Fritz Ringer, Emeritus Mellon Professor of History at the University of Pittsburgh, died on February 3, 2006, of a chronic pulmonary illness with which he had been struggling for several years. With his death we lost one of our most distinctive and recognizable voices in modern European intellectual history. He leaves us a distinguished body of scholarship that reflects an unusually unified, lifelong, intellectual project as well as an example of active, principled conduct in defense of the ethical ideals of the university. Both will remain challenges to us now and in the future.

Bruce Moran's new book forms part of Harvard University Press's series “New Histories of Science, Technology, and Medicine.” The series is aimed at a general readership rather than a specialized academic market, although its volumes can also serve as basic introductions to scholars in other specialties who need a quick entrée into their fields. In the present instance, however, the location of the precise problematic that the book addresses is historiographically rather complex for such a task.

To discuss the connections between place, nature, and identity, and the dilemmas of modern German history that derive from them, James Retallack (University of Toronto) and David Blackbourn (Harvard University) brought together sixteen historians from Canada and the United States for a three-day conference at the Munk Centre for International Studies at the University of Toronto from May 12 to 14, 2005. The meeting was generously sponsored by the Deutscher Akademischer Austausch Dienst (German Academic Exchange Service, or DAAD)/University of Toronto Joint Initiative in German and European Studies, the Departments of History and Germanic Languages and Literatures, and the Jewish Studies Program.

Studies of national identity and nationalism have experienced a high conjuncture during the last decade, and recently Switzerland (after a typical delay) is taking its place among them. In this rich but somewhat sprawling study, Oliver Zimmer traces the shifting contours of national sentiment in Switzerland—a project that always gave historical arguments a central place in the origins of Swissness—and seeks to show how a national identity could be constrained by embedded traditions and take shape out of the very debates over meaning of “the nation.”

“Christianity has emptied Walhalla, felled the sacred groves, extirpated the national imagery as a shameful superstition, as a devilish poison, and given us instead the imagery of a nation whose climate, laws, culture, and interests are strange to us and whose history has no connection whatever with our own” (p. 72). The young Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel voiced this lament in 1796, while working as a private tutor in Berne.

In his small essay collection with the programmatic title German Jews beyond Judaism (Cincinnati/Bloomington, 1985), the late George L. Mosse stressed the cultural dimension of Jewish emancipation in the German context. Jews became Germans by replacing traditional Judaism with the universal and inclusive Enlightenment ideal of Bildung, which developed almost into a new “religion” for bourgeois German Jews. When all German Jews were finally emancipated in 1871, the large majority belonged to the Bürgertum, which can be loosely translated as bourgeoisie. The German term Bürgertum, however, refers not simply to the socioeconomic position but also to a very specific set of values and forms of behavior, underpinned by constant education and achievement—to Bildung. The very broad Verbürgerlichung (embourgeoisement), in two to three generations, of a hitherto marginalized and destitute group is indeed remarkable in the larger European context. “The Pity of it All,” to borrow from the title of Amos Elon's remarkable synthesis of the “German-Jewish Epoch” (New York, 2002), was that in 1933 many of the truest German Bürger still loyal to the universal Bildungsideal were German Jews. They, Mosse emphasized, “more than any other single group, preserved Germany's better self across dictatorship, war, holocaust, and defeat.”

In 1953, Karl W. Deutsch published one of the most powerful works in the history of the study of nations and nationalism. The book was entitled Nationalism and Social Communication, and it hypothesized that a nation was not the expression of the essence of a people, as nationalists had argued, but of networks of communication. These networks ran along the rails and with the postal service, and were the “steel sinews,” as Bismarck once maintained, of a community that shared and exchanged a common culture. The cultural turn in the study of nationalism, most prominently represented by Benedict Anderson's Imagined Communities, did not so much refute Deutsch as shift the analytical terrain from an analysis of the infrastructure of commonality to an interpretation of the style in which nations were imagined. Many of Deutsch's insights remained the unspoken assumptions of the historiography of nations.

This second volume of John C. G. Röhl's definitive biography of Kaiser Wilhelm II is a hybrid between narrative history and a documentary collection. The narration is buttressed by and interspersed with lengthy quotations from documents, especially unpublished ones from the Royal Archives in Windsor and General Count Alfred von Waldersee's diaries, hitherto available in print only in the falsified edition by Heinrich O. Meisner. This richly detailed account rarely alludes to secondary sources; the reader without previous knowledge of German domestic and foreign policy might well be overwhelmed by the level of detail; however, Röhl's argument is clear. He aims to restore Wilhelm in historiography as “the powerful and pernicious ruler that he actually was, a kind of missing link … between Bismarck and Hitler” (p. xiii). This volume succeeds in showing how Wilhelm built up and used his immense power from his accession in 1888 to the high point of personal regime from 1896 to 1900.

In recent years, a growing literature on nationalism has highlighted cultural and gender topics. At the same time, religion, most prominently Catholicism, has attracted the intellectual energy of more and more scholars. To date, however, the relationship between nationalism and religion has been undervalued. Helmut Walser Smith's study German Nationalism and Religious Conflict was one of the first to relate religious conflict to the character of German nationalism. Michael B. Gross now analyzes the relationship between German liberalism and religion.

This is a fascinating book, partly because of the excellent contributions, and partly because of the ways in which the editors have chosen to engage the topic and organize their volume. Marchand and Lindenfeld open the collection with a loaded question: Was there a German fin de siècle? Did Germans, in other words, share the kinds of reactions to modernity that have so fascinated historians of Austria and France? Their answer is yes and no. Many German intellectuals embraced the modernist currents Carl Schorske identified more than forty years ago in his work on fin de siècle Vienna, reacting to the depressing problems of modernization in ways similar to their Austrian counterparts. And yet much of the German population was largely unbowed by their putatively perplexing condition. As the editors argue, despite the worries of many an intellectual, “the later Wilhelmine world was characterized by enormous ambition and optimism, booming industries and bustling new urban spaces, cultural and political activism on a new scale, and the promise, if not the immediate realization, of a ‘place in the sun’ on the world stage” (p. 1). That optimism is the perplexing bit, because many of us, schooled in the dark side of Weimar culture and its intellectual antecedents, have learned to imagine Germans at the end of the nineteenth century (or at least our favorite representatives) as people caught up in a pessimistic, existential, Nietzschean funk. Indeed, the editors themselves have not avoided that position entirely.

The growth of research on religious topics from different conceptual perspectives in the past several years represents what one scholar has now called the “religious turn” in modern German historical study. With Catholicism, Popular Culture, and the Arts in Germany, Margaret Steig Dalton has made another important contribution to this historiography with a study of Catholic cultural criticism from the Wilhelmine period through the Weimar Republic. Her focus is on what she calls the “Catholic cultural movement,” and by cultural movement she means production in the arts broadly understood from literature to film and radio.