The authors in this volume have come together to echo the frustrations of Goethe more than two hundred years ago: “Germany? But where is it? I don't know how to find such a country.” The German-speaking political entities of central Europe in the course of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries went through more forms of state than one can shake a stick at: Holy Roman Empire, German Confederation, North German Confederation, Second Empire, Weimar Republic, Third Reich, Democratic Republic, and Federal Republic. Austria meanwhile slid from empire to republic to Anschluss with the Third Reich to republic again. The essays wrestle with the ambiguities of identity, home, language, and place from the mid-nineteenth century to the 1930s. They amount to a set of fascinating reflections on the ways inhabitants came to identify and to identify themselves with “this work-in-progress called Germany” (p. 6).

In the introduction by the editors, two preeminent historians of modern German culture, society, and politics, David Blackbourn and James Retallack, explain that the essays together explore the internal borders and divisions within the nation-state and its borderlands. The focus is therefore on “localism”: the feelings of belonging that were found there and the uncertainties of place that these feelings generated. Not only nations, but also regions and localities are mental constructions, illusions of identity to which people attach affection and set down roots. If the nation is an imagined community, so are regions, localities, and borderlands. Ultimately Germany was fashioned through the local in a process that transformed both.

In an opening section entitled “Placing Cultures, Moving Cultures,” Celia Appelgate focuses on Richard Wagner's Bayreuth and the cultural critiques of Heinrich Riehl. She examines the ways music and place interacted in the nineteenth century, each impressing on the other both character and identity. She shows that musicians who traveled through space and across borders, from city to city and country to country to pursue sponsorship and to perform, both linked people with a common music culture and taught them the meaning of difference. Though the words Heimat and Heimatkunst, rooted as they have been in rural, local, or regional cultures, have been associated with reactionary movements, Jennifer Jenkins argues that the terms shared a great deal with modernity and modernist art. Artists such as Heinrich Vogeler, who founded the artist colony Worpswede, drew together the inspirations of local and everyday life to fashion styles that were part of a modernist aesthetic. Retallack delves into Julian Hawthorne's (son of Nathaniel) Saxon Studies published in 1876. Describing the obsession evident in the Saxon forests where all the trees were numbered and cataloged, Hawthorne could only wonder “What is to happen to a people who can do such things as this?” The travel book was lambasted by just about everyone who read it as inept caricature. But Retallack insists that there is a hidden joke on us. Hawthorne himself meant the book to be a parody, and the lesson is that identity “is not about one's given place, but about one's chosen position” (p. 46).

In a section on political cultures, Thomas Kühne studies how localism shaped, enabled, and limited the ways Germans “practiced democracy” in the Second Empire. The emphasis on the local activism trained Germans in forms of political participation that inclined toward democracy. But it was a kind of democracy based on political marches and rituals that also contributed to class divisions, religious conflict, and party factionalism. In a nice rejoinder, Eric Kurlander traces how regional particularism and a sense of rootedness in place (Heimat) defined German liberalism in the borderland regions of Schleswig-Holstein and Alsace before World War I. In Schleswig-Holstein ethnic particularism contributed to “völkisch liberalism” with exclusionary undertones; meanwhile in Alsace “republican particularism” emerged that would, Alsacian progressives hoped, inject French ideals of liberty into the rest of Germany.

In a section on “Landscapes,” Blackbourn's elegant chapter explores German colonization in the east. As pioneers thought about supposedly uncultivated and empty spaces in the east, they began to remove the indigenous inhabitants. This mental work clearing terrain, removing native populations, and replacing them with Germans had brutal consequences, he suggests. It was actualized in the policies of the Third Reich in the quest for Lebensraum. Thomas Lekan follows with an interesting rebuttal: he compares American and German preservationists' visions of natural landscape and it inhabitants. The U.S. government created huge scenic parks such as Yosemite as an escape from urbanization but also dislocated local populations; in Germany conservationists proposed that landscapes serve as a middle ground for human inhabitants and the natural environment.

In a final section on border regions and language practices, Caitlin Murdock argues in an interesting chapter focused on Saxony that tourism provided the German public with the opportunity to make localities part of modern society, and modern society part of the locality. Tourism promoters showed that localism was neither a premodern survival nor a conservative reaction to dramatic changes but a significant aspect of modernity. In the penultimate chapter, Tara Zahra studies the ways Bohemia was imagined and politicized by nationalist pedagogues in the late Austrian empire. It was their work, more so than the processes of state-building and modernization, that made Czechs and Germans out of the bilingual children of Bohemia. Finally, Peter Judson examines the efforts of the organization Südmark to resettle farmers and their families from Württemberg on farms in South Styria as a way to “Germanize” the language frontier. By World War I the Südmark, completely independent of any government or state support, had settled more than 400 German-speakers on farmland formerly owned by Slovene-speaking farmers.

Collections of essays based on conference papers often suffer from a lack of cohesion or uneven quality, but this is not the case here. The chapters, though on diverse themes, nicely complement and play off each other. There is no weak link in the chain. The chapters are interesting and well argued. Together they represent a fresh and evocative study of the interplay between landscapes and localities in the shaping of modern German culture, politics, ideology, and identity. This is therefore a model for an edited volume of collected essays.