“Individuality,” “individualism,” “the individual,” and “the self” are buzzwords that appear in many histories of the modern era, not least of Germany. Sociologists, starting with Georg Simmel's lectures on the ambivalent impact of the modern metropolis on the mind of the individual and Emile Durkheim's inquiries into suicide as the culmination of individualism, have long since disputed the meanings of these terms. But historians, at least those of central Europe, have rarely attempted systematically to examine change and continuity in the discourses and practices, experiences and expectations, emotions, fantasies, and depravations that these words trigger or frame. This is what Moritz Föllmer's exciting, challenging, and inspiring book on Berliners in the twentieth century aims to do. It relies on a broad range of diverse sources including diaries, letters, reports, novels, and above all various types of local newspapers.

Föllmer's core argument is about continuity. Berliners, Föllmer says, demanded to be acknowledged and respected as individuals. And while different notions of individuality pushed this claim, it developed a dynamic powerful enough to make Germany's rather different political regimes from the 1920s to the 1960s devote themselves eagerly to meet it. That, of course, is not an entirely new insight regarding the two democratic periods the book begins and ends with, the Weimar and the Bonn democracies. But it bears some surprise for communist East Berlin, and it is a provoking—yet ultimately unconvincing—assessment about Nazi Germany.

Divided into three parts, the book examines Weimar Berlin, Nazi Berlin, and finally postwar and Cold-War Berlin. The first part presents a colorful panorama of different individualities around 1930. On the one hand, they represent, for example, among commuters the experience of isolation, estrangement, and distrust in daily lives. On the other hand, they show “mental adaptability” (p. 51), authenticity, self-control, self-interest, and determination, paradigmatically represented by sports stars such as Max Schmeling and Elly Beinhorn popularized by means of consumerism. In Föllmer's view, the whole diversity of these experiences did not nourish a painfully experienced and destabilizing crisis that eventually gave way to fascism, as many historians have assumed, but rather the opposite. Berliners enjoyed the benefits and learned to cope with the risks of individuality to a degree that it was not possible for the Nazis, once in power, to overrule the culture of individuality. Instead, they needed to organize their collectivist visions around it.

From the beginning “Nazism's electoral success in the capital,” and then even more the popularity of the Third Reich, Föllmer says, were the consequence of taking “the multifaceted problems of individuality” seriously (p. 93). While condemning Weimar's liberal individualism at large and its allegedly Jewish exploitation in particular as emanations of egotism, the Nazis' propaganda and their integrative welfare politics “granted a prominent place to the individual person” (p. 96), whether represented by heroic athletes, fighters and leaders, quiet contemplators, self-sufficient consumerists, or Volksgenossen who empowered themselves on the backs of the Jews, the latter excluded from the blessings of the culture of individuality. Even when, from 1943 on, the Third Reich doomed, Berlin soldiers on the eastern front and their wives prioritized individual survival over national rhetoric, they remained attracted by the Nazis' “blend of individuality and collectivity” (p. 176).

Finally, divided postwar Berlin grew into in an arena in which east and west competed for having learned the individualist lessons of the past best. The east's defeat in that competition became obvious the more Berliners on either side realized that the communist regime's rhetorical honoring of modern individuality dragged behind its satisfaction of consumerist desires. The first West Berlin mayor, Ernst Reuter, represented a powerful strand of thinking about individuality in antimaterialist (i.e., also anticonsumerist) terms that marked, notwithstanding its antitotalitarian impetus, a continuity from pre-1945 ideologies. It did not, however, survive the city's western parts' final incorporation into fully developed consumerism in the 1960s under Willy Brandt.

Although aware that various notions of individuality drove Berlin history, Föllmer does not put much effort into distinguishing them. A deep sociological literature that goes far beyond Simmel, Durkheim, and Luhmann, whom Föllmer occasionally quotes, would have helped to differentiate categories such as individuality, subjectivity, selfhood, agency (often used synonymously in this book), as well as social figurations, such as aesthetic, consumerist, moral, disciplined, expressive, avant-gardist, contemplative, soldierly individualities. This literature would have also drawn attention to their hybridity. Föllmer puts even less weight on the contexts of those different individualities. What the book offers is, again, a highly readable and vivid story of the rhetoric of individuality and its semantic field. But it barely drives the analysis beyond the tabloid rhetoric, not even for the Nazi period. Surely the Nazis talked much about individuals and individuality, and they worked hard (yet not always successfully enough) on matching consumerist desires. Föllmer is right in pointing at the complementarity of granting individuality to Aryans and depriving Jews of it. One of the strongest chapters of the book illuminates the desperate, ambiguous struggle of Berlin Jews to secure some sort of individuality or agency. But while the Jews were those who suffered from this deprivation more than any other group, they were not the only ones. The point is that each Volksgenosse and each Volksgenossin, however Aryan, ran the risk of being ousted if he or she did not rigidly conform to the Nazi concept of a united and racially purified Volksgemeinschaft. This restriction applies not least to the Nazi versions of the heroic character and the charismatic leader. The individuality of the latter was tied to his ability to enthuse Aryans on behalf of that nation, that of the former on the readiness to sacrifice him- or herself for it. In other words, as soon as they are contextualized, the individualities that run through Germany's twentieth century suggest not continuity, but sharp discontinuities.