Maiken Umbach tackles several major issues in this provocative book. Scholars of German and western history more generally have long argued about the meaning of “modernism,” its connections with bourgeois cultural and political aspirations, and how those connections fit into the chronology of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The tragedies of Germany's twentieth century have often been attributed to the supposed failure of its bourgeoisie to become sufficiently modern. Umbach draws upon the history of architecture and design, primarily in Hamburg and Berlin, to complicate this interpretation, and the architectural designs and written works of Fritz Schumacher and Hermann Muthesius provide a great deal of the evidence.

During the years of the industrializing and urbanizing Second Empire, Umbach argues, the German bourgeoisie demonstrated its ascendency with a program that combined modern ideas of spatiality, functionality, proximity to nature, and capitalist consumerism with an insistent effort to maintain ties to the past and the local. It sought to negotiate the tensions produced by modernization by creating buildings, spaces, and material objects that could facilitate the self-discipline of the educated bourgeoisie and the disciplining of the unruly working class. Thus governmental, commercial, and residential buildings could combine stylistic elements of historicist architecture (Gothic, northern Renaissance, Baroque, neo-Classical), exterior forms and materials drawn from local vernacular traditions (timbered gables, red brick), and modern structural elements (reinforced concrete), with interior home floor plans and furniture suitable to modern needs (ample light, views of nature, privacy for serious study, spaces for chamber music performances). The goal was to support or create local identities that simultaneously embraced Heimat, the nation, and the new, industrializing society. There was no fixed set of ideas that characterized bourgeois modernism. Instead it was a form of praxis, constantly changing.

Bourgeois modernism, then, was quite different from the classical or high modernism of the Bauhaus, which demanded a break with the past and embraced the international and the abstract, but bourgeois modernism was as or more important than classical modernism in shaping the environment in which the educated and propertied German middle class worked, governed, and lived. It would not be correct to think that bourgeois modernism was replaced by Bauhaus modernism. Representatives of the arts and crafts movement and the Deutscher Werkbund were involved in creating both variants of modernism while they hotly disputed with each other about the appropriate path to the future. Moreover, Umbach argues, while National Socialism did not grow out of bourgeois modernism, some proponents of bourgeois modernism saw the strong state fashioned by National Socialism as a potential mechanism for realizing their designs and were willing to offer that regime their talents.

Umbach's arguments will be of considerable interest to German historians and to architectural, urban, and cultural historians. Some will at times be frustrated, however. Umbach is making claims about the entire bourgeoisie over several decades, but it is not always true that architects, planners, designers, and their clients from a few large cities were representative of the bourgeoisie everywhere. Berlin and Hamburg were not always like smaller cities, nor were cities in Prussia the same as all German cities. Historically there were quite different traditions of local government, different patterns of demographic and economic change, different numbers of emigrants and Jews, and so on. Such things surely also helped to shape local bourgeois identities. Umbach makes frequent reference to the psychological makeup of the bourgeoisie, but it is not clear just what that means. She can better document the intentions of the architects and designers than the “unspoken assumptions and practices” that “are not fully conscious” (p. 193). Moreover, one would like to know more about the wishes of the clients, be they individuals or city governments, and how these clients interacted with the architects. Some historians may be put off by casual references to collective memory, longue durée symbols, or the occasional application of semiotics and deconstructionism.

Nonetheless, the analytical framework of this book might well be applied to other countries and other periods. For example, disputes about the “modern” in both urban planning and architecture were central to the reconstruction of urban areas all over Europe that were damaged during World War II. Umbach's study of bourgeois modernism deserves a wide audience.