The impetus among Germany's cultural elite to mark the end of World War II as a “zero hour” has been analyzed mainly as a German phenomenon, with considerably less attention to the role of the occupying forces in fostering that mentality. Settling Scores offers a long-awaited analysis of the American Military Government's precarious navigation in the music world, one of the most sensitive cultural areas for both the conquerors and the conquered. Most histories of twentieth-century German music and culture suffer from a basic misunderstanding of this tumultuous time and uncritically accept many of the prejudices it engendered. As this study demonstrates, the notion of a musical “zero hour” is one such misconception, for the imperfect projects of denazification and reeducation left the musical world of the post-war period largely indistinguishable from its pre-war existence. Based on thorough archival research, interviews with eyewitnesses, and a wide range of literature, this highly readable and engaging history reveals in detail the successes and failures of the Military Government's ambitious agenda to root out the musical “Führers” of the Third Reich and to transform music from a tool of nationalist aggression to one of democratic tolerance.

Astrid Eckert undertook a daunting task when she began to research and write Kampf um die Akten. The field of post-war German history has become increasingly crowded in recent years with many excellent books on politics, diplomacy, economics, culture, and memory. One might have wondered how well an exhaustive study on the fate of captured German documents would fare in such an environment. Yet precisely for this reason, Eckert's achievement with this book is all the more impressive. This is a study of profound importance to the historiography on twentieth-century Germany.

For Ludwig Erhard, West Germany's “legendary” Minister of Economics, mass consumption played a vital role in the country's postwar recovery. Consumer goods, as he stated in 1949, were the “very foundation of our entire economic, social, and national being” (p. 183). In The Authority of Everyday Objects, Paul Betts explores the centrality of mass consumption to West Germany's postwar history, analyzing how industrial design was called upon to create a sense of national identity following the war. Works from several scholars—Erica Carter, Michael Wildt, Kathy Pence, Uta Poiger, Jonathan Wiesen, and others—have explored the centrality of the national economy and mass consumption to postwar reconstruction. To these works, Betts adds a specific emphasis on design. As he states at the start of his study, consumer goods were to have a particular look, and design was given a powerful place in West German society. It became the chosen terrain for creating a revived sense of national identity following the disasters of dictatorship, war, and genocide. In the postwar period, an “elective affinity” was forged between “industrial design and the rehabilitation of the ‘good German’” (p. 1), he writes. In six chapters, he explores in absorbing detail how industrial design, with its single-minded mission to turn “mere” commodities into “cultural objects” (Kulturgüter), was invested with political meaning in postwar West Germany. The new world of consumer goods, supported by official discourses on the social importance of “good design,” both rehabilitated West Germany's image internationally and exhibited a desirable vision of consumer citizenship to domestic audiences.

Among forced population transfers in the twentieth century, the expulsion of the German population from East Central Europe at the end of World War II was remarkable. More than twelve million Germans were expelled from the eastern parts of the German Reich and some eastern European states. These refugees arrived in a defeated, occupied, destroyed, and divided country. Initially, the percentage of expelled persons in the Soviet Occupation Zone was much higher than in the western zones. With almost 4.5 million individuals, the expellees made up twenty-four percent of the total population in the Soviet Occupation Zone in 1949. By contrast, western Germany had eight million expellees, who comprised roughly sixteen percent of the total population.

Since the mid-1990s, a number of books have appeared that examine the tumultuous early years of the Federal Republic of Germany through the lens of the former Wehrmacht officer corps. How this elite group, so closely tied to the aims and institutions of the National Socialist regime, managed the transition to democracy is critical to understanding the ultimate success of the Federal Republic in establishing legitimacy and avoiding the fate of its Weimar ancestor.

Kristina Spohr Readman's book, Germany and the Baltic Problem after the Cold War, serves as a fine example of what historians can achieve in the field of contemporary history. Her study provides a detailed account of the political process of German unification and its consequences for its neighbors. By drawing on archival sources that have, for various reasons, become available before the usual closure period has expired, along with interviews, memoirs, and published documents, she has provided a painstaking, scholarly analysis of the manifold transitions in European relations that took place in the wake of the unexpected events of 1989.

In this useful and informative study, Matthew Hockenos examines German Protestants' confrontations with the Nazi past in the early postwar period. Following an entire series of recent studies on postwar memory, Hockenos, too, disproves the long-held assumption that postwar Germans simply repressed the past. Instead, Hockenos unearths a comprehensive and often controversial Protestant discourse about the Nazi past. To be sure, Protestant memory, as this study makes clear, did not entail an “honest, open postwar discussion of the church's complacency and complicity in the face of Nazis' illegal, inhumane, and unchristian policies” (p. 10). Yet the significance of this book does not primarily consist of exposing rather unsurprising deficiencies of Protestant memories. More importantly, it reveals the considerable internal disagreements of a “divided Church” about the Nazi past, and it demonstrates the crucial significance of long-standing theological and doctrinal differences for shaping Protestant responses to the Nazi past.

The Wayward Flock: Catholic Youth in Postwar West Germany offers readers an elegantly written analysis of German Catholic subculture, or “milieu.” Ruff examines how it once successfully operated in the mid-nineteenth century and then explores why the same strategies failed to win the continued support of young Catholics in the postwar era of the Federal Republic. Ruff modifies the standard interpretation of the 1950s as a static time in German history, examines the impact of consumer culture on the Catholic subculture, and offers his own contribution to the theories of secularization.

“We have all suffered,” remarked the Austrian chancellor Leopold Figl in 1946, looking back at Austria during the Nazi period (p. 34). This blanket affirmation of Austrian victimhood became the ideological basis of the postwar Austrian state and mandated an inability or refusal to recognize that some Austrians had suffered rather more than others, while some Austrians had actively contributed to the suffering of others by their participation in the Nazi regime. This Austrian victim myth was left largely intact for forty years until the controversy that erupted around the election to the presidency in 1986 of Kurt Waldheim, whose convenient suppression of his own Nazi past was emblematic of Austria's more general national amnesia.