Current research, writes Helmut Walser Smith, has neglected investigations of long-term influences on modern German history. Emphasis on rupture, fragmentation, and skepticism toward master narratives has foreshortened the temporal frameworks for explaining National Socialism and the Holocaust. Recent historiographical focus on biomedical racial hygiene and other distinctly modern aspects of the Nazi dystopia, however important, has diverted attention from longer continuities that impinge on the question of Nazi anti-Semitism and genocidal practice. Smith identifies historians' preoccupation with shattered discontinuity as a “new orthodoxy”; fragmentation has assumed the status of a “root metaphor” that precludes “traditional historical narrative” and the possibility of telling stories that strive for a “coherent whole” (pp. 4–5).

To resist this trend and direct attention to deeper historical processes, Smith has designed five loosely connected essays as a “series of attempts to construct bridges across chronological chasms” (p. 6). These studies respectively examine the perspectives and blind spots of historical generations and schools interpreting the Third Reich; how Germans learned to spatialize, sense, and imagine the nation; the collective trauma of the Thirty Years' War on Germany's national memory that occluded Jewish remembrance; anti-Jewish violence in Germany and eastern Europe over the long nineteenth century; and, finally, the intellectual origins of eliminationist racism. The sweep and intellectual breadth of these essays is stunning, all the more so because they move beyond the book's ostensible subject of Germany's long nineteenth century to address both continental Europe and the early modern period. The interwoven themes of nationalism, racism, and anti-Semitism furthermore lend coherence to the collection, allowing the reader to think about their notional development over centuries. Collectively, the essays point to a longue durée of anti-Semitic imagination, exclusion, and violence that current interpretations of genocidal practices largely overlook. In asking to extend the Holocaust's temporal and spatial “depth of field,” the author raises key issues in method, interpretation, and periodization. Written with clarity and grace, these essays forcefully embrace their genre's original spirit; they are critical, suggestive, probing. In posing significant questions, sketching continuities, and limning deeper historical logics to the Holocaust, the essays will invigorate discussion. But as a convincing revisioning of Germany's relationship to nation, race, and religion in the nineteenth century, the collection poses as many questions as answers. This review thus addresses the collection's virtues and shortcomings.

The essays' strength lies in the impressive range of method and interpretation. Blending a formidable body of historical literature with motifs and ideas from art history, cultural anthropology, and political philosophy, Smith throws light on a number of dark corners. His account of the knotted relationship between Germany's scarred collective memory of the Thirty Years' War and its erasure of Jewish suffering shows an adroit blend of anthropology and cultural history. Equally provocative is his sketch of nationalism's evolution from visual and aural constructs (maps and language) into a psychic “interior depth” of self-identity. Fichte emerges as the pivotal figure for nineteenth-century nation-thinking, at least for radical nationalists who transformed nations and states into racial communities. In the last essay, Smith's discussions of Heinrich Treitschke, Friedrich Ratzel, Alfred Ploetz, Paul Rohrbacher, and Heinrich Class mark the stations of conceptual slippage toward the terminus of racial nationalism and anti-Semitism. An instructive discussion of the annihilation of the Herero and Nama peoples between 1904 and 1907 further evinces the eliminationist discourse that informed General von Trotha's fundamental attitudes toward empire and civilization. Smith's foray into the intellectual pedigree of racial nationalism contends that Detlev Peukert's concept of modernist racial thinking has broader and deeper roots in nineteenth-century Germany than previously thought.

