This abundantly documented study explores the course of acculturation of the Mennonites, who from the sixteenth century on settled in the Vistula Delta and became Prussian subjects in the first partition of Poland. Their cohesiveness, centered on their interpretation of Biblical texts and such elements of their faith as the rejection of war and the refusal to tender oaths and carry arms, guided their efforts to settle in their new home and also shaped the government's policy toward them. To the Frederician state the Mennonites represented an added segment to an already highly segmented society, each particle with its defined duties and privileges, arrived at by imposition and negotiation. The Mennonites’ refusal to carry arms was an issue to be negotiated with ministers and provincial officials, as, among other such matters, was the relationship of their congregations to the established churches in the state.

The author notes more than once that the treatment of a small minority says a great deal about the political and social system as a whole, and his analyses of the Mennonites in Prussia and the reactions to them from the late eighteenth century to the Wilhelmine empire approach each particular issue from a wide perspective. If his work does not revise our general understanding of the changing conditions the Mennonites faced in Prussia, its detailed accounts and interpretations of the official responses to their arrival and presence, and how the state's policies were developed and implemented, are nevertheless instructive. What began as the introduction of newcomers to a stable social and political host, soon turned into their coexistence with the uncertainties brought by the French Revolution, Prussia's defeat in the war of 1806, the development of a new cultural and subsequently political German nationalism, and the expansion of Prussian particularism into the German empire under Prussian leadership. In a society now marked by more encompassing political ideals than existed in the Prussia of Frederick the Great, the Mennonites—except those who left Germany again to escape the obligation of military service—gradually became supportive German patriots.

The book's impressive social and political analyses begin and end with two vignettes of cultural history. In 1877 Ernst von Wildenbruch, a popular now forgotten dramatist, wrote a play set in the Napoleonic era, in which the Mennonites’ pacifism is linked with immorality and lack of patriotism. The play, though crude and sensational, enjoyed a certain success. Thirteen years later, the great German writer Theodor Fontane published a novel in which Mennonites with their faith and “creative Christianity” form an admired contrast to characters whose narrow, harsh sense of duty and order turns them into unpleasant representatives of traditional Prussian virtues. The play and the novel use a group of outsiders to express conflicting attitudes that were widespread as the German states coalesced into a nation, and “confirm the connection between Mennonite conflicts and German struggles over establishing a national identity” (245). That Professor Jantzen's discussion of the two literary works frames his social and political interpretation is also a welcome example of how productive it can be to combine one's specialization with different approaches to history.