Oliver Zimmer draws on the terms “journey, dance and rhythm” to explain the dynamism generated in urban Imperial Germany. Even his focus on “place,” another key term, is far from static, as the concept of “place” remained in constant social flux in relation to economic transformation, migration, emerging popular nationalist sentiments, and long-standing corporate and religious sensibilities. Moving beyond the Sonderweg and “hometown” interpretations, Zimmer critiques “uniform and totalizing assumptions” regarding modernization that suggest Germans faced modernity with an option to accept or resist it as well as scholarly attempts to frame the German past as a “narrative of national development” (p. 295). In contrast, his work seeks to uncover the unpredictability of the “socio-temporal dislocations” that Germans faced in the last decades of the nineteenth century and how different groups expressed and negotiated alterative visions of community, progress, and stability. His story is one that focuses on the reconstruction of local life and the community tensions generated during an era of economic, social, and political transformation.

Zimmer's fascinating study analyzes and compares life in three very different south German cities: Ulm in Württemberg, Augsburg in Bavaria, and Ludwigshafen am Rhein in the Bavarian Palatinate. Though distinct, each city was a rapidly growing municipality, as Zimmer describes them “on the move,” in which inhabitants sought to accommodate dynamic growth with visions of progress and prosperity. In addition to comparative urban structures, reforms and policies, Zimmer focuses on the people inhabiting these towns and how they faced new social dynamics and in doing so learned to dance to new tunes. Indeed, dance is the metaphor he employs, replacing the ideological program of nationalism, to reveal how contemporaries engaged in different ways and at different times with nationalist sentiments and each other. This view highlights the collective, creative, open-ended, and contentious nature of popular nationalist sensibilities.

Zimmer analyzes targeted areas of life within the three cities in three sections: “Journeys, Place-Makers, and Rhythms,” to depict the simultaneous sense of urban dynamism and the tensions it generated. In the first section, “Journeys,” configurations of status and an enduring corporatist sprit faced liberal ideas of progress and prosperity in each city as urban factions sought to remake and affirm local economies. The example of Ulm demonstrated tensions between small tradesmen and craftsmen in the Gewerbeverein and leading entrepreneurs in the Handeslverein in contrasting developmental visions that included protectionism, the prospects of gaining a branch of the Reichsbank, and a warehouse project. Zimmer argues that the combination of the challenges to traditional handicrafts and increasing complex and dynamic modes of economic interaction generated the feeling that Ulm was on a journey or a “work in progress” rather than a “well ordered place” or “a configuration of positions” as he describes Augsburg in one case study. In addition, local debates on the role of educational reform, in particular the introduction of interdenominational schools, Zimmer contends, played a crucial role as transformative agents representing towns as progressive works in progress.

The second section, “Place-Makers,” addresses citizenship and changing notions of municipal citizenship following new imperial legislation: the 1870 Residence Relief Law (that stipulated the source of poor relief) and 1871 universal male suffrage. Zimmer illustrates how Heimat and Wohnsitz evoked different meanings of place and belonging as well as function and communal responsibility. The three cities struggled with evolving ideas of municipal citizenship and its relationship to national enfranchisement with different results that spanned from inclusion to exclusion in the civic community. Inclusive communal citizenship policies like those favored in Ulm were designed to help strengthen the appeal and substance of local citizenship and belonging, whereas municipal citizenship in Augsburg remained expensive and exclusive as the city's leaders defended the traditional meaning of Heimatrecht. If the acquisition of imperial suffrage strengthened exclusion at the municipal level to protect the Bürgergemeinde, such various social groups as war veterans, teachers, consumer cooperatives, and Social Democrats challenged this notion of a fixed civic community.

In the last section, “Rhythms,” Zimmer explores a range of topics to illustrate how different urban progressives envisioned the role of public spaces and negotiated the social spaces in different mass public rituals: Sedan Day parades and Corpus Christi processions. In two short sections on the symbolic importance of a local Stadttheater and on urban health reform, Zimmer reveals progress and nationhood in the liberal reformer's imagination. Within debates about public health in Augsburg, for example, progressive reformers linked the status and honor of the town with the nation. This highlights one of Zimmer's main arguments: emerging concepts of nationalism increasingly shaped the construction of urban life and its institutions. Another key conclusion from this section, drawn from an analysis of local negotiations over public space on Sedan Day and especially the Corpus Christi processions, contends that urban space became charged with a Christian spirit (p. 291). Zimmer suggests a silent revolution brought liberal nationalists and ultramontane Catholics together in quest of a shared rhythm of urban life.

This rich study, based on an innovative analysis of archival documents, presents an important new framework to explain the experience of dynamic economic, political, and social transformations and the ensuing tensions within the Kaiserreich. His attention to the coexistence of new visions and rhythms of life with concerns for stability, status, and localism is unique. Readers may find the journey metaphor overdrawn at times, but my biggest criticism is that the conclusion does not reflect adequately the important insights of this book. The many threads pulled from these urban case studies could have been more tightly woven to represent effectively the diverse insights Zimmer presented in his chapters. Most important, Zimmer's work invites scholars to join the dialogue about the Kaiserreich by raising new ways to address long-standing questions on the nature of the German state with his innovative terms and case studies. He makes clear German nationalism was far from linear or a tool of elite manipulation, and links the local and the national to yield important insights on social, political, and economic life. The conceptual terms and evidence Zimmer garners from the three distinct cities demonstrates well the complexity involved in reconstructing local worlds between 1870 and 1914.