Of particular importance, the essay “From Play to Act” comprehensively examines the broad band of anti-Semitic violence that spanned western, central, and eastern Europe during the long nineteenth century. For this investigation, Smith leaves the high ground of intellectual history to deploy a brand of historical anthropology that centers on ritual and symbolic forms of anti-Semitic violence, which he finds solidly embedded in the collective memory of Christian Europe. His survey frames anti-Semitic and ethnic violence as a trans-European phenomenon, and it marshals the evidence to draw a tight arc between the pogroms of the 1880s, ethnic killing in World War I, and the ethnically motivated massacres of the Soviet civil war. Two salient features emerge from this evidence. It diminishes the prominence of German anti-Semitic violence (see the table on p. 136); but it also unearths the long-standing reservoirs of prejudice in rural political cultures, whose attitudes and practices correspond poorly with party politics or racial conceptions of anti-Semitism. By foregrounding “traditional” anti-Semitism and illustrating its capacity to generate large-scale violence in the period from 1880 to the 1920s, Smith provides a key for explaining how older forms of exclusion and hate served the genocidal practices of National Socialism. In doing so, Smith does not discount the significance of racial ideology and its biomedical regimes but, rather, argues for additional explanations. While eugenics and racial hygiene animated an ideologically overheated postwar generation (e.g., Michael Wildt's Generation des Unbedingten), such racial doctrines had less effect on rural and provincial communities, whose perceptions of and attitudes toward Nazi genocide remain underresearched. In this regard, Smith's discussion is richly suggestive for future research. How modern forces of acculturation converged with received attitudes to produce the anti-Semitism of ordinary people is a question well worth posing.

Yet Smith's productive insights have their blind spots. Missing in the critical subjects of nationalism, anti-Semitism, and religion is sociological depth. For the central subject of nationalism, Smith deploys a selective brand of intellectual history. He asks the reader to accept Fichte's national selfhood as paradigmatic and then jumps to the late nineteenth century to fashion Treitschke, Rohrbacher, Class, and others as harbingers of eliminationist racism (p. 71). (In deploying such a term, Smith valorizes Goldhagen's use of “eliminationist,” although he rejects Goldhagen's treatment of the nineteenth century.) This account knowingly elides the civic nationalisms of the Vormärz, the Revolution of 1848/49, and the various liberalisms and parliamentary conservatisms of the 1850s and 1860s (p. 221). Setting aside more than a half-century of mainstream political life, it foregrounds the marginal visions of racial nationalism in the Wilhelminian era. Bourgeois civil society and its varied visions of political modernity therefore play a decidedly minor role in the argument. Yet Bürgertum, with its discursive engines for assimilation and difference as well as its experiential arenas for Jewish-Christian cooperation and coexistence, exerts a silent presence. By ignoring the ideals and practices of civil society, the argument undermines its own claims to capture either nineteenth-century continuities or coherent wholes. For the collection's emphasis on religion and nation, the rich textures of Jewish-Christian civic relations—in law, education, business, politics, the arts, religion, marriage, associational life—surely form part of this complex continuity. Amid strife and prejudice, German Jews also found sanctuary in Germany's laws, culture, and civic life—as did other European Jews. It is only against the background of nineteenth-century civil society, and Jewish agency within it, that one apprehends twentieth-century differences. Frank Bajohr's research on the “aryanization” of Jewish property, for example, evokes ineffable sadness precisely because it rests on the premise that generations of Jews and Christians perceived each other foremost as Germans. In sum, the collection's thin treatment of the first half of the long nineteenth century weakens the overall argument for long-term causality. Unwittingly, the essays' analytical heft shifts to the decades between 1880 and the 1940s: a standard periodization from which Smith wishes to escape.

Inattention to reception is also troubling. The power of these essays resides in the assumption that millions of Germans vernacularized racialized forms of nationalism and acted on them. Yet the essays don't explore how ordinary Germans and east Europeans absorbed the ideas of an Alfred Ploetz or a Heinrich Class. Consequently, Smith's choice of deploying intellectual history to posit a mass sociological phenomenon is not always convincing. Recent excavations of nineteenth-century German and Austrian communities have underscored the relative indifference of ordinary Europeans to nationalist rhetoric. Scholarship on national identity suggests that bourgeois print matter is a poor yardstick to measure local experience; the self-evident logic of nationhood amid cultural and political hybridities does not always obtain. Taking stock of the political literacies through which ordinary German citizens transformed their understanding of community and polity remains a methodological conundrum.

