One can learn surprising things from this book. I had not realized that the consort of Kaiser Wilhelm II was named Donna (p. 111) or that the German imperial couple had been deposed in 1919. Or that the Emperor had made his famous declaration, “Ich kenne keine Parteien mehr, … nur noch Deutsche!,” on August 1, 1914, from a balcony in Paul Wallet's [sic] Reichstag building (odd, since he hated it aesthetically as well as politically) and not his residence in the Berliner Stadtschloss, as I had always thought. I had also assumed Treitschke was recognized by most serious scholars as a pre-biological anti-Semite, not a proponent of an “early form of population genetics” (p. 5). These and copious other clunkers and errors (the German misspellings alone are legion and sometimes inadvertently amusing) might enliven (for an immunized, well-informed reader) an otherwise tedious slog through hundreds of pages of often bizarre and usually trite statements about human nature, history, art, and other topics, all couched in a friendly and rambling style, backed by the supreme confidence of a lifelong career of lecturing on the history of art and architecture at MIT. For readers not well-versed in German history, however, the slog could result in a highly distorted image.

A few examples should suffice to convey the level of writing skill and argumentation. In quoting an 1810 poem by Heinrich von Kleinst [sic] demanding that patriots “block the Rhine with the cadavers” of the French invaders, Andersen wonders if “this is not as sick a proposal as one in the Racial Resettlement Officials [sic] of the Third Reich that everything not useful to the regeneration of Germany become matter for building dikes to deal with land reclamation: the marshes of the Pripet?” (p. 3). Evidently Andersen is ignorant of the refrain of the “Marseillaise,” composed shortly before against the Germans: “March on, march on, shed their blood like rain, to fertilize our plain!” It is best that Andersen largely avoids social analysis. “Appropriately named, the Middle Class, as the clientele for modern art, occupies the zone between aristocracy and peasantry. Both are pure classes while the Middle Class itself is neither one. Peasant taste is the absence of taste, and there is no such thing as Middle-Class taste other than as degrees of lacking High-Class taste and an avoidance of Low-Class taste” (p. 131). And on the sociology of artists: “… I am not saying that artists mirror society but that the sort of artists I deal with here … are embedded in society like lizards in deserts or Polar bears in the Arctic, mirroring not society but their own existence as an aspect of society” (p. 97).

Based on the author's slippery grasp on German history, one cannot recommend this book for serious students. A pity: good interdisciplinary works combining mainstream and art history of central Europe are rare. Andersen has published numerous titles establishing a certain reputation in art history, particularly of France and Italy. Insofar as one can find a clear thesis or thread in this book, it would appear to be that German art was “masculine” and French, “feminine.” To update this sort of pronouncement to the level of “theory” (as evidence-free “scholarship” must evince for the legitimacy formerly provided by facts), we learn (p. 25) that we are dealing with “gendered nationalities” (the units of gendering merely transcend individuals).

This sort of twaddle reminds one of the breathtakingly sweeping cultural generalizations tossed off in the 1940s (with such horrid examples as Peter Viereck's Metapolitics: The Roots of the Nazi Mind) to “explain” the rise of Hitler, a central goal here as well. The author eschews clear statements of his “theory,” though, instead by using the ploy of guilt by association. For example, if (masculine, German) Expressionism is aggressive, violent, and dismissive of social norms, and (feminine, French) Impressionism is passive, peaceful, and fond of picnics and the bourgeoisie at play, then you can see without further proof how Expressionists had a lot in common with “Hitler's Mind.” Other mainstream and art historians, doubtless confused by the murderous hostility between the Nazis and most of the Weimar modernists, seem to have missed this affinity, so Andersen wants to set us straight about it.

Therefore an entire chapter on the art of Georg Grosz and Otto Dix provides the explanatory key, their fascination with Lustmord. The author insinuates rather than argues (his pseudo-postmodernist “method” again) that corporal punishment in youth, a kind of masculine hatred or fear of women, and a desire to destroy in order to defend “masculine” culture better explain the morbid works of these artists than, say, the horrors they witnessed in World War I or their use of sexual violence and other forms of depravity to illustrate shockingly the cruelty and injustice of the world around them. Selective misquotation, distortion, and even malevolence seem to drive the author here, but after Empress Donna, would one really expect subtle or