This book brings an original perspective to bear on a time period and topic—the immediate postwar years and their unsettled nature—that has been attracting increased scholarly attention for the last fifteen years. While there has been work on many different aspects of the German occupation, there seem to be a disproportionate number of books centering on the American zone or on the early relationship between West Germany and the U.S. This intense interest in the future Federal Republic is intertwined with many larger questions, such as the roots of Americanization in these years. The topic that Schroer explores is race, but in this case, the role of African-Americans and ideas about them just after World War II.

Schroer argues that one of the principal consequences of World War II was not just the reeducation of West Germans as democrats but, going further, getting Germans to give up their “Aryan” identity in exchange for one as “white.” The irony, as he makes us aware, is that this change was enforced by an American military that was facing its own problems in the wake of Truman's 1948 order for racial equality in the army. The boundaries of Schroer's study are the U.S. zone of occupation from 1945 through 1949. His monograph relies mostly on American military records with some usage of German archives. He also incorporates contemporaneous novels and three films.

The book begins by giving an overview of German racial ideology before the end of the Third Reich. The second chapter looks at the ideas of race that the occupying American forces and their leadership brought with them. Two chapters deal with the complex story of black GIs and German women. A final chapter is devoted to the uneasy confrontation between German concepts of Kultur and jazz and traditional African-American music.

In contrast to many other books on similar topics, this work does not theorize much about race. This book's focus is not really on “blackness;” thus some readers might feel that blackness is undertheorized here. On the other hand, though, Schroer explicitly states that his aim is to study whiteness and indeed to historicize it (p. 4). In doing so, he is also examining whiteness as “a code of conduct that operated to police white Germans” (p. 5). Drawing on W. E. B. DuBois, Schroer defines race as a code or set of rules (p. 5). With this book, Schroer is attempting to “historicize racism” as well (p. 8). He concludes, “The Nazi effort to persuade Germans that they were not Aryans locked in Darwinian struggle with alien Jewish and Slavic racial enemies gave way to a racial orthodoxy that lumped such groups together in racially undifferentiated whiteness” (p. 183).

One might inquire why postwar encounters between Germans and blacks have garnered so much scholarly interest. Perhaps because historians see these groups as providing insight into a time period that has unfairly been stereotyped as repressive and reluctant to dwell on the past. Schroer's work joins a rich subfield with works by Tina Campt, Fatima El-Tayeb, Heide Fehrenbach, Pascal Grosse, Maria Höhn, and Uta Poiger. One useful introduction to the field where many of these authors are published is Not So Plain as Black and White: Afro-German History and Culture, 1890–2000, edited by Reinhild Steingröver and me (Rochester, NY: Rochester University Press, 2005).

While Schroer gives quite a bit of attention to German complaints of rapes by African-American soldiers, he might have made more of the fact that the Germans in the Soviet sector could not complain—for many reasons—about the great number of rapes committed by the Russians. But the Germans could complain to the Americans and did.

Now, to consider the big picture, one might ask where Schoer's book fits in the historiography of postwar Germany. Even as learned a text as Konrad Jarausch's After Hitler: Recivilizing Germans, 1945–1995, published in 2006, makes no mention of race in the index. The book does not touch on African-Americans or blacks and in general makes little mention of foreigners. Yet Jarausch is trying to explain, as he says in his acknowlegments, how could “a country that produced Hitler and the Holocaust transform into a new, peaceful, and democratic Germany?” What Schroer's book and others like it do is to invite the question whether foreigners really played no role in this. I'm sure there will be much more to say on the topic.