Hans-Erich Volkmann's work on the Polish areas of the Kaiserreich—a less popular topic in German historiography than it once had been—synthesizes the state of research in mainly German- and Polish-language works, summarizing the literature on the Polish minority in the Kaiserreich, and on German-Prussian governmental policy toward that minority from 1867 through the end of World War I. It begins with Otto von Bismarck's Germanization efforts, and ends with Germany's ambivalence about carving a Polish client state out of Russian territory during the Great War. The focus is on these and other failed German policies, but Volkmann also includes chapters about the economic, social, and especially political mobilization of the Polish community against Prussian policies.

The German-language historiography on this region has reflected larger trends. Whereas the initial postwar research in the 1960s—exemplified by Martin Broszat's Zweihundert Jahre deutscher Polenpolitik (1963)—emphasized a top-down approach focusing on the evolution of administrative policies, later scholars turned to an examination of high-level politics, and of the policies of each political faction in the Reichstag and Landtage, especially the conservative factions. East German historiography, by contrast, examined the class origins of radical nationalist groups and of conservative politics more generally. From the 1970s, when historiography approached the Kaiserreich as an authoritarian incubator for the Third Reich, German treatment of the Poles was viewed as a precursor of later treatment of the German Jewish population. This was seen in discussions not only of repressive administrative measures—which increasingly relegated Polish subjects to an inferior legal status because of their ethnicity—but also of radical nationalist movements such as the Ostmarkenverein (Eastern Marches Association, a group promoting the settlement of Germans in ethnically mixed areas in the Posen province), and in studies of the racial-anthropological ideologies of radical nationalist academics. At the same time, though, other historians—German, Polish, and Anglo-American ones—began looking more closely at the Polish community's responses, which ranged from economic and political self-mobilization to school strikes by children protesting the use of German in schools. All of this aimed to create a viable Polish civil society independent of the German community.

In the chapters on World War I and on ambivalence at the time about setting up a Polish state on formerly Russian territory, Volkmann argues that the German government found itself essentially caught between the contradictory aims of wanting to harness and plunder Polish resources and mobilize workers forcibly for the war effort—while considering, at the same time, Polish aspirations to autonomy and independence as a useful weapon against the Russian government. Volkmann covers the policy conflicts between military and civil leaders, both in imperial offices in Berlin and on the ground in the Generalgovernment during World War II. The book arguably makes its greatest contribution by not only drawing attention to recent scholarship showing the continuity between German-Polish interactions during World War I and those in prewar Prussia—as well as implicitly later policies during World War II—but also by showing the fundamental contradiction of the policies underlying German goals toward the Polish population: namely, of legitimizing Polish nationalism and autonomy outside Germany while suppressing it in Germany itself.

This is an impressive synthesis organized chronologically with thematic chapters, but there are nevertheless some weaknesses. The study thinks of the region mainly in terms of governmental policy vis-à-vis the Polish population, and of Polish resistance to government policies. Yet, there was a sizeable German-speaking population in the area that was Protestant, Catholic, and Jewish. This is significant because a large degree of Polenpolitik, beyond suppressing the Polish population, concerned the maintenance and promotion of its German counterpart. For example, the Königliche Ansiedlungskommission (the Royal Settlement Commission) intended not just to purchase Polish (and later German) estates, but also to create networks of German villages linked through cooperatives and credit associations in order to solidify a German economic and demographic presence in Posen and the West Prussian provinces. Volkmann does note that the commission fell far short of its ambitions, not least by generating a vigorous Polish organizational response. It is worth noting as well in this context the establishment of a special fund to promote politically or economically critical German businesses in the province's towns, as well as the fact that these German villages were supposed to provide an economic foundation for the German mercantile community in the local towns. After all, this, too, was arguably Polenpolitik.

The book's narrower conception of Polenpolitik also means that it overlooks everyday German-Polish interactions. Germans (including German Jews) and Poles traded and competed in the marketplace, even if they did not interact in other ways, and this was something that both German and Polish nationalists discouraged. German and Polish Catholics uneasily shared churches (which were literally sacred spaces) and sometimes even married, a matter that also concerned German authorities worried about the survival and reliability of German Catholics. In addition, there is nothing here about electoral politics or governmental efforts to promote and maintain all-German coalitions in order to prevent Poles from getting elected to office. Governmental and grass-roots efforts arguably all belong as well within the purview of Polenpolitik, and deserve to have been included.

In the end, this is still a meritorious work. Volkmann does not come to any radically new conclusions about his subject, preferring instead to show how decades of anti-Polish policies preceded the horrors of World War II. But the absence of a groundbreaking conclusion is not always necessary, especially if a study usefully synthesizes an enormous quantity of material, as this one does. It will serve as an essential starting point and reference tool for future scholars.