led to the displacement of close to 1,000 local residents, many of whom were former refugees and expellees. While construction of the military base turned out to be more difficult than American officials had expected, the process itself nevertheless became a “victory for democracy,” as the book's last chapter is entitled, largely because it encouraged different constituencies to make their voices heard and to participate in the political process.

Some of the material discussed in this book is not entirely unfamiliar; it has already been discussed in other, more general studies of the postwar period. Seipp's work succeeds, however, in bringing into sharp relief the interdependency and interrelationship of different processes—the confrontations with DPs, the integration of refugees and expellees, the experience of American occupation—that have often been analyzed in isolation. Well written and based on an abundance of local, national, and international sources, Strangers in the Wild Place reveals the inner “workings of rural society in occupied and semi-sovereign West Germany” (229). Wildflecken's relative proximity to the inner-German border might have deserved more attention, especially in light of recent studies by Edith Sheffer (Burned Bridge, 2011) and Sagi Schaefer (States of Division, 2014), which have highlighted the eminently local aspects of the German division. Still, this book makes an important contribution to a more nuanced understanding of how (West) Germans negotiated the transition from Nazism to democracy, from war to postwar.