In this monograph, Christopher Molnar offers us the first in-depth English-language analysis of the relationship between Germany and Yugoslav migrants after World War II, including refugees fleeing the Partisans and communism, labor migrants during Germany's economic boom, and Bosnian refugees in the 1990s. Focusing primarily on the state of Bavaria, which is where substantial numbers of migrants were concentrated, and on German political parties and popular opinion, Molnar argues that memories of World War II in combination with Cold War politics played the most important role in shaping German attitudes toward migrants from Yugoslavia. A rather conflicted image of Germany emerges as it swung back and forth between principled support for refugees and an appreciation for labor migrants, on the one hand, and xenophobia on the other. On the whole, Molnar's study is a solidly researched, carefully argued, and persuasive contribution to both German history and the history of migration in postwar Europe.

In his first chapter, Molnar explores how refugees who came to Germany after World War II, either because they were wartime opponents of the partisans or because they objected to the imposition of communism, were able to mobilize German sympathy. In the context of the early Cold War, which included the expulsion of the ethnic Germans from East Europe and the division of Germany, refugees from Yugoslavia successfully used a discourse of shared victimhood at the hands of communist oppressors. There were limits to this shared affinity, as evidenced in the second chapter—when extremist émigrés shifted from peaceful protest to terrorism in the 1960s, they were seen as having violated German hospitality and they lost popular sympathy. The turn in public opinion against migrants was influenced by Germans' own reckoning with the crimes of the Nazi past and a rejection of all forms of fascism—Germans sought to distance themselves from Croatian terrorist groups that professed loyalty to the wartime Ustasha puppet state in Croatia.

The next two chapters look at the case of Yugoslav labor migrants. Because of Yugoslavia's decision to recognize the GDR as a sovereign state, it did not benefit from a bilateral labor treaty until 1968, creating obstacles to mobility and forcing Yugoslavs to have recourse to illegal migration strategies. By then, Germans were ambivalent toward Yugoslavs: employers wanted and appreciated them, but various political actors saw them as communist agents. Molnar shows, however, how the migrants’ image improved in the 1970s as part of what he calls Willy Brandt's “interpersonal Ostpolitik” (131). More specifically, Brandt emphasized the migrants’ role in promoting a friendly relationship between Germans and Yugoslavs.

The final chapter analyzes the German response to the war in Bosnia between 1991 and 1995. Molnar contrasts Germany's empathy with victims of war, with German actions in the face of the refugee crisis—first, their limited response, and then, following the Dayton Accords, their aggressive efforts to repatriate refugees before conditions for this were favorable. Germans drew specious analogies between their own heroic reconstruction of Germany after 1945 and the refugees’ supposed moral imperative to return to Bosnia to rebuild it; as Molnar notes, however, the Germans’ real motives were less principled. Public discourse in the mid-1990s expressed an anxiety about Germany being overwhelmed by needy people from around the world—a reaction that would resurge, the author notes, in the face of the Syrian refugee crisis in 2015.

In focusing on Yugoslav migrants, Molnar aims to contribute to the growing scholarship that seeks to write German history “from the margins,” putting aside the framework of the nation-state in favor of examining the place and significance of marginalized groups. Engaging with debates on the role of race in shaping German national identity, Molnar calls into question how well race as a concept captures German attitudes toward Yugoslavs. Germans were less prone to consider Yugoslavs—as opposed to ethnic Turks—as racial others, and more likely to see Yugoslavs as culturally similar. At the same time, Germans often did treat Yugoslavs as undesirables, sequestering them in miserable refugee camps after World War II, seeking to limit the flow of Yugoslav labor migrants, and finally pushing for hasty repatriation of Bosnian war refugees.

Molnar does not provide a universal explanation for this suspicion of Yugoslavs beyond the fact that they were perceived at various times as threatening to German national identity or interest. Refugees after World War II were initially seen as asocial and criminal; asylum seekers were often denigrated as economic refugees, labor migrants were perceived as potential communist infiltrators, and Bosnian refugees were unwelcome because they arrived at a time of renewed German nationalism in the wake of the reunification. Perhaps the concept of xenophobia could be applied more productively than that of racism.

Although this book focuses on German attitudes and perceptions, the Yugoslav perspective comes up only occasionally, in the Yugoslav state's interactions with Germany, the consequences of German attitudes and policies on Yugoslavs, and refugees’ strategic efforts to rally German sympathy. Nonetheless, scholars of Yugoslav history will find this account interesting for a number of reasons. At the most basic level, the context in which Yugoslav emigrants and temporary migrants were situated in their host state is useful for understanding their continued engagement with Yugoslavia. Namely, their interactions with Yugoslavia were shaped by how settled and secure they felt in their host state. Yugoslavs living abroad who felt insecure or unwelcome in their new context were more likely to maintain close ties to Yugoslavia, or at very least refrain from seditious activities that would jeopardize their passport. This monograph also provides a fascinating, detailed discussion of the activities of émigrés and their organizations, as well as their interactions with the German state and, to a lesser extent, with other labor migrants. Forthcoming monographs by Christian Axboe Nielsen and Mate Nikola Tokić promise to further expand our knowledge of this topic.