Book Review

America's Invisible Gulag: A Biography of German American Internment & Exclusion in World War II—Memory and History. By Stephen Fox. (New York: Lang, 2000. xxiv, 379 pp. Paper, $34.95, ISBN 0-8204-4914-8.)	1
Historical inquiries of World War II have in recent years demonstrated an intriguing shift away from the studies of great warriors and important battles to the experiences of ordinary participants. Guided by Samuel Hynes's argument that the way to understand modern war is to "turn away from history and its numbers and to seek" reality in the lives of the rank and file rather than their overlords, we have witnessed a plethora of studies of ordinary persons who did the actual killing and/or suffered the personal consequences of warfare. The growing fascination with such cultural studies of World War II have presented a particular challenge for those scholars seeking to demystify the enemy. Given our knowledge of the global consequences of Nazism, humanizing the sympathizers with, or executors of, Nazi Germany's military policy is not an easy feat.	2
Some of the most intriguing episodes of that genre are the recent studies of German POWs (prisoners of war) and alien detainees in the continental United States. Liberated by captivity from unerring loyalty to the cause, those prisoners and detainees offered a complex picture of human beings seeking to recover, reconstruct, or reinvent their personal identities. Instead of the common portrayal of evil Germans, these studies reveal the presence of individuals espousing a wide diversity of political sentiments, many of them as far removed from Nazism as were their adversaries. These attempts to humanize the enemy, however, have produced uneven results, ranging from fascinating sociological studies to a veritable abuse of the historical record. The two studies reviewed here provide examples of the opportunities and dangers involved in that type of enterprise.	. . .