Most of the contributors to this important collection have come to bury the Sonderweg, not to praise it. Regardless, though, of whether it really is a case of “Paradigm Lost?,” as James Sheehan wondered a few years ago, or an acknowledgment of its continuing fruitfulness, this erstwhile master narrative still throws a long shadow. As is only proper for a volume whose origins date back to a conference to mark Hans-Ulrich Wehler's seventy-fifth birthday and whose publication coincided with the historian's eightieth birthday, it is the legacy of the Sonderweg that provides the intellectual context within—and sometimes against—which the articles assembled in this book are formulated. In their crisp introduction, editors Sven Oliver Müller and Cornelius Torp remind us that the historiographical scene has changed profoundly since the publication of Wehler's seminal Das deutsche Kaiserreich of 1973. For one thing, the concept of modernity has become much more ambivalent. It is now unlikely to serve as a positive beacon against which the deviation of Imperial Germany can be measured. Moreover, a “pluralisation of approaches” within the discipline has yielded a picture of the Kaiserreich that is “much more complex and rich in nuance; it is less the authoritarian power state and is viewed less from a Prussian perspective than was the case only a couple of decades ago” (p. 9).

Loosely grouped into four broad sections that address historiographical issues, politics and culture, war, and transnational perspectives, the book's twenty-one contributions, an updated selection from the 2008 German version of this volume, offer a multifaceted and sophisticated account of current research on Imperial Germany. They highlight the insights afforded by fresh perspectives and remind us where old debates continue to rage and new ones have recently sprung up. Bringing together, as it does, more than a score of highly condensed discussions penned by leading scholars, Imperial Germany Revisited offers richer fare than can be digested within a brief review. What is more, the usual difficulty of pointing to a few highlights is rendered even harder here by the quality of the articles, which is very high and unusually even. Almost every text rewards the reader with thoughtful arguments and unexpected turns. Moreover, there are several different layers of connections even across the sections that weave the chapters together into an agreeably coherent whole.

Some of the essays assembled here—Helmut Walser Smith's and Benjamin Ziemann's respective comments on the Sonderweg and the impossibility of a single vanishing point, for instance, or MacGregor Knox's, Dirk Bönker's, and Alan Kramer's observations of the peculiarities, continuities, or otherwise of the “German Way of War” engage with similar issues and illustrate how contested some questions still remain. A handful of chapters pick up on the editors' introductory discussion of the changed meanings of modernity and trace the forms in which it manifested itself in the Kaiserreich. John Breuilly's interpretation of German nationalism conceptualizes it as a set of contemporary responses to a process of political coordination that began in 1871. James Retallack explores the tensions between the authoritarian state and the political mass market. Stephan Malinowski's contrasting of a fragile, fragmented, and often impoverished Prussian nobility with Germany's rich and assertive bourgeoisie makes a familiar premodern bête noire appear much less ominous. In an intriguing counterintuitive twist, Ute Planert argues that even the presence of a strong antifeminist movement in Germany was a symptom of political modernization—triggered, as it was, by a vocal German feminism.

The theme that emerges perhaps most prominently from this volume is encapsulated in Thomas Mergel's comment on the experience of Germans who only discovered their commonalities when meeting each other as emigrants in the Ohio Valley: “The nation became something that could only be truly experienced in a foreign environment, away from home” (p. 278). The realization that a proper understanding of the country's history can only be gained through a look beyond Germany informs several of the most thought-provoking arguments in this volume: James Retallack reminds us that Germans judged their political culture in the light of “cultural transfers across national borders” (p. 84). Heinz-Gerhard Haupt's comparative analysis of the state's use of violence includes the striking contrast between the 26,000 policemen of the French Third Republic and Prussia's figure of 5,597. Comparative analyses of antifeminism in Germany, France, and Britain (Ute Planert); of the British blockade and German submarine warfare during World War I (Dirk Bönker); and of the ethos of German and Italian armies (MacGregor Knox) all serve to reinforce the message that there is much that cannot be known about the Kaiserreich by those who know only the Kaiserreich.

A noticeable presence in many of the earlier contributions, this notion is central to the final section of the book, which considers Imperial Germany's position within the wider world. In her evaluation of German colonialism, Birthe Kundrus points to similarities with other forms of European colonialism (such as the lessons learned from the British) and the relatively few differences—such as the “sporadic overacting” caused by the excessive enthusiasm typical of the latecomer (p. 259). Thomas Mergel's vivid thumbnail sketch of Germany's “Society of Migration” paints an image of great mobility—with millions of people leaving, entering, crossing, and moving within the Kaiserreich. His observation that this global dynamic was crucial for Germans' national identity is powerfully echoed in Sebastian Conrad's discussion of Wilhelmine nationalism. Taking a peculiarity-focused and nationally orientated historiography to task, he regrets that historians have taken “German nationalism out of the world at precisely the moment when the notion of ‘the world’ assumed center stage in German politics” (p. 282). Drawing on a discourse of Germanness sustained by diaspora Germans in Brazil and those keen to share in their subtropical utopia of national rejuvenation, Conrad advocates a “spatial turn” in the historiography of nationalism” (p. 293). Cornelius Torp and Volker Berghahn conclude the volume by taking the argument into the economic sphere, with the former discussing German tariff policy against the background of the Reich's economy being integrated into the world markets of a globalizing age and the latter exploring Imperial Germany through the lens of American big business.

There is little to carp about in Imperial Germany Revisited. Inevitably, there are some gaps in the coverage—for instance, foreign policy, parties, science and scholarship, and monarchy—and the translated texts tend to flow less nicely than those originally written in English. As always, the helpful pointers so generously supplied in the notes could have been accessed much more conveniently at the bottom of each page rather than where they appear—banished to the end of each article, and it would have been helpful if the “Select Bibliography” had included all the titles cited in the articles. These quibbles notwithstanding, this volume offers an intelligent, thought-provoking and argument-driven panorama of much of the current research on the Kaiserreich. As an addition to Roger Chickering's Historiographical Companion to Imperial Germany and Matthew Jefferies's Contesting the German Empire, Imperial Germany Revisited will be sure of a warm welcome—and not just from those whose students' command of German lags a fair bit behind their desire to find out about the vibrancy, diversity, and sophistication of the state of the historiographical art on Imperial Germany.