Modern, confident to the point of arrogance, divided by class, and graceless in its tragic demise—this is how contemporaries described the Titanic as it sank to the ocean floor on the night of April 14, 1912. It is also James Retallack's metaphor for Imperial Germany, which he sees as a dynamic society and a powerful state riven by dissension, plagued by contradiction, as creative as it was crass and heedless, utterly intent on proving itself to the world, and monumentally unlucky. As any well-buttoned professor will point out, a metaphor is not yet a theory, but it is nevertheless true that an image both allows and shuts off analytical possibilities. This is an imperial Germany both authoritarian and modern, but not one in perpetual crisis, or self-mobilized from below, or hell-bent on a forward leap into the abyss. These last three theories have, of course, been immensely fruitful for the profession, generating new scholarly literature, encouraging polemics, if also polarizing historians into one or the other camp. But it is arguable that Retallack's image conjures for us a picture that gets closer to the heart of what was great and terrible about Germany in the half century after its foundation in 1871.

The second volume of the Short Oxford History of Germany, which covers the period 1871 to 1918, is an immensely useful compendium intended for university students. The authors of the individual essays are top-shelf historians, mainly from a mid-career cohort of scholars of German history, especially as represented in Great Britain and North America. Smartly conceived and well penned, the essays reflect the latest state of the field and thus constitute a helpful introduction to a range of themes. Short bibliographical essays tilted toward English-language contributions augment the book's usefulness. There is also a timeline that attempts to integrate the various layers of Imperial German history—social and cultural life, religion and gender, politics and the state. We notice that, the titanic metaphor notwithstanding, there is not a separate chapter on class, though there is a fine one on economy (by Brett Fairbairn). Hence we learn about socialist politics and working women (in Angelika Schaser's essay on gendered Germany), but not working men. We also hardly meet that ubiquitous figure of earlier theory and caricature, the Prussian Junker. Nor do we encounter his associate, the allegedly servile peasant. In place of German hometowns, there is the transnational actor (in Sebastian Conrad's wide-ranging essay on Transnational Germany). Each chapter in the book begins with an anecdote, or literary reference, or a story from the archives, that draws the reader in. There is pleasingly little in the way of polemic. Whether in the editor's introduction and conclusion, or in the individual chapters, Retallack's Kaiserreich is free from the tone of indignation that once marked the history of Imperial Germany. It is also bereft of strained apologetics. Instead, we have a no-nonsense history that gives far more room to such topics as religion, bourgeois reform, and gender than was the case twenty-five years ago. It is also a Kaiserreich liberated from the shadows of the Third Reich. Indeed, Hitler is not even in the index.

Retallack makes a case for considering Imperial Germany largely in its own right, both internally, so that Bismarckian Germany (served by a fine essay by Katharine Anne Lehmann) is closely tied to the Wilhelmine period and with respect to what came after. Retallack thus eschews the direct connections historians have recently made between the conduct of the German Army in Belgium and the Wehrmacht on the Eastern Front, or between the massacre of the Herero and the genocides of World War II. In this reticence, most authors follow Retallack's lead. In his nuanced essay on Wilhelmine Germany, Mark Hewitson, for example, emphasizes that in the July Crisis of 1914 it was the civilian leaders, not the military, who called the shots. In his excellent résumé of religious coexistence and conflict, in which Protestants, Catholics, and Jews are each given their due, Chris Clark emphasizes that anti-Semitism was sufficiently diffuse so that continuity theses only get to part of this broad phenomenon. In Celia Applegate's learned and elegant discussion of culture and the arts in Imperial Germany, we learn of Nietzsche and Wagner, but not what some historians have taken to be their darker sides. And in Edward Ross Dickinson's panoramic discussion of bourgeois reform movements, the Peukert thesis (that bourgeois reform movements inaugurated a kind of inner colonialism of life worlds with significant connections to later inhumanities) gives way to a flexible understanding of their possibilities and potentials. Indeed, the bourgeoisie comes off quite well in this volume. Hewitson sees their efforts to achieve distinction as a measure of their internal cohesion, while Dickinson, following Manfred Hettling, discerns their Archimedean point in a utopian striving for self-improvement. We are here far from the depiction, quite common thirty years ago, and older still in its origins, of bourgeois servility, marked by status insecurity and apolitical behavior. Only in the suggestive essays of Thomas Kühne (on political culture and democratization) and Roger Chickering (on militarism and radical nationalism) is it possible to sense foreboding developments, whether Kühne's interesting remarks on “the politics of togetherness” (and therefore exclusion) as manifested in nationalist, militarist, and imperialist organizations, or Chickering's fine-grained depiction of the sweeping militarization of culture in the years leading up to World War I. Finally, even the Great War, the seminal catastrophe, seems not to cast shadows forward. In his balanced, finely wrought discussion, Jeffrey Verhey emphasizes that there were no new ideas in 1918. The collapse seems more the end of an era than a new beginning.

The volume serves as a fine introduction to the period, and its framing is challenging and incisive. It is also interesting to take as a benchmark of where we are in the study of the Kaiserreich. Despite Retallack's injunction to bring the Bismarckian period back in, the Wilhelminian era remains the subject of the most intense research. This is not true of all the contributions. But it is indicative that Dickinson, for example, writes about the bourgeoisie as if they only existed after 1890. Male workers, as noted above, have largely fallen from our purview. There is a separate chapter on transnational history, but precisely its separateness speaks to how the field has not yet integrated its perspective. There are other such issues and questions—such as the place of the “second founding of the Empire” in a larger interpretation of the Kaiserreich. But perhaps what makes this compendium so helpful—for teachers and researchers of German history—is that it allows us to see what we have accomplished and what remains to be done.