Reparationen nach dem Zweiten Weltkrieg by Jörg FischReview by: Michael L. HughesThe American Historical Review, Vol. 99, No. 1 (Feb., 1994), pp. 223-224Published by: Oxford University Press on behalf of the American Historical AssociationStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/2166220 .

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Modern Europe 223

in such terms turns historians (or any writer or reader) into self-conscious story makers; they are always implicated in the text, so that history itself becomes an aesthetic production that implicitly cri- tiques all pretensions to omniscient knowledge and gives creative power back to women and others long disenfranchised.

Ermarth's argument proceeds-as one would ex- pect from a literary critic-by reading postmodern texts, specifically Vladimir Nabokov, Alain Robbe- Grillet, and Julio Cortazar. Yet her originality stems from her desire to read postmodern temporality as a cultural as well as textual alternative to unequal power structures. From this ambition stems the book's most inspiring and most disappointing moments.

The impulse behind Ermarth's argument is an admirably democratic one. Everyone can improvise at every moment, and the normative frameworks in which all of us have been forced to work can be discarded. She envisions a future with no boundaries between texts and contexts, in which there would no longer be a division between, say, theory and politics, but instead an "Aesthetics of Feminism," of "Racism," of "Capitalism," and so forth (p. 12). But how, one wonders, does conceiving of feminists as history mak- ers in these terms help us to identify who has power and who does not and how and why it is distributed the way it is?

Ermarth is quite aware of these questions, but she answers simply that the purpose of "guerrilla" criti- cism is not to replace old forms with new ones but to subvert the old ones from within-to demonstrate that all normative frameworks are constructed. And here she falls back on the artist's perspicacity: "a painter like Joan Miro addresses the real problems of social action more directly than any governmental agent" (p. 103), presumably because of his capacity to "deneutralize" and "eroticize" pictorial space. I quote this somewhat surprising phrase not to ridicule it or the method that makes it possible, but rather to point to the profound problems even a critic such as Er- marth has in envisioning a postmodern scholarship that could allow for the proliferation of new mean- ings and yet also account for why some meanings (say, the multiple perspectives of minorities, women, lesbi- ans, and gays) remain marginal.

Historians will recognize some of the most recent critiques leveled at their own discipline by poststruc- turalists and postmodernists more generally in Er- marth's analysis. They will be disappointed to note her lack of engagement with historians in a book so preoccupied with history. Hayden White, Joan Scott, and others are notably absent. Feminist historians and theorists might also be frustrated by her lack of attention to feminist critiques of poststructuralist crit- icism in a book that discusses French feminist theory in some detail. Nevertheless, this is a lucid book that deserves a wide readership among historians.

CAROLYN J. DEAN Brown University

JORG FISCH. Reparationen nach dem Zweiten Weltkrieg. Munich: C. H. Beck. 1992. Pp. 359. DM 98.

Reparations are in bad repute, blamed for exacerbat- ing international conflict and economic problems after World War I. But after reviewing world-wide reparation payments after World War II, Jorg Fisch concludes they can be a reasonable policy.

After discussing the divergent motives of the vic- tors of World War II, Fisch compares the widely differing reparation burdens on vanquished coun- tries. Reparations included, he notes, not only goods from current production, dismantled plants and ma- chinery, and money, but also occupation costs, enemy assets abroad, shipping, and intellectual capital (pat- ents and knowledge). And several defeated countries (like Finland) paid substantial reparations without serious economic or political problems.

More in sorrow than in anger, Fisch identifies the United States and Britain as the villains of his piece. They imposed enormous occupation costs, took those enemy assets most useful to them, and insisted that repayment of prewar and postwar debts should have priority over reparations, favoring rich creditors like themselves over poor war-damaged countries. But they simultaneously rejected not unreasonable de- mands for reparations from current (especially Ger- man) production desperately needed by the Soviet Union and others. They initially feared promoting reparations from production would speed economic recovery, making Germany a potentially dangerous competitor again and perhaps allowing renewed Ger- man aggression. They also believed (wrongly, Fisch claims) that they would finance any reparations from their zones to the Soviet Union and others.

Historians have noted the importance of repara- tions disputes, but Fisch blames the Anglo-Americans for forcing the "reparations-political division" of Ger- many and Europe into Western and Soviet spheres (p. 12). He believes that reparations were feasible and that the Anglo-Americans, not the Soviets, were in- transigent. Fisch argues that the reparations-political split made any reunification extremely difficult but reflected underlying suspicions that made a division of Europe and Germany probable anyway, although by no means certain.

Although concentrating on the German case, Fisch provides a clear, thoughtful overview of all postwar reparations. He draws on secondary works and a few published primary sources. Because his sources vary widely in quality and approach, his statistics usually have to be estimates. Unfortunately, he does not always clearly document his assertions.

