As Peter Caldwell notes in his contribution to this volume, “citizenship” can refer to different things. He proposes four definitions that serve as a point of reference throughout the volume: “a subject's belonging to a state, the objective set of rights that accrue to a citizen within a state, the citizen's subjective sense of which rights he or she is entitled to within the state, or a subjective feeling of identification with a certain state or community” (p. 41). While it is possible to subsume these meanings under literal and figurative uses of “citizenship” in English, they exceed the semantic boundaries of equivalent nouns such as Staatsbürgerschaft in German. Thus, vocabulary perhaps has something to do with German historiography's disinclination to merge the discussion of definitions of national identity with other topics covered in English or American studies of “citizenship.” The volume under review successfully calls such divisions into question.

The collection of papers which were first presented at a conference held in 2004 is divided into three parts. The first is concerned with citizenship in its more technical sense. Dieter Gosewinkel describes the development of French and German nationality law as an entangled history shaped by perceptions of the other country's actions and domestic demographic developments. Peter C. Caldwell argues that Weimar discussions of citizenship were dominated by a desire to move from formal to substantive conceptions of membership widely shared on the left and right. He sees the desire to supplement rules for the acquisition and loss of nationality and political rights with “substantive” tests of emotional commitment to a higher sense of community as paving the way for the Nuremberg Laws' racial and political restriction of full membership in the nation and the state to “Aryans” willing to serve Führer and Reich without hesitation. By contrast, Annemarie Sammartino focuses on the administration of membership in the nation-state by looking at naturalization practice in the early years of the Weimar Republic. Focusing on a number of poignant cases, she argues that naturalization was a battleground between ethnic and cultural definitions of national identity far more important than the relatively small number of cases would suggest. While the struggle remained undecided, it kept rules unclear and contributed to denying many long-term residents of Germany access to German citizenship. Jan Palmowski's article on the GDR emphasizes the role of citizenship (with an emphasis on the right to participate in political rituals and Mitbestimmung in communal projects) for the construction of a socialist community, which in turn defined the boundaries of GDR citizenship in its technical and metaphorical dimensions. More implicitly, Palmowski highlights that leaving GDR citizenship out of the picture in general surveys of citizenship's development in Germany incurs the danger of missing important dimensions of continuity and discontinuity.

The second block of essays combines a look at citizens' rights and at attempts to create culturally more homogeneous citizens. Thomas Lindenberger compares police assaults on demonstrators in the Wilhelmine Empire and a police assault on a journalist in 1994 Hamburg. In spite of similarities (notably police immunity from prosecution), this is largely a story of progress, of a departure from a militarized police service designed to keep subjects in check to a demilitarized (though still potentially abusive) civilian police. Lindenberger insists, however, that the story is one of precarious progress, and that considerable potential for the exclusion of minorities through discriminatory policing remains. Cornelie Usborne's contribution expands her well-known work on women's reproductive rights in the Weimar Republic by focusing on the politicization of women by the struggle against “§218.”

The articles on what might be termed Bürgerlichkeit begin with an essay by Jennifer Jenkins on attempts to define a suitable domestic environment decorated with modestly priced, but artistically valuable furniture sponsored by the Werkbund before the First World War. S. Jonathan Wiesen tackles consumer-oriented advertising in Nazi Germany as a possible forum for the creation of the ideal race-conscious and loyal consuming citizen (or subject?). Toby Thacker discusses how and why the notion that there was a particular link between being German and being musical ceased to convince in the aftermath of World War II, in part by studying GDR attempts to revive it.

Structurally, the most innovative section is the last one, which contains four attempts at synthesis by Pascal Grosse, Adelheid von Saldern, Kathleen Canning, and Geoff Eley. While the first two concentrate on particular dimensions of citizenship—biology and citizenship, citizenship and civil society—the last two papers offer concise, though different summaries of problems of citizenship in German (and more general) history. One potential problem with the term peculiar to German history, for example, is the contradiction between the use of “citizenship” with its largely positive connotations and its implication of thick political participation to describe subjects of dictatorships or authoritarian states—indeed, the implied question about the status of “citizenship” (and regarding which contemporary developments make it possible to use a thin version of the term) concludes Geoff Eley's essay.

The editors have composed an exceptionally coherent volume, which reflects the discussions at the conference in a vibrant, explicit debate between papers. This will make it of excellent use to jump-start debates on agency, identity, and rights in seminars on modern German history.