| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 104.4

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 104.4 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Methods/Theory

Alon Confino. The Nation as a Local Metaphor: Württemberg, Imperial Germany, and National Memory, 1871–1918. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. 1997. Pp. xiii, 280.

Germany has long been a land of distinct regions, as a quick glance at a historical atlas will show. Yet the exact place of these diverse localities in German nationalism is only now being explored. The publication of Alon Confino's stimulating study, based on Württemberg in Germany's southwest, follows Celia Applegate's fine work on the western Palatinate, A Nation of Provincials: The German Idea of Heimat (1990), and greatly enriches our understanding of this complex relationship. 1

Confino's concern is to explore the way Württembergers came to relate ideas about their own specific region to wider concepts of Germany after Otto von Bismarck's forcible creation of a single nation-state between 1866 and 1871. Like Applegate, Confino traces connections among the intimate space of the local community, that of the province or region, and the larger, more abstract, but no less real national sphere. The preservation of partially autonomous states like Württemberg, Bavaria, and Saxony, each of which retained its own ruling dynasty, political system, and administration after 1871, institutionalized regional diversity within the new German Empire. These states provided intermediate focal points for a host of lesser localities, all of which had a distinct sense of their own identity. As Confino argues, however, there was no simple, linear progression from the local to the national, nor from the tangible to the abstract. Instead, the local and national were interwoven in a shifting pattern that eventually merged local, regional, and national identities in a single representation of the nation by the time of World War I. . . .

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