This ambitious book offers a vast and often touching panorama of everyday life in occupied Europe. The fruit of a multi-year research project bringing together an impressive array of sources in multiple languages, it aims to attract a general as well as specialist readership. Tönsmeyer places individual experiences at the centre of the work, distancing herself from history-writing in »big numbers« that fails to capture the »varied and shocking« (275) aspects of being occupied. Instead, this work aims to render occupation »comprehensible as a civilian experience ... taking it seriously as a social process« with manifold dynamics and tensions (15).

The book is founded on first-person accounts from the Second World War that reflect a broad range of experiences. It also draws on later recollections and memoirs, buttressed by archival documents. According to Tönsmeyer, German conquest led to the development of »occupied societies« that were comprised of both occupiers and occupied populations. Uneven power-relations permeated these societies, colouring even the most mundane daily interactions. The author’s analysis of such societies is informed by the thinking of Ewald Frie and Boris Nieswand, as well as Jan Philipp Reemtsma, who have considered how human beings adapt to situations of uncertainty that they cannot control or understand.

By investigating specific moments, such as invasion and the arrival of occupiers, the maintenance of administrative control and surveillance through paperwork, as well as aspects of daily living, such as housing, nourishment, and labour mobilization, the volume highlights similarities across regions, and the everyday violence that characterized occupied societies Europe-wide. The author also sets her work in the context of an emerging history of emotions, returning often to the deep-seated fear, embarrassment, humiliation, sadness, and other feelings evoked by first-person testimonies. She thus begins to sketch out a framework for a potential future emotional history of German-occupied Europe.

Most efforts to write the history of occupied Europe take a German-centred perspective, are limited to one or a small number of national contexts or focus on a particular region. Edited volumes that bring together contributions by a series of national or regional experts aim to increase geographical breadth but can be inconsistent in quality and insufficiently integrated. Without systematic analysis, they leave shared themes to emerge (or not) more or less accidentally. In contrast, this book puts shared topics and themes at the centre of the inquiry, typically offering a brief introduction to a specific theme, then developing it through a series of examples that diverge in time and space before circling back to reiterate general points.

By emphasizing shared experiences across German-occupied territories, Tönsmeyer’s work contributes to building a more integrated history of Europe and Europeans. The testimony not only of working-age men, but also of young people and older adults provides important building-blocks for the volume, which deliberately decentres German occupiers’ experiences. Tönsmeyer brings welcome attention to women, not simply as victims of Nazism, but as workers, resisters, participants, agents. She analyses subtle forms of sexual violence, such as forcible undressing, as well as more direct ones, like rape, as integral elements of occupation’s brutality. More generally, the author is well-attuned to the multifarious forms that violence took, and to how a range of these forms affected occupied populations. She rightly points out that routine humiliations and the constant fear of violence were as clear markers of occupation as open violence. An additional strength is the way that the volume integrates the history of racial persecution and genocide into broader narratives of occupation, not only highlighting connections between the forms of violence directed toward different groups but also analysing the ways that members of local populations became complicit in the racial oppression of notably Jews and Sinti and Roma.

The volume succeeds at painting a picture of everyday life under German occupation that is both over-arching and filled with granular detail. It recognizes how similar experiences might play out differently across time and space, and any loss of shading that results from such a broad project is more than justified by the insights that derive from its implicit and explicit comparisons. At the same time, scholars of German-occupied Europe may find little that is, strictly-speaking, new here. The layered examples confirm our sense of the contours of occupied life rather than advancing radically new perspectives. Although it makes sense to insist on the centrality of violence and humiliation to everyday life under occupation, other elements, such as voluntary and involuntary mobility across Europe, and the many interconnections between and among occupied areas, might have been given more attention. The book’s introduction and conclusion consider the resonances of World War Two’s occupation experiences with present-day Ukrainian experiences of Russian occupation. Further engagement with the historiography of military occupations globally, and perhaps also with the history of colonialism as a form of occupation, might have opened up additional perspectives. These challenges, however, can be taken up by other scholars. As it is, this volume combines thematic overviews with individual detail to present a rich and valuable tapestry of life in German-occupied Europe.