This is a fine book about the practice of naturalization in a succession of German states. Trevisiol finds a significant gap in our knowledge about citizenship, the concept that connects quantitative migration studies to cultural and political analysis of states and societies. Since the creation of a German nation became a leading political idea in the nineteenth century, competing ideologies and political formations have fought over the meaning of citizenship. At the point where ruling political ideas are implemented as naturalization procedures, Trevisiol shows the sudden shifts, the regional variations, and the deadly discriminatory continuities in bureaucratic Praxis. His evidence about both state policies and local bureaucratic practices traces the evolution of German ideas of citizenship from the Kaiserreich through the Nazi state.

Trevisiol's method of looking for differences in treatment of applicants across many social boundaries is complemented by his comparison among a well-chosen few German states. Unlike the ideological spokesmen who still dominate our consciousness of the range of German popular opinions, Germany's bureaucrats worked quietly to put their political ideas into efficient practice. By following the individual practices of and the interstate disagreements among Prussia, Bavaria, and Baden, we see the range of German conceptions of citizenship.

Trevisiol weaves together the orders and guidelines of state authorities and the official details of individual cases to recreate the way German state bureaucracies reacted to applicants for citizenship. He demonstrates that shifting state interests can be read in naturalization practices, because the discussion of who was a desirable citizen and who was not flourished from cabinet ministers to local judges and mayors. He has sought and found compelling evidence of the depth and continuity of official German racism and racial discrimination.

Before and after unification German governments reacted to prospective citizens with the medieval fear of the beggar. The formal criteria that dominated official consideration of such applications were financial: Geschäftsfähigkeit, Unbescholtenheit, a secure place to live, and an adequate income. The thorough investigation of each applicant's economic, familial, and moral qualifications meant a “deep invasion of the private sphere of the applicant” (p. 99), whose purpose was to ensure that the individual would not become a fiscal burden on the community or state.

While such broad criteria might theoretically be applied fairly to all people, they never were in practice. The strength of German particularism after 1848 was written into naturalization practices: citizens of other German states were foreigners. More unifying was the consensus among states that Jews were perhaps necessary, but not desirable fellow citizens.

Trevisiol's careful reading of innumerable individual naturalization cases, as well as the relevant government documents, demonstrates how naturalization practices acted as a sensitive barometer of evolving state political ideology. His greatest success is the demonstration that the practice of naturalization in a succession of German states went beyond narrow financial anxiety to increasingly reveal ideological, moral, and political conceptions of nation. Political leadership, bureaucratic procedures, and elite political lobbying organizations expressed both enduring and transient political interests through their willingness to confer citizenship on some applicants but not others. A surprising result is the continuous intensification of anti-Semitism as the sharpest element of the officially discriminatory treatment of eastern European immigrants.

During the Kaiserreich, the state's anti-socialist and anti-Catholic policies were expressed in discriminatory naturalization policies. No applicant for citizenship who had any Social Democratic connections was admitted to citizenship. Dark-skinned people from German colonial regions were not considered desirable candidates for citizenship, nor were women, except as dependents of fathers or husbands. Because naturalization was the province of individual German states, Trevisiol is able to trace regional political differences. Prussia practiced anti-Polish discrimination while more liberal southern states, such as Bavaria and Baden, did not.

As dominant political ideologies and socioeconomic conditions changed after World War I, ideological prejudices hardened into the racial categories prescribed by the most nationalist and most anti-Semitic segment of German opinion. The Weimar Republic, often portrayed as a relatively liberal if doomed interlude between the Kaiserreich and the Nazis, in fact practiced even more thorough anti-Semitism in naturalization issues. Bavaria became one of the most insistent exponents of treating Jews as members of an unwanted race, no matter their individual characteristics. In this story, 1933 does not appear as a sudden lurch toward the right in state practice, but rather an extreme conclusion to the continuous radicalization of the official ideologies of German governments since 1870.

The weak link in Trevisiol's presentation is his use of demographic statistics, and more generally the placement of naturalization as a selective consequence of migration into the larger framework of mobility. The view of German internal migration described here represents an outdated emphasis on permanent east-west migration to the Ruhr, with no reference to the recent quantitative works by Dieter Langewiesche, James Jackson, and me. More generally, Trevisiol has not been able to turn his scattered statistics into an easily grasped quantitative portrait of the changing importance of naturalization in Germany. Although he repeats that naturalization happened often (pp. 95, 97, 199), the meaning of that claim remains unclear: such a judgment requires comparative statistics.

The calculation of “naturalization rates,” the number of naturalizations divided by the number of resident foreigners, might be a useful tool for comparing naturalization across time and space. The rates provided here (usually less than two percent) need a comparative context—what does it mean that the naturalization rate of the Kaiserreich in 1880 is the same as that of Berlin in 1995? While available statistics are scattered for the period he considered, more could be done with what he has found; for example, the Bavarian statistics of 1927-30, separated into Jewish, eastern European, and other applicants (p. 162).

Trevisiol has transformed his 2004 dissertation into a successful book. It will inspire new attempts to find data on naturalization inside German states and outside them, and to analyze them as representing political practices as well as demographic processes.