German-Balkan Entangled Histories in the Twentieth Century ed. by Mirna Zakić and Christopher A. Molnar

Abstract

Reviewed by: German-Balkan Entangled Histories in the Twentieth Century ed. by Mirna Zakić and Christopher A. Molnar M. Blake Morley German-Balkan Entangled Histories in the Twentieth Century. Edited by Mirna Zakić and Christopher A. Molnar. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2021. Pp vii + 381. Cloth $35.00. ISBN 978-0822966753. Twentieth-century Balkan history is often presented through the legacies of the Ottoman and Habsburg empires. By the end of World War I, both empires ceased to exist. The essays in Mirna Zakić and Christopher A. Molnar's edited volume take up the question of Germany's involvement in southeastern Europe when this imperial void presented itself. This work brings to light an important chapter in Germany's destructive drive for power during the first half of the twentieth century while highlighting the ways that ethnic Germans from the Balkans and West Germany came to terms with this tragic history in the postwar period. The book is organized into an introductory essay that familiarizes the reader with the history of German-Balkan relations, followed by two sections of essays linked by the themes of war, empire, migration, and memory. The first section, titled "War and Empire in the Balkans," focuses on German-Balkan entanglements during the first half of the twentieth century and how actors [End Page 614] within the region negotiated Germany's political, economic, and military ambitions. David Hamlin opens this section with a challenge to Fritz Fischer's thesis that Germany's war aims during World War I reflected longstanding prewar ambitions for domination. Rather, Hamlin argues that German-Romanian relations during the war, which culminated in the signing of the Treaty of Bucharest in 1918, were dictated more by Germany's need to fortify its wartime domestic economy. Bernd Robionek's study of the economic cooperative Avis, an ethnic German organization in the Kingdom of Yugoslavia, shows how attempts to fortify a local self-sufficient ethnic community aligned with Germany ultimately forced the cooperative into a double bind caught between the shifting economic demands and racial policies of the Nazi state and the complex realities of an ethnically diverse Yugoslavia. Christian Promitzer explores Germany's entanglements in the Balkans through the development of Nazi racial science (Rassenkunde), highlighting the often-overlooked links between SS racial policies and earlier anthropological studies of Serbian prisoners of war during World War I and German ethnographic research throughout southeastern Europe in the interwar period. Mirna Zakić's essay focuses on the "misremembering" of Prince Eugene of Savoy among ethnic Germans in the Serbian Banat as they sought to position themselves as equals in the Third Reich and how the Prince's image was put to work to support Nazi claims in the Balkans during the 1930s and 1940s. Mark Biondich's chapter on the Holocaust in southeastern Europe shows how the scale of genocidal violence in Croatia was not the result of Nazi policies alone but more so determined by preexisting anti-Jewish and anti-Serb domestic policies of the Ustaša, the Independent State of Croatia's (NDH) fascist regime. Closing out the first section of essays, Kateřina Králová and Jiří Kocián's analysis of Holocaust survivor testimonies demonstrates the inherent difficulties of overcoming traumatic memory and how this process is challenged by different attitudes toward German collective guilt and individual responsibility, attitudes ultimately determined by whether the survivor came from an occupied state or a collaborationist state in southeastern Europe. The second section, "Aftershocks and Memories of War," turns to the question of memory as the collected essays explore German-Balkan entanglements in the postwar period. Jannis Panagiotidis adds a global dimension to these entanglements by showing how Gottschee Germans utilized preexisting transcontinental business and familial networks in North America to negotiate the complexities of postwar migration and German identity. Gregor Kranjc's chapter continues the discussion on Gottscheer German postwar experiences by focusing on the ways individual traumatic memories of loss and suffering from different events before, during, and after World War II allowed members of the Gottscheer diaspora in the United States to develop a collective memory of victimization that occluded their own Nazi past. Similarly, Gaëlle Fisher's essay...