It is well known that there was a radicalization of antisemitism in Germany during and after the First World War. In his new book, Michael Brenner, the holder of one of the very few chairs for Jewish history and culture in Germany, provides a new history of this moment of accelerated antisemitism. Concentrating on the city of Munich, it is a welcome addition to literature on the Weimar Republic, antisemitism in Germany, and the longer-term origins of the Third Reich.

In Hitler's Munich begins with a chapter on the perspectives offered by a history of the 1918-1919 revolution that focuses on Jews. The author starts with careful observations about terminology and the problem of writing a history of identities that were in a state of flux. As Brenner points out, some of the key protagonists in the revolutionary experiments of 1918-1919 had little enthusiasm for their Jewish origins, while many Bavarian Jews aspired to the fullest integration within Bavarian and German culture. Some of them responded to their othering by pointing out that they spoke German with Bavarian dialects.

This conceptual work is followed by a succinct introduction to the history of Jews in Munich before the First World War. The book's second chapter is its longest: it offers a sequence of biographies of Jewish protagonists in the revolutionary period, introducing readers to the life histories of such key figures as Kurt Eisner, Gustav Landauer, Erich Mühsam, Ernst Toller, and Eugen Leviné, while also providing important contextual information upon Munich's Jewish communities’ rejection of the councils’ republic and Jewish roles in opposing it.

After introducing readers to Jewish involvement in the revolution, the next three chapters focus on the antisemitic backlash that followed. They are broadly chronological and cover events from 1918-1919 until 1923, the year when Thomas Mann famously defined Munich as the “city of Hitler.” Much of the outline of the story these chapters tell is already known to specialists. But there is no single other work that brings these histories together in such a coherent manner. Brenner also draws upon original research to add important new details. His book is particularly good on the treatment of Jewish migrants, the so-called Eastern Jews (Ostjuden), who arrived in Munich during and after the First World War. Their presence in the city provided new layers to the racist scripts used to justify discrimination by Munich's antisemites. The increased antisemitism culminated with the deportation of Jews from Bavaria in the autumn of 1923. Brenner's account includes chilling analysis of unsuccessful attempts to oppose the rise in antisemitism. It is also filled with examples of how untruths became widely believed by significant numbers of people in Bavaria after the First World War.

Reading this work, an older question remains relevant: could pro-Republic parties have done more to combat support for antisemitism in Bavaria? Could Gustav Stresemann's government have done more to support Bavarian Jews in the autumn of 1923? That they needed to do so was obvious to some contemporaries: antisemitism in Bavaria after 1918 was not limited to words and state policies. There were acts of physical violence too. Brenner includes some details but does not probe the crucial question of how violent speech became physical acts of violence against Jews? For example, at one point Brenner suggests that the violent acts directed at Jews in Munich during the night of the Hitler Putsch were “undoubtedly spurred on by pogrom-like scenes in Berlin's Scheunenviertel” (255). But the author offers little to support this argument. Perhaps it is a problem that is impossible to fully answer. That said, In Hitler's Munich is an important book. It is essential reading for all with an interest in antisemitism in Germany in the twentieth century. Above all, it offers a necessary corrective to those who try to downplay the significance of antisemitism during Germany's first democracy.