If Smith assumes that racial and eliminationist discourses recast German nationalism, his essay “From Play to Act” assigns secondary importance to the differing forms of anti-Semitic discourse in their various contexts. When tracing the path of violence from pogrom to genocide, the author draws few distinctions between anti-Semitic print cultures of France, Germany, and eastern Europe, nor accents differences in the heterogeneous political forces that fomented and mobilized collective violence. Of greater import is the substratum of traditional anti-Semitic rites and rituals that structured Christian symbolic violence throughout Europe. Searching for deeper underlying catalysts, Smith turns to cultural anthropology and uses the metaphor of a “script” to explain the homologous forms of violence found throughout Europe, from the Fettmilch revolt of 1614 to ethnic cleansing during World War I. Although violence punctuated the script of anti-Semitism, Smith notes, inhibition and restraint inhered in traditional anti-Semitic rituals. By the end of the nineteenth century, however, radical nationalism altered the script, and the “dam of inhibition broke” (p. 117). The pressures of modernity and the core elements of peasant animosity are characterized, then, as unified, general, and applicable to all cultures. Referring to the Kishinev pogroms of 1905 and 1906, Smith writes, “This script was not a Russian script but a European one, and in the modern period it had been rehearsed dozens of times throughout the zones of Christian-Jewish settlement” (p. 155). Deploying the metaphors of thresholds, dams, and theaters, Smith portrays the decades after 1880 as a portentous period when thresholds were crossed, dams breached, and the theater of anti-Semitic rites turned murderous.

That similarities existed in violent anti-Semitic rituals throughout Europe over centuries is persuasively established. Blood-libel and host-desecration charges were ubiquitous and disturbingly persistent, right into the twentieth century. But homologous structures can also be deceptive; similarity of form can disguise altered content, changed contexts, and varied practices over time and space. By opting for the parachutist's view of transcontinental violence, the specificity and historicity of local knowledge goes missing. His integrative mode of explanation papers over particularity and relational difference. (Viewed rhetorically, Smith's narrative privileges holistic synecdoche over metonymy, whose dispersive, partial, contiguous qualities undermine the central thesis.) Are Catholic, Protestant, and Russian Orthodox anti-Semitisms indistinguishable? Did the political prisms of Russian, Hungarian, German, Polish, and other agitators refract their dark light equally or at different angles and densities? Do all rituals dam pent-up hatred for future vengeance? Finally, how does one parse the grammar of modern anti-Semitic violence and properly diagram the agency of the press, political parties, and collective memory? Is collective memory a sufficient factor for violence without modern agitation? If so, where? In short, what the reader gains in interpretive breadth is sacrificed with historical depth and specificity. Moreover, because regional and national differences are left out of focus, the crucial question of German continuities is not answered. Although the subsequent chapter on eliminationist racism returns to German radical nationalists, the linkage between specific German social formations and omnipresent anti-Semitic violence is never established.

By acknowledging the complexity and difficulty of posing such questions, these reservations only praise Smith's enterprise, for they endorse the author's call to assess approaches that best measure the impact of long-run continuities on modern mass society. Indeed, these essays are a timely call to submit modernity's three centuries to a deeper and broader set of overarching explanations. Above all, this collection exhorts historians to soften interpretive boundaries and reassess the various types of anti-Semitisms, political cultures, and time frames that constitute the Holocaust as an unfixed aggregate term. Not one lens but many are needed to view long-, mid-, and short-range factors. Because the watchwords of this project appear to be historicity, inclusion, and synthesis, Smith's compelling questions are generous in spirit and should spur debate on causality, complicity, and continuity in modern German history. May that discussion be reasoned and deliberate—and less so “controversial” as foreordained by the book's blurb.