Ladislas Löb's superb translation of Otto Weininger's highly controversial but enormously influential book is a most welcome contribution to understanding Vienna circa 1900 for readers who, for whatever reason, must approach Weininger via an English edition. It replaces what Wittgenstein termed a “beastly” anonymous translation published by Heinemann in England and G. P. Putnam's Sons in 1906 in the United States; the latter was reissued in 1975 by AMS Press and again as recently as 2003 by Howard Fertig. Approaching Weininger from that translation, one has the sense of being confronted with the work of a madman, who spins thoughts off the top of his head in a way that can only be described as absurd, so absurd that their very implausibility and contrariness have a way of making it into a fascinosum. To be sure, there is enough in Weininger's original to encourage that impression. It also helps to explain his appeal to half-educated fanatics like Dietrich Eckhart. Such a seriously defective edition, expurgated, bereft of one hundred thirty-five pages of notes and references and notoriously inaccurate, made it even more difficult than it otherwise might have been to understand how Weininger attracted the attention of brilliant thinkers and writers like Karl Kraus, Elias Canetti, Ludwig Wittgenstein, and even James Joyce (whose Ulysses, improbable as it seems, is deeply indebted to Weininger). In his Translator's Note, Löb provides numerous examples of absolutely grotesque mistranslations—in one place “es ist klar” is rendered as “it does not follow”—which more than corroborate the judgment Wittgenstein passed on the 1906 English edition. Löb neglects to mention, however, that English prudery seems to have dictated that all explicit references to orgasm be deleted. The expurgated version gives the impression of being a kind of misogynistic, anti-Semitic version of Peter Pan. Only a naïve, sensitive “boy genius” could have written such nonsense. In the end, camps formed on both sides about whether the author was a genius or a madman. Nobody, however, paid much attention to the argument—or the state of the text itself. This state of affairs has persisted until recently. Only in 1982 did it become known that there were two slightly different German editions of the work, and this only became widely known in the mid-1990s thanks to the assiduous research of Waltraud Hirsch (who is currently preparing an electronic critical edition of Weininger's complete works that should finally clear up the matter of the authoritative German text). Little wonder that there has been so much confusion surrounding Weininger.

In the 1970s and'80s, scholars of religion in Central Europe would habitually claim that this topic was overlooked in histories of the modern era. On the one hand, prevailing paradigms of secularization and modernization seemed to squeeze out religion as a serious topic for analysis. On the other, old-fashioned institutional church histories, often apologetic in character, did not make religion seem like a very promising or exciting area for social and cultural historians. How things have changed. Now, confessional identity and religious culture are at the very heart of our understanding of modern Germany (and Austria). The work of Thomas Nipperdey, Margaret Lavinia Anderson, David Blackbourn, Helmut Walser Smith, Wolfgang Altgeld, and Jonathan Sperber, among many others, has revolutionized scholarship on Germany in particular and Central Europe in general. At present, it is hard to imagine serious discussions of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries without some treatment of confessional issues. Many scholars would go much further and place religion and religious issues at the heart of political and intellectual developments in the modern era. Róisín Healy clearly falls into this latter camp. Her recent study, The Jesuit Specter in Imperial Germany, builds upon some of the perspectives and conclusions offered by recent scholarship and mines new ground in its portrayal of “Anti-Jesuitism” as a political and intellectual movement in Imperial Germany.

“Darwinism was a necessary, but not sufficient, cause for Nazi ideology.” This is the thesis of Richart Weikart's important, scholarly, controversial, but narrowly conceived book. Put more strongly, but within the parameters of Weikert's argument: No Darwin, no Hitler.

The law of diminishing returns can arguably be applied to historical research as well as larger economic enterprises. What had previously been described in a few paragraphs and notes of such standard works as those by Paul O. Rave and Hildegard Brenner has now been brought to the light of day in a full monographic treatment of Bettina Feistel-Rohmeder and the Deutsche Kunstgesellschaft (German Art Society). For those attracted by the majestic sweep of Joan Clinefelter's book title, however, a more accurate (if still overstated) description is found in the title of her 1995 Indiana University doctoral dissertation, “The German Art Society and the Battle for ‘Pure German’ Art, 1920–1945.”