Fisch's reassessment of postwar reparations, while often compelling, suffers from a certain unreality. He makes a theoretical case that German reparations from production need not have burdened Anglo- American taxpayers, but it is not fully convincing. He speculates about Soviet, American, and British con- cerns but, relying on relatively few published docu-

AMERICAN HISTORICAL REVIEW FEBRUARY 1994

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224 Reviews of Books

ments, he lacks adequate evidence of their views. He alludes to, but does not systematically pursue, the larger context in which reparations were debated. He also wavers between recognizing that various govern- ments disagreed internally and writing as though each country were a rational actor implementing a coherent consensus. Hence, for all his efforts to explore the reparations debate comprehensively, he does not fully capture the confusion and uncertainty that plagued postwar policy makers. Americans and Britons may be more or less culpable in the repara- tions conflict than Fisch argues, but finding out will require combining his reassessment with a careful reading of the documents.

Better documented discussions of specific repara- tions cases are available, and Fisch's use of evidence is not always satisfactory. But he provides a useful overview of reparations after 1944 and a thought- provoking analysis of the Allied conflict over German reparations.

MICHAEL L. HUGHES Wake Forest University

AVRIL PITTMAN. From Ostpolitik to Reunification: West German-Soviet Political Relations since 1974. (Soviet and East European Studies, number 85.) New York: Cam- bridge University Press. 1992. Pp. xix, 226. $59.95.

This is a curious book, uneven and lacking in cohe- sion; it is more like a collection of essays on subjects that appear to be rather unconnected, or at least not compellingly connected. Avril Pittman's splicing job begins with its title, which promises a great deal more than it delivers. Neither the Ostpolitik nor German unification are fully described or related to the main essays presented here, and the impression of a polit- ical history of West German-Soviet relations from 1974 to the 1990s is also misleading. The book looks more like a study of certain aspects of the 1974-82 period, with as much emphasis on West German-East German relations and the Berlin Agreements as on West German-Soviet relations. The field work con- sists of confidential interviews done in 1984 and 1985 in East Germany. There is no sign that sources in languages other than English or German were used. After the mid-1980s, the project seems to have gone into hibernation. A final chapter on West German- Soviet relations after 1982 tries to tie together the disparate parts and update the account in a rather cursory way. There is also a brief appendix on West German-Soviet economic relations that adds little insight.

Having condemned the book as generally lacking, I should say that some of its parts deserve praise. There is a fine chapter, which could have been expanded, on ethnic Germans in the Soviet Union and the West German efforts to help their emigration or improve their rights. This topic deserves emphasis because there is little information available in English,

to my knowledge, on this subject. The chapters about the Berlin Agreements-not on "Berlin" in general as the title promises-on West German-East German relations under the Helmut Schmidt administration in Bonn, and about West German-Soviet relations are useful in a limited way. There is, again, the absence of an encompassing framework or argument that could have inspired, carried, and unified the presentation. There is also a curious variation in the level of analysis that occurs from subject to subject and chapter to chapter. Some sections that seem to ask for broad interpretation, such as the one titled "World War Two and Its Aftermath, 1945-1974" (Pittman provides no explanation for this choice of period) never rise above the driest of chronologies. Other chapters, such as those concerning German- Soviet relations, are almost all interpretation. Some- times Pittman makes excessive use of lengthy quota- tions and reported opinions of various personages; at other times the author rests mostly on her own account and description. Many chapters lack a con- clusion or summary to pull the disparate threads together, and the book itself leaves the reader dissat- isfied in this respect. The writing also falls frequently below the standards we are accustomed to from this publisher, and there are some embarrassing mistakes and word usages that a knowledgeable editor should have caught.

PETER H. MERKL

University of California, Santa Barbara

EAMON DUFFY. The Stripping of the Altars: Traditional Religion in England, c. 1400-c. 1580. New Haven: Yale University Press. 1992. Pp. x, 654. $45.00.

Ever since Keith Thomas published Religion and the Decline of Magic (1971) some have felt the need for a book just as long on more conventional late-medieval religion, to balance the recent emphasis on "popular," even magical, approaches to the supernatural. Eamon Duffy has produced such a work.

This book is not another history of the Reforma- tion from the perspective of England's rulers, whether clerical or lay. Nor is it a phenomenological description of how the sacred was apprehended by worshippers in that day, although Duffy does use the voices of contemporaries when he can. He does not draw on comparative religion or semiology to show a coherence within late-medieval piety. Nor does Duffy attempt an explanation of religious changes from some sociological, economic, or psychological angle. It could best be called a local history of the Reforma- tion, drawing instances from all areas of the country.

For all its length, the work sometimes seems narrow because of Duffy's implicit definition of religion. He is only interested in what went on in church. What people did to insure their health and good fortune, how religious concepts informed their discourse or

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