The front image of Erin Hochman's Imagining a Greater Germany book jacket is stunning: a sturdy man in lederhosen places the final stone with the name “Anschluss” to complete a bridge with one single German waiving a black-red-gold flag on the right side and a crowd of Austrians waiving a red-white-red flag on the left side of the bridge. This visual addresses the major themes of the book, including the importance of political symbols, such as flags. Republican grossdeutsch nationalists worked very hard on both sides of the border throughout the 1920s toward Anschluss—Austria “coming home into the Reich.”

Hochman explores how republicans in both Austria and Germany “sought to popularize democracy in the wake of a disastrous war and bitter defeat” (3). The empirical evidence for her argument comes from examining transborder political rallies, cultural commemorations, and debates about official symbols and discourses. The republicans supporting both Weimar and First Republic Austrian democracy and Anschluss were situated mainly among Socialists, Center Party Catholics, and liberals (if those existed at the time), not right-wing nationalists and reactionary conservatives, who embraced alldeutsch ideas, and less and less Christian Socials in Austria.

The organizations created after the disappointments of World War I and the peace treaties of Versailles and St. Germain, forbidding Anschluss, were designed to foster such grossdeutsch republican nationalism and parliamentary democracy. The Reichsbanner Schwarz-Rot-Gold in Germany and the Republikanischer Schutzbund in Austria aimed at “creating a unified German Volk in a German Republic from Neusiedler Sea to the North Sea” (2f). Parallel to Reichsbanner and Schutzbund, the Österreichisch-Deutscher Volksbund, founded in Berlin in 1920 and launched in Vienna in 1925 and overlapping in its membership with the Reichsbanner and Schutzbund, worked toward Anschluss.

Whereas a grossdeutsch political elites defended parliamentary democracy vis-à-vis the hidebound alldeutsch political right, trying to create a national community cutting across religious, political, and social divisions (chapter one), ordinary citizens got involved in the intensely passionate debates about national symbols such as flags and national anthems (chapter two). Hochman thinks much of such political symbols, serving both as “markers of one's opinion about the imperial past and as a barometer for one's feelings on the current form of government” (52). German parliament made black-red-gold the official color of the new state whereas the conservative right wanted to keep the black-white-red imperial standard. In Austria the colors red-white-red did not elicit much debate, but the national anthem did. The trajectory of the demise of Austrian democracy became recognizable in the fight between the Social Democrats, who rejected the old tune of the Haydn hymn and its lyrics “God Preserve, God Protect Our Emperor, Our Country”; they adopted a new song and lyrics in 1920, but in 1929–30 the Christian Socials returned to the old Haydn melody with a new text “Be Blessed without End.”

The fight in Austria was equally intense in the debate over a national holiday. Socialist Karl Renner's suggestion to adopt 12 November and 1 May as national holidays was accepted without much debate (chapter three). The Germans adopted 11 August (“Constitution Day”), the day the Weimar Constitution was signed, as their national holiday. Both were contested from the beginning. The conservatives and the political right were unhappy with these holidays. Hochman analyzes the annual commemorations of these holidays, as commemorations were a tool “to concretize a national community” (89). In fact, they became highly divisive occasions. Christian Socials and Greater Germans did not see revolution defining the Austrian Republic but rather the harsh dictate of the victors. The Social Democrats soon saw themselves as the only defenders of democracy in Austria. In Germany it was the parties of the Weimar coalition that commemorated “Constitution Day” and upheld democracy.

It was above all regular “cross-border” visits to celebrate republican holidays such as Constitution Day and cultural commemorations such as Ludwig van Beethoven's and Franz Schubert's deaths (chapter five), where hundreds of Schutzbund members visited Germany or thousands of Reichsbanner members descended on Austria. On these occasions, grossdeutsch nationalism was celebrated. The Austro-German People's League had the same purpose in reinforcing the Austro-German “People's community” and promote Anschluss (chapter six). With the coming of the Great Depression and the rise of Hitler's Nazism, all these activities fizzled out. Starting in 1933, the Nazis prohibited opposition parties like the Socialists and got rid of organizations such as the Reichsbanner and imposed their vision of Germandom in the Third Reich. At the same time, Dollfuss's Austrofascist regime got rid of Austrian parliament and the Social Democratic Party, quasi the last bastion of Austrian democracy. Hitler launched the Anschluss in March 1938 with a military invasion of Austria. It was easy pickings because many members of the Volksbund such as Arthur Seyss-Inquart had become Nazis.

Hochman's book is deeply researched, collecting an enormous amount of primary evidence in both German and Austrian archives. She also is steeped in the secondary literature of the era in both countries. While German and Austrian historians usually look at this era from their respective national perches without engaging the discourse in both countries, Hochman succeeds in forging a strong thesis on “cross-border contacts” enabling democracy in both countries and shaping Austro-German relations in the 1920s. Ever since Stanley Suval's The Anschluss Question in the Weimar Era (Baltimore, 1974) and Radomír Luža's Austro-German Relations in the Anschluss Era (Princeton, 1975), the strongest contributions in analyzing Austro-German relations have come from the Anglo-American scholarly community. Hochman's book is a further signal contribution to this admirable tradition and has rightly won the Radomír Luža Prize of the German Studies Association in 2017. Hochman's study also transcends the rather grim recent narratives of the hopeless First Republic dominating the anniversary literature of the founding of the First Republic in 1918 by Anton Pelinka (Die gescheiterte Republik) and Walter Rauscher (Die Verzweifelte Republik).