The pieces in this collection of essays stem from a conference held in 2003 on the occasion of Volker Berghahn's sixty-fifth birthday—a Festschrift, in other words, a genre becoming increasingly uncommon, at least in the Anglophone world. Given Berghahn's long and distinguished career in Germany, the U.K., and the U.S. (admirably surveyed by the editors in the introduction); his many influential publications; and the wide range of his work, across so many different areas of modern German history, the honor is a very appropriate one. The essays themselves, written by Berghahn's students and colleagues, are evidence of Berghahn's intellectual influence, but also of the current trends in the study of German history.

The temporal focus of the book's chapters is evidence of these trends. Of the eighteen essays, just two are on the Kaiserreich, and two on the Weimar Republic. Four discuss the Nazi era and the Second World War, while eight deal with the post-1945 era, all on the Federal Republic. There are two essays that cover a longer time period, but their emphasis is also on the years after the Second World War. This orientation toward contemporary history reflects Berghahn's own more recent publications, such as The Americanization of West German Industry (1986) and America and the Intellectual Cold Wars in Europe (2001) rather than Der Tirpitz-Plan (1971), Germany and the Approach of War in 1914 (1973), or his very first book on the Stahlhelm, Der Stahlhelm. Bund der Frontsoldaten 1918–1935 (1966). It might be fair to say that the emphasis on the years after the Second World War is becoming increasingly characteristic of the study of modern German history.

As is typically the case in volumes of this sort, topics and approaches vary widely, to say nothing of the state of previous publication—six of the essays are more or less reworked reprints of pieces that have appeared elsewhere. The book contains a number of quite interesting pieces, including—among others—Michael Gross's intriguing, but not entirely convincing suggestion that the Kulturkampf was directed more against feminism than the Catholic Church, John C. G. Röhl's elegant and amusing dissection of Wilhelm II's love-hate relationship with England, Mark Roseman's reflections on the historiography of the Holocaust, and Jonathan Wiesen's essay on the 1950s Rotary Clubs as a site for the reconstitution of the West German Bürgertum. Given the limited space available for review, and the volume's emphasis on the post-1945 period, I will direct my remarks primarily toward three pieces that attempt to develop theoretical reflections on that era, considering it in a broader temporal and spatial framework, rethinking modern German history in a global perspective, from the vantage point of the past sixty years.

Mary Nolan's essay on Americanization as a paradigm for modern German history is a continuation of her book on Americanization in the Weimar Republic into the years after the Second World War. She notes a number of limitations on the concept, including the problematic identification of Americanization with modernization, the lack of consideration of the influence of other countries on the development of the Federal Republic, and, especially, the extent to which the Federal Republic was not Americanized. Nolan mentions social welfare policies, labor relations, and government intervention and management of the economy here in particular. Nolan's points are apt and her reflections repay thoughtful consideration—as one might expect from the author—but I do have to wonder if her conception of the America that is the basis for Americanization is not overly static. The post-New Deal America of the 1950s and 1960s, so influential on the Federal Republic, was one in which social welfare policies, trade unions, and state regulation of economic affairs were more generally accepted than they have been in United States during the last quarter century. The last section of the essay, which is increasingly a diatribe against the post-9/11 policies of the U.S. government, suggests that the author's—eminently understandable—anger at the current administration has led her to project it back onto previous periods of American history.

Ute Poiger's essay on imperialism as a paradigm for modern German history, emerging from her forthcoming global history of cosmetics in twentieth-century central Europe, is a very ambitious attempt to tie together historical developments from Bismarck to Helmut Kohl, in a global context. Her argument seems to run that the colonial empire of the Kaiserreich was part of a broader European imperialist, racist project that led up to the Holocaust and found its continuation after 1945 in the Federal Republic's support for Moise Tshombe in the Congo, as opposed to the GDR's anti-imperialist endorsement of Patrice Lumumba. This is certainly a global representation of decades of German history, across many different regimes, although the author can accomplish this feat only by neglecting some other developments: the prominent role of Austrians—from the one pre-1914 Great Power without a colonial empire—in the Final Solution; the non-European antecedents of mass murder, such as the killing of the Armenians in the Ottoman Empire; the foreign policy efforts, in both the Kaiserreich and the Nazi era, to ally Germany with anti-imperialist opposition to British and French colonial rule (including the Nazis' promise to eliminate such enemies of the anti-imperialist movement as the Jews of Palestine); or the GDR's organization and training of the secret police in Ethiopia's communist military dictatorship.

Rather more convincing than Poiger's essay are Hanna Schissler's reflections on doing contemporary German history. She notes, very appropriately, the considerable methodological conservatism among German historians of the post-1945 period, and difficulties with translating American approaches, focusing on race and gender to Germany, given the different, historically shaped meanings of race in the two countries and the marginal status of gender and women's history in central Europe. Schissler argues in favor of a less detached attitude for German contemporary historians, and a greater willingness to consider personal experiences in the study of the recent past, while also noting the problematic features of unreflected individual memory. I can only endorse her comments, but might add that some of the ways historians of the increasingly neglected nineteenth century have developed to study such matters as the symbolic representations of politics, the nature of everyday life, or the forms of gender relations could be usefully employed in investigation of the late twentieth century.

Whatever one thinks of these historical reflections, or of this reviewer's opinion of them, they all stand as a tribute to the scholarly record of Volker Berghahn. His important contributions to the study of different eras of modern German history from the Kaiserreich to the Federal Republic, and his emphasis on the international and global aspects of the history of central Europe, are all well represented in the book's essays. In these respects, this volume is eloquent evidence of the profound influence of Volker Berghahn's scholarship on the development of historical studies.