Raised in a pied-noir family and married to a Silesian expellee, Etienne François draws upon his personal, as well as on his scholarly, background in this book's conclusion, which assesses how best to compare the forced migration of one million non-Muslims from Algeria to France during decolonization with that of the roughly twelve million ethnic Germans expelled from the East in the aftermath of Nazi defeat. Whereas Norman Naimark's pioneering Fires of Hatred (2001) and Philipp Ther's authoritative Dark Side of Nation-States (2014) have exemplified a trend toward comparing forced migrations as part of an unfolding, interconnected history resulting from exclusionary ethnic policies, this book offers the first comparison between postwar ethnic cleansing and decolonization. Drawing together specialist assessments from a 2012 conference at the German Historical Institute in Paris, it shows how forced migration fostered social welfare states and prompted nostalgic memory cultures with political and personal outcomes. As François rightly warns, however, each case's radically different backstory should inspire caution: rather than seeking similarities in the causes and course of each forced migration, comparison is most fruitful when focusing on the “memorializing configurations” (273) discernable in each aftermath. Both the strengths and weaknesses of this volume bear out his warning.

The book is divided into six thematic parts, each of which includes two articles dealing with each case. Demonstrating the appropriateness of François's warning, the first part offers the weakest comparison, sketching the origins and outcomes of each forced migration to characterize both Germany and France as failed imperial states. Rather than problematizing the complicated ethnic interchange and pre-national identities that had predominated across Central and Eastern Europe before the onset of modern nationalism, Shelley Baranowski paints everything east of Germany's post-1945 borders as part of a zone of exploitation for German national and imperial aspirations that culminated with Adolf Hitler. It is almost a reiteration of post-1945 Polish propaganda about “recovered territories” when she characterizes German history in “the East” as a seven-hundred-year “diaspora,” in which ethnic Germans were supposedly living outside their inherent ethnic core land. It is a serious miscalculation that “the contraction of [Germany's] eastern borders to the Oder and Neisse Rivers resulted in the loss of forty percent of its interwar territory as of 1937” (37)—when, in fact, it was 25 percent. And her argument that an inherent, still ongoing “resistance to multi-ethnicity” in Germany rests on a Nazi and later West German naturalization of German refugees (47) overlooks some resounding multiethnic successes, such as the greater social integration that descendants of guest workers have often enjoyed in Germany, especially when compared with migrants in neighboring countries. Todd Shepard, by contrast, draws a more nuanced picture of French approaches to ethnicity. The French government was so desperate to retain Algeria in 1958, he argues, that it even extended citizenship to Muslims. After the loss of Algeria, however, the French government reversed course by privileging “European” migrants as “French”—in contrast to Muslims classified as refugees—thereby “erasing” an earlier, more inclusive notion of France in favor of a “European” definition (55).

In both West Germany and France, an essentially ethnic approach to citizenship may have, at times, reinforced “an ethnocentric core” (13), in particular because of enormous and long-term state investment in integrating each population of arriving, imagined ethnic kin. Alongside its substantiation of economic integration, however, the second part of this book also reveals that the rhetoric and public sentiment about ethnic belonging were often undermined by racism on the part of supposed conationals already living in the core territory. Michael Schwartz rightly stresses that the expulsion of Germans from longstanding areas of settlement in Central and Eastern Europe differed radically from decolonization in areas more recently occupied by comparably segregated European imperialists. He also shows how East German efforts to assimilate migrants as quickly as possible sometimes inspired West German politicians to break with promises of a “right to return” to the lost territories. In the accompanying essay, Yann Scioldo-Zürcher argues that French repatriation policies, which were closer to the East German approach to expellees, transformed even pieds-noirs with non-French origins into “thoroughgoing metropolitans” (96).

Following this emphasis on state economic measures, patterns of political organization dominate the third and fourth parts. Pertti Ahonen's analysis of centralized and hierarchical West German Vertriebenenverbände (expellee organizations) parallels Claire Eldridge's examination of more local and fluid pied-noir associations: though vocal in both cases, these organizations had relatively small membership numbers that shrank as their platforms lost resonance and their remaining members radicalized. The steady and generally ambivalent integration of each migrant group into the political life of each receiving state, explored in contributions by Frank Bösch and Eric Savarese, reveals that, in each case, migrants embraced a diverse spectrum of political parties rather than a specific refugee party, and that migrant associations shifted to the right as their constituents aged and largely stopped identifying with their supposed leaders.

In the fifth section, Tobias Weger and Michèle Baussant offer an insightful comparison of how, in both public and private spaces, the trauma of loss was expressed in material objects and rituals often legitimized as part of West German or French culture. Although expellee and pied-noir political organizations sought to give official meaning to pilgrimages, commemorations, symbols, memorials, and reunions, the shared nostalgic character of each group's memory culture often diverged from hegemonic political objectives. This aligns with Etienne François's valuable reminder that memory is an ever-present and evolving reconstruction with power to transcend political appropriation—“whether the memories in question be individual and familial, group and generation related, or affective and cultural” (273–74). The final section looks at how recent museological and pedagogical approaches have, at times, reembraced national victim narratives—for instance, by claiming to overturn the supposed taboo status of the trauma of expulsion. Whereas Stefan Troebst outlines the often polarizing domestic and European debates about the potential construction of a Zentrum gegen Vertreibungen (Center Against Expulsions) in Berlin, Jan C. Jansen examines how, in France, right-leaning commemorations of Algeria and the pieds-noirs have influenced recent high-level political discussions about French identity and the colonial past.

At its best, this volume successfully compares cases of what François calls “the constitutive plurality of memory systems, together with their structural imbrication” (275) at interconnected personal, local, national, and transnational levels. But it founders when it compares each forced migration as somehow rooted in a failed imperial project. Although the editors stress that each migration differed in size and political context, they embrace a misleading notion that Poland and Algeria possessed “equivalent significance for Germany and France as parts of larger ‘imagined geographies’ that nurtured fantasies of territorial expansion, provoked policies of colonial settlement and national assimilation, and sustained national imperial identities” (2). Eschewing François's caution against seeking similarities in the historical context before each forced migration, the editors invoke “Poland” and “Eastern Europe” as colonized spaces, despite the fact that the vast majority of expellees came from provinces such as Silesia and Pomerania, which had been home to a German-speaking majority for centuries (and thus were not, as Polish Cold War nationalist propaganda pronounced, “recovered territories”). References to Prussia as a “German-Polish Empire” by 1795 overlook the fact that Prussia ceded most of its Polish territories in 1815. Furthermore, late nineteenth-century Germanization policies evinced particular aggression in areas such as Poznan and West Prussia, which were then ceded to Poland in 1918. Even if the forced migration of about 1.5 million ethnic Germans from newly independent Poland after the Treaty of Versailles was perhaps more similar to the Algerian case, many German-speaking groups had lived in these regions far longer than the French had resided in Algeria. If this book thus substantiates François's warning about the futility of comparing the context behind each migration, it nevertheless offers a useful comparison of forced-migrant integration processes, political advocacy groups, and nostalgic memory narratives. Selections from this volume could therefore nicely supplement readings for advanced courses on postwar forced migrations.