One way of defining “the West” is to see it as a framework of political values, including the championing of representative democracy and the rule of law. This highly political way of defining “the West” both accompanied and underwrote international cooperation under US leadership after World War II. It rested on the belief that lasting peace and economic prosperity could only be achieved through international cooperation and the abandonment of exclusively nation-state-centered politics. Despite the broad relevance of “the West” as a concept, this edited volume is nevertheless a very “German” book. After all, few nations have wrestled intellectually as much as Germany has since the end of World War I with the concept of “the West,” and with their own inclusion in or exclusion from this concept. Heinrich August Winkler's two-volume study, Der lange Weg nach Westen (2000), an examination of Germany's place in Europe and the world at large, was arguably the last major contribution to these debates. As a result, Winkler's study is, in many ways, the starting point for Germany and “The West,” for it points to both “the West's” continuing importance for scholars and to its continued political relevance.

In the words of the editors, this volume “does not seek to settle the question about Germany's ‘actual’ relationship to the West. Its principal aim is to historicize this question” (1). It begins with a chapter by Bernhard Struck about the early decades of the nineteenth century. In Struck's view, “the shift towards an idea of East and West as oppositional Kollektivsingulare” (51) was beginning to develop during these decades. In the next chapter, Mark Hewitson reminds us that during the Wilhelmine period, “‘the East’ was a relatively stable, commonplace term, representing … Germany's most consistent and constitutive ‘other’” (64). Hewitson's arguments are helpful and necessary reminders that, before 1914, Imperial German ultimately saw itself as part of “the West”—despite the fact that a minority of conservative and nationalist Germans dreamed of colonizing the East. It is ironic that the outbreak of war in 1914 created a situation in which Germany “was both in ‘the West’ and threatened by it” (65). After the war, this sentiment continued to inform the radical Right's views of “the ‘Western’ allies, Zivilisation and ‘the ideas of 1789’” (66).

Hewitson is not the only contributor to this volume who points out the importance of World War I for a shift in German notions about “the West.” Anselm Doering-Manteuffel shows that—in addition to the initially artificial antagonisms between “German” and “Western” values created and exploited by German wartime propaganda—Germany's defeat in the war added significantly to the discrediting of those values. It was especially the refusal of France and Great Britain to allow Germans and Austrians to claim the right of national self-determination to unify their two territorially diminished states that bolstered anti-Western feelings already stirred up between 1914 and 1918. From the perspective of many Germans, the term Western values became synonymous with British and French interests after World War I.

During the years of the Weimar Republic, according to Austin Harrington in his essay, even left-liberal Germans thus embraced a certain skepticism toward “the Atlantic West” (179). As a result, left-liberal social commentators and academics such as Alfred Weber, Georg Simmel, and Ernst Cassirer felt that “the challenge for Europe was to define an intelligent project of modernity beyond both the triumphalist industrial-commercial modernity of the Atlantic West on the one hand and the bureaucratic and paternalist collectivist modernity of the tsarist and post-tsarist Russian East on the other” (179). After World War II, even conservative thinkers (at least in the Federal Republic of Germany) quickly came to terms with West Germany's integration into the West through NATO membership and close cooperation with France. As a result, Martina Steber argues in her contribution to the volume that the “development of conservatism in the FRG was thus characterized by a profound engagement with German, European, and U.S.-American traditions of political thought. The multidimensional appropriation … of the concept of the West were part and parcel of this process; and these drew heavily on nineteenth-century notions of the West” (241).

The essays in Germany and “The West” cover more than two hundred years of German history, from the 1770s all the way to the 1970s—even if only three chapters focus exclusively on the post-1945 era and only one of these deals with East Germany. There is no question that the book offers a wide array of in-depth analyses of notion of “the West” in German history, but more chapters on the Federal Republic and the German Democratic Republic between 1949 and 1990, and at least one contribution on views about “the West” in unified Germany after 1990, would have usefully enlarged the already broad scope of this edited volume. In addition, the omission of a chapter dealing with German conceptions of the American West must be mentioned, especially given the role that ideas about the westward expansion of the United States played in public discourse in Germany until at least 1914. Germany and “The West” nevertheless achieves its goal of historicizing a multitude of conceptions of “the West” with great verve and clarity.