As historians of East Central Europe become increasingly skeptical of the nation as the basis of historical narrative, several scholars have insightfully used urban history to study how different ethnic communities interact. Recent examples of this literature include Jeremy King's well-received study of České Budějovice (Princeton, 2005), Brubaker's book about Cluj (Princeton, 2006), and Mark Mazower's work on Thessaloniki (New York, 2006). Duin's densely researched and densely written study contributes a study of Bratislava to this tradition, further problematizing ethnonationalist narratives by concentrating on Social Democratic politics with its rhetoric of proletarian universalism.

Duin primarily seeks to recount the foundation of Czechoslovak state power in a multiethnic city with a predominantly German/Magyar population. Detailed introductory chapters describe post-Ausgleich Hungary, conditions in the city, and late-Habsburg Social Democracy. The heart of the book covers the 1918–1919 transition from Hungarian to Czechoslovak rule. Duin devotes particular attention to “Bloody Wednesday,” a strike on 12 February 1919 in which nine protesters died at the hands of Czechoslovak soldiers. The book shifts between German, Hungarian, and Slovak perspectives, though the city's Germans receive the most attention. Final chapters attempt to address the significance of the 1919 events for Bratislava's Social Democratic movement.

Relying heavily on newspaper accounts, Duin demonstrates a strong mastery of both the German and Slovak press. He also commands the secondary literature in German, Slovak, and English. Duin lacks Hungarian-language sources, which may have contributed to his excessively hostile description of Magyarization in the introductory chapters. At one point, for example, he describes Magyarones as “non-Magyar renegades” (129), implying that assimilators ought to have remained loyal to their “true” nationality. The main chapters describing the events of 1919, however, are mostly evenhanded in their sympathies.

Duin pays such close attention to detail that his overall narrative sometimes lacks direction. The central chapters conclude that “political pluralism … ethnic segmentation and political fragmentation had cultural, national-political, and ideological dimensions that could interact in bizarre ways” (332). Quite so, and Duin successfully demonstrates as much; yet, such complexity and its various dimensions call for analysis and explanation. Duin too often contents himself with documenting “complicated conditions in multi-ethnic Bratislava” (328) without offering any synthesis.

The text frequently passes judgment on historical actors for their failure to accept reality as Duin understands it. Austrian Social Democrats score better on this yardstick than prewar Hungarian liberals (122), though expressions of pan-ethnic solidarity from Pressburg's German-speaking Social Democrats show that they “shied away from making a more serious analysis” (95). Postwar Communism “provided a way of escaping from the painful reality of new national inequalities and enduring social inequalities, and from the difficult challenge of looking for practical solutions” (398). Duin also interprets Hungarian or German resistance to Czechoslovak state-building policies as a pathological lack of realism (e.g., 119, 314), which impedes his ability to recreate the motives of those historical actors whose “realism” he has called into question.

Duin has little time for social-constructivist approaches to nationality. He admits that ethnic identification is “flexible and Janus-faced, defying simple classification” (72), but usually treats ethnicity as “a hard fact” (6). Though contradicting current fashions in Central European nationalism theory, Duin's reductive approach to ethnicity works well in the context of his high-political study, because it reflects not only the perceptions of historical actors, but also captures how ethnicity functioned during the political upheavals of 1919. Samuel Zoch, for example, may have been able to address a mixed crowd in fluent Slovak, German, and Hungarian (305), yet he spoke as a Slovak and was received as such.

One cannot but respect Duin's diligence, though one might have wished for shorter paragraphs. Central European Crossroads is not an easy read; even selected chapters would probably be too dense for undergraduates. Scholars interested in the history of Bratislava during the 1919 transfer of power, however, will find a wealth of detail in Duin's narrative. The main chapters are exhaustive, balancing a narrative of events, the popular perceptions of various different historical actors, and subsequent historiography. All in all, Duin has written a solid book of considerable interest to specialists.