Choice Review

This sophisticated, reflective analysis compares how three countries occupied by Nazis in WW II--France, Belgium, and the Netherlands--coped with war memories and implemented policies for political and cultural recovery. Lagrou effectively blends traditional political history with research in government archives and on monuments and places of memory. The central common characteristic of these nations' war memories is that there were no heroes of glorious victories or fallen soldiers of gargantuan battles, but only victims and various degrees of resistance and collaboration. Although governments tried in each case to construct unified national memories through monuments, medals, and heroes of resistance, the actual memories were too splintered on ultimately individual levels of victimhood and resistance for unified response--except in the Netherlands, where the queen had refused to collaborate. In France and Belgium the deported and victims either of the occupation or of resistance governments were the dominant force; and government policies dealt primarily with the distress and damage caused by the Nazi occupation to the displaced, forced migrant labor, and the victims of terror and the Holocaust. The book is sometimes dense, but meticulous in its research and thoughtful in its conclusions. Graduate and research collections. ; Carleton College