This volume of essays provides a fine overview of research on popular history, one of the most methodologically innovative and exciting areas of research on German history. There has been a major boom since the late 1990s in the treatment of historical themes in books, movies, television, magazines, and museums. Editor Sylvia Paletschek attributes this growing interest in the past to the disruption of traditional identities, declining belief in progress, and a sense of crisis. Also, in its attempts to become more “scientific,” academic history has lost its “entertainment value” (p. 3). Popular media use “mediating strategies” (p. 4), such as emotionalization, that make history more appealing to the general population. There is an illuminating discussion in the volume of the relationship between the study of popular history, mainstream historiography, the study of memory, and public history.

Part I, with its focus on the nineteenth century, analyzes the relationship between academic and popular history-writing. Angelika Epple asks why female writers of popular historical accounts were excluded from the canon of true historians in Germany. Essentially, Epple's argument seems to be that for Ranke, historians were subjective, but they could attain objectivity through correct methodology. Conversely, Johanna Schopenhauer claimed that objectivity was part of her character, but, like other female history-writers, she embraced subjective methods and themes. Readers might like to know more about female writing on private life. Paletschek's chapter shows that articles about history in the popular magazine Die Gartenlaube were innovative in that they had an “almost global approach to history” (p. 44), were interdisciplinary, and emphasized cultural history. They not only served to promote a sense of national identity, but also to develop liberal ideas and further a “process of negotiating a modern identity.” They combated presentism by demonstrating the falsity of both the idea that everything was better in the past and that the present was better in every way than the past. Die Gartenlaube makes imperial Germany look “pluralistic and open” (p. 48). Hartmut Bergenthum argues in the next article that popular world histories represented an attempt to understand the world in an era of insecurity, globalization, and rapid change. World history exhibited innovative qualities (multidisciplinary and inclusion of African and other non-European peoples), disquieting elements (racism), and older perspectives, such as the view of history from the point of view of salvation (in the case of Catholic accounts), progress, or moral advance.

Part II looks at the twentieth century. Wolfgang Hardtwig lays out a subtle and diverse research agenda for this field, covering publishing history; the role of the intellectual in civil society; the “contribution of popular historiography to the formation of and change in historical-political awareness in Germany” (p. 83); the interaction of ideas, demand, culture, and forms of representation; popular history's attempts to overcome the split between history-writing, the philosophy of history, and literary traditions; the ways popular history deals with the split between history and memory; and the relationship with modern knowledge society. Academic historians, he seems to suggest, cannot ignore the general public's desire for coherence and a breaking down of barriers between popular and academic culture.

Dictatorship discouraged the effective popularization of history, as Christoph Classen demonstrates in his article on radio in the GDR. In the heyday of radio (until the mid-1960s), East German audiences were hungry for radio programs with a high level of emotional content.The communist leadership lacked a sense of the potential of radio, however. Attempts to rewrite deeply entrenched historical narratives, for example regarding the Battle of Stalingrad as national and personal tragedy, cannot have been very effectual. GDR radio programming on historical topics was not innovative because it was instrumentalized to serve present-day goals of the party.

In West Germany and reunited Germany, on the other hand, historical films on the Nazi period have been phenomenally popular, though they have at times met with the disapproval of historians. Frank Bösch argues that these films and television programs have not just shaped memory culture. The television mini-series “Holocaust,” first shown in 1978–79, is credited with bringing about a decline in antisemitism, causing the statute of limitation for murder to be eliminated, and contributing to the founding of Holocaust studies as an academic field in Germany. Film depictions of the Nazi period developed in tandem with academic research (belying simplistic notions of popularization).

According to Dieter Langewiesche, an internationalization of “responsibility for history” (p. 122) is taking place, characterized by the prominent role of the state. For example, France is considering a law that would make denial of the Armenian genocide of 1915 a punishable offense, as Holocaust denial already is. A group of French historians has opposed this, however, demanding “liberty for history” (p. 123) and freedom of opinion. Langewiesche sees this democratization of history as validating memory history. Indeed, he assigns memory history a central role in the continuous renewal of academic history, following the writings of Paul Ricoeur.

The case studies in part III include Claudia Lenz's article on the feminist rediscovery of the role of women in Norwegian resistance during World War II. She uses Foucault to understand how memories of resistance were structured by a gender order. Sylvia Schraut views “Sissi,” an Austro-Hungarian empress of the nineteenth century, as a “projection screen” for various popular preoccupations. Beate Ceranski shows that Albert Einstein and Marie Curie remain “trapped in gendered clichés” (p. 185). She sees this as a reflection of some of the problems of biography-oriented history of science of the sort that has become so popular in recent years. In the volume's final chapter, Franz-Josef Brüggemeier demythologizes the so-called “Miracle of Bern,” as the West German winning of the World Cup in 1954 has come to be known.

The discussion of recent research and the bibliography make this required reading for historians interested in memory, epistemology, and popular culture. One minor quibble: American readers may be confused by the use of the term historiography to mean the writing of history rather than the history of the writing of history. The authors maintain a high level of reflection in their articles, but also seem to have learned from popular history that historians must express themselves clearly, cogently, and in an enjoyable prose style. Specialists and students alike will find this volume highly useful.