Book Review

"Only by examining the sources and uses of the identity of a people over time--that is, through history--can one understand and appreciate the circumstances out of which tolerance emerges or is sustained." That conviction, articulated by Carl Degler on page three of Identity and Intolerance, led a group of scholars distressed by the growing signs of intolerance in both the United States and Germany to gather in 1994 at the German Historical Institute in Washington, D.C. There they wrestled with issues of identity and intolerance and explored the ways in which the individual experiences of each country on both issues revealed new insights into the experiences of the other. Fortunately for the rest of us, the conference participants have shared some of those insights in this rich and provocative collection of essays.	1
Allowing the individual essays to speak powerfully for themselves, the editors impose a minimal but effective framework for readers to use in working their way through the sometimes difficult range of materials. The book's conceptual outlines appear in Dietmar Schirmer's illuminating introduction. Two assumptions, he argues, frame the book: that nationalist, racist, and ethnocentrist modes of exclusion are integral parts of modernity and that racism, anti-Semitism, and xenophobia are only adequately analyzed as a form of collective identity. The editors then impose a structural organization on the fifteen essays that explore those themes from different intellectual and methodological perspectives. Their three sections--"National Identity and the Symbolic Construction of Nations," "The Social and Cultural Practice of Racism," and "Race, Gender, Body, Biology"--help readers appreciate the implications of the different approaches for understanding those broad themes. In addition, by mixing consciously comparative essays with nation-based essays, they challenge readers to think comparatively even when reading about only Germany or the United States.	2
The first section, "National Identity," is the most consciously comparative. In it, Degler sketches out broadly over time and ideology key notions of American and German national identities and the ways in which those notions informed assumptions regarding tolerance. Frank Trommler follows with an intriguing look at what he describes as the "Modern Reinvention of Two National Identities" in the realm of work in the industrial eras of both countries. Gregg Kvistad's "Segmented Politics" takes readers into the complicated terrain of German citizenship and segmented political loyalties that developed in the nineteenth century to offer historical insights into the German citizenship debates of the 1990s and potential ways to encourage tolerance. Using Foucauldian discourse analysis, Ute Gerhard examines the ways in which concepts of "We" and "Them" were constructed in pre–World War I German fiction, historiography, demography, and eugenics. Another essay by Schirmer closes the section by elaborating on many of his introductory ideas as he develops an interesting two-dimensional model of collective identity based on history and social integration that positions current national debates in terms of their relationship to modernism.	3
In the next section on social and cultural practices, the essays investigate particular aspects of racism within more specific contents. Incorporating his own research with that of other recent scholars, W. Fitzhugh Brundage explores the gendered and racialized nature of class in the American South and the ways in which violence was used to create and enforce status boundaries. Focusing on roughly the same time period, Herbert Shapiro surveys the ways in which racial assumptions influenced American imperialist policies and practices. Co-editor Norbert Finzsch takes his readers to mid-nineteenth-century Washington, D.C., to see how police behavior toward Irish and African American residents reflected and institutionalized racial notions. In looking at race-based boycotts in both the United States and Germany, Ralf Koch demonstrates how similar tactics were used to fight and impose racial hierarchies. Dietz Bering's informative piece outlines the complex relationship Germans, Jewish and non-Jewish alike, had with the German language as a marker of cultural and national identity. What is most striking about these essays is the way in which they resonate with contemporary realities and transcend national boundaries. It is easy to find in Brundage's analysis overtones of the debates that rage over African immigrants in today's German cities and in Bering's discussion echoes of current American battles over English as an exclusive national language.	4
Section three picks up on the intertwined themes of gender and race, considering the ways in which cultural assumptions were mapped onto the physical bodies and then reincorporated back into social, cultural, and political practices. Lois Horton opens the section by looking at the ways in which the gendering of female and male African Americans, particularly during slavery but reaching into the present, provided a means for dehumanization and domination by European Americans. Eileen Boris investigates the powerful interaction between race and gender and its relationship to the legal dimensions of American citizenship, particularly in the era before women could claim full citizenship rights themselves. Focusing especially on the woman's pelvis and the Jew's foot, Patricia Vertinsky brings the discussion of gender and race to the archetypal bodies created by German anatomists, physiologists, and psychologists that provided ideological justifications for the social divisions that haunted contemporary and future generations. Arnd Krüger's article adds another dimension to our understanding of scientific racism by bringing "A Horse Breeder's Perspective" into the debates about eugenics and racial hygiene in Germany in the sixty years preceding the Nazis. Finally, Peter Weingart applies critical elements of those debates to today's era of gene research as he explores "The Thin Line Between Eugenics and Preventative Medicine."	5
Although more specialized readers might raise questions about the arguments and evidence in particular essays, the collection as a whole is important for a wide range of audiences. Its readers cannot escape the horrors of the intolerance described nor fail to see the ways in which the intellectual, cultural, social, economic, and political systems of modern states relied on racism and xenophobia at the same time they utilized the very people they marginalized and even exterminated. Its comparative framework offers new and troubling insights into the pasts and presents of both countries. Yet, it also offers the hope of that original conference, that we may "learn about the conditions and uses of tolerance by recalling the past of intolerance."	6
Janice L. Reiff University of California, Los Angeles

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