Benjamin Ziemann concludes his well-researched and readable account of Republican war commemorations by clearly rejecting the assertion that the Weimar Republic was a “Republic without republicans.” In so doing, he wades into one of the long-standing issues in interwar German historiography; namely, the influence of World War I and war commemoration on the political culture of the Weimar Republic. Ziemann's book is a welcome contribution to this literature in large part because it provides us with valuable new insight into the nature and extent of pro-republican commemoration of the war and the many ways that active engagement by groups like the “Reichsbund of War Disabled, War Veterans and War Democrats” and the “Reichsbanner Black-Red-Gold” offered hope for the creation of a more robust Weimar democracy supported by substantial numbers of committed republicans. This account is an important corrective to many earlier studies on the political culture of German veterans after 1918 that focused largely on the rhetoric and symbolism of the radical Right to explain a supposedly broad-based culture of “brutalization” that bled into the rest of German society and eased the transition into the violent politics of Hitler's National Socialist movement.

Ziemann's tightly argued study convincingly demonstrates that large pro-republican veterans groups exerted considerable influence within the national culture of remembrance and commemoration of the Great War in Germany. These groups largely emphasized peace and reconciliation and rejected what they viewed as the corrupt and incompetent Wilhelmine elites that led to Germany's defeat in 1918. One of the real strengths of this study is Ziemann's focus on what he calls the “performative celebration of republican citizenship” (p. 269). Here he refers to the wide range of commemorative ceremonies and celebrations that were carefully scripted by these organizations to present their interpretation of the lost war, the concept of sacrifice, and even the shared commitment to international reconciliation with former enemies.

Another valuable feature of this study is the linkage of personal stories and narratives to the broader analysis of these veterans groups. This is a very effective approach as it allows the reader to understand on an individual level what membership and participation in these groups meant rather than speaking abstractly about what the national organizations claimed to be doing. For example, Ziemann devotes nearly all of chapter 3 to an analysis of a manuscript by war veteran and Reichsbanner member Fritz Einert. Einert wrote the text after the war, based on some of his own letters from the front and his memory of events. Ziemann uses this individual case to highlight the complicated process of negotiating both personal memories of the front experience and the challenge of making sense of the lost war after 1918. In this process, Ziemann offers the reader a useful case study that touches on broader issues of memory, loss, and the search for meaning that infused virtually all German veterans groups.

For all of its evident strengths, Ziemann's book also contains a couple of weaknesses. First of all, his study focuses heavily on the period before 1928. In addition to periodic references throughout other parts of the book, only the book's final body chapter directly addresses the period after 1928, and this largely by analyzing media debates about the war (e.g., the reception of Erich Maria Remarque's All Quiet on the Western Front). In this sense, Ziemann misses an opportunity to carry an important part of his argument to its full conclusion. That is, for all of the effectiveness that these pre-republican groups demonstrated in their activities before 1928, they were largely ineffective in preventing the machinations of precisely the Wilhelmine elites they so despised from placing Adolf Hitler into power, thus destroying the republic they had so vigorously sought to defend. Here readers might have wished to hear more from Ziemann about his understanding of the actual effect of memory, performance, and commemoration on the momentous political events of Weimar's final years that produced such a disastrous outcome. Second, Ziemann seeks to enrich his study of these German veterans groups with a comparison to similar French organizations. While this comparative effort is a welcome addition to these sorts of traditionally nation-based studies, the author never seems to integrate this aspect fully into his account. The French comparative perspective appears in various chapters on occasion but never seems to be systematically incorporated as an analytical category, thus undermining some of its potential effectiveness.

In spite of these criticisms, Ziemann's account stands as a welcome addition to more recent scholarship on the Weimar era that stresses the contingency of politics and culture and rejects more simplistic accounts of a German republic doomed to failure. Most important, Ziemann's history illuminates a hotly contested conflict for the survival of the Weimar Republic fought on the important battlefields of symbol, public performance, and collective memory that provides the reader with important new insights into the complicated nature of Germany's first real experiment with democracy.