Since the collapse of the Soviet Union, scholarly interest in the inter-war Russian emigration has increased significantly, and numerous works on émigré life, culture, and politics have been published. Given the limited influence that émigrés had on the world around them, much of this work has inevitably been rather introspective, of little interest to scholars outside this narrow field. Michael Kellogg's new book, The Russian Roots of Nazism, is rather different. He argues that one group of White Russian exiles had a decisive influence on the development of the Nazi Party and its leader Adolf Hitler in the early 1920s. His account makes an important contribution not only to the history of the Russian emigration, but also to that of German politics.

Seeking a general theory of fascism is a bit like the attempt to gather all of modern physics into a single unified field theory. It is a necessary exercise that can stimulate reflection, even in failure. Michael Mann, a historical sociologist at UCLA, provides an intriguing survey and theory of European fascism. While he does not really break significant new ground, he does raise questions that will eventually advance the state of our knowledge.

Between the two world wars, Germany was on the move. The slowdown of the Great Depression notwithstanding, more and more Germans took vacations and enjoyed weekend adventures, and when they traveled, they did so to destinations farther and farther away from home. Along the way, they filled up trains, hotels, and youth hostels. And it was very much Germany that Germans wanted to explore, following as they did quite explicit itineraries of the idealized nation. “Seeing Germany,” as Kristin Semmens puts it, was a way of possessing and occupying Germany. This was quite deliberately the case for the hundreds of thousands of visitors who took special trains to Stahlhelm marches, Reichsbanner demonstrations, and, later in the 1930s, the Nuremberg party rallies, for which more than 700 special trains were pressed into service in 1938. “Seeing Germany” was also at the heart of the new tourist practices the Nazis created: the camp experiences of the Hitler Youth and the rural outposts of the Reich Labor Service. Patriotism required an overnight stay.

Norman LaPorte's The German Communist Party in Saxony, 1924-1933 contributes new and important material to the major debates on the history of German Communism during the Weimar Republic. Laporte distinguishes between an older historiography, which focused on the top-down imposition of a Stalinist model, with a post-1960s revisionist “history from below.” The revisionist historians explained Communist behavior “as a response to a range of social and economic conditions that influenced the mentality of party members and the choices of the party leadership” (p. 22). LaPorte sees his own work as a step beyond both schools. Following Weber, he argues that policy was indeed formulated from above, and he suggests that the revisionists have downplayed the significance of the “top-down system of control” in the KPD. At the same time, the party leaderships' directives were interpreted and responded to in specific political contexts. The rank-and-file could not be easily forced to carry out policies that “failed to account for the realities of their own specific political environment,” and the attempt of the party leadership to impose ideological uniformity, Laporte argues, “destabilized” the relationship between the party and its membership. Hence, he views his work as an attempt to fuse history “from above and below” (p. 31).

Dagmar Herzog opens her introduction to Sexuality and German Fascism with a simple question: “What is the relationship between sexual and other kinds of politics?” The essays printed here offer a thought-provoking and sometimes surprising set of approaches to that question. Like most recent research in the history of sexuality, they focus on “deviant” sexualities—homosexual, commercial, interracial, public—and its policing. They are, however, informed also by an awareness of the productive and positive, as well as the prohibitive and repressive functions of the societal regulation of sex.

In 1997, Peter Hayes was approached by the German chemical firm Degussa to research and write a detailed report about its activities in Nazi Germany. As the author of a well-received volume on the history of IG Farben in the Third Reich and a respected professor of German history and Holocaust studies at Northwestern University, Hayes was a logical and solid choice to undertake such a task. The judicious and careful volume under review is the final product of his effort.