| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 112.3

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 112.3 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Methods/Theory

Neil Gregor, Nils Roemer, and Mark Roseman, editors. German History from the Margins. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. 2006. Pp. vi, 306. $49.95.
"What does it mean to write history from the margins?" (p. 2). Although the contributors to this volume offer a range of answers to this question, posed by the editors, all seek to illuminate the ways in which "modern nations incorporate and respond to their minorities" (p. 20), and all challenge the existence of anything vaguely approaching a homogenous German nation.	1
In two essays, the focus is on Germans whose Jewishness defined their marginality. Till van Rahden examines the work of German Jewish intellectuals who directly challenged the idea of a homogenous nation, arguing instead that the nation should embody particularity and difference. German Jewish ethnicity was identified less in religious practice than in the notion of Stamm or tribe, a concept vague enough to encompass Orthodox, Reform, and Conservative religious practices as well as Jews who defined themselves by ethnic and even "racial" criteria. Jews were thus one German tribe among many, "a community of common descent rather than faith" (p. 33), full members of the nation who could nonetheless celebrate their difference. In adopting a language of tribe, German Jewish intellectuals manipulated a discourse that they had not invented. By embracing a scientific language of racial distinction, Yfaat Weiss demonstrates, German Jewish thinkers similarly seized on a dominant discourse that offered a compelling explanation of cultural difference.	2
The marginal groups that interest Helmut Walser Smith are Lithuanians, Masures, and Cassubians in East Prussia in the second half of the nineteenth century. In this case, religion created bridges that united those divided by language, ethnic self-identification, and culture. Thus, the pietistic Protestantism of the Masures tied them to East Prussians but also created connections to Polish Catholics and Lithuanians. East Prussia emerges as a "space" where "for a very long time ... religion and language were sites of complex allegiances" (p. 75). Eric Kurlander examines the intersection of ethnic identity and liberalism in a comparative study of Alsace-Lorraine and Schleswig-Holstein. As mainstream German liberalism moved increasingly in the direction of a völkisch nationalism that insisted on homogeneity, liberal Danes in Schleswig-Holstein and ethnic Germans in Alsace continued to champion a liberal-democratic vision that included a defense of minority rights. Winson Chu demonstrates that the ethnic German population in interwar Poland was anything but homogenous; rather, it was made up of German-speakers from three former empires—the German, Russian, and Austro-Hungarian. The Volksdeutsche whose cause the Nazis championed were deeply divided between the former German citizens of western Poland and Germans who had long lived in the diaspora in the east. For Frank Bösch, Guelph Conservatives represent a marginal group at the center, a political group that saw its origins in the Kingdom of Hanover. For over a century, Guelph conservatives sustained an independent political existence, resisting Prussian hegemony in the Kaiserreich, demanding a split from the "red" metropolis, Berlin, in the 1920s, accommodating National Socialism, and reemerging as the Deutsche Partei after 1945, championing the importance of regional interests and the values of Heimat.	3
Katherine Kennedy's subject is the representation of minority groups—Catholics, Socialists, and Jews—in the textbooks used in elementary schools. In the Kaiserreich and Weimar, the social marginalization of these groups, Kennedy argues, found no parallel in textbooks, which ignored minority groups altogether, instead promoting a vision of a unified nation. If antisemitic images were absent from elementary school textbooks in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, they also played no part in the political rhetoric of those opposing Schund- und Schmutzschriften ("dirt and trash writings") and championing temperance. Gideon Reuveni concludes that Jews were not targeted in these campaigns because they were "consumer discourses" that were addressed at the masses—women, youth, the working class—who were particularly susceptible to drink and pulp fiction, temptations that Jews, members of the educated bourgeoisie, knew to resist.	. . .

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