My dissertation explores the social history of the British occupation of Germany after World War II. It juxtaposes official occupation records with a broad range of unofficial sources (including memoirs, letters, diaries, films, novels, and newspapers) in order to reconstruct contemporary British and German reactions to the occupation. My study focuses on the everyday social relations that developed between occupiers and occupied in the British zone and seeks to clarify how certain occupation experiences and encounters became important symbolic elements in the reconstitution of both British and German collective identities in the post-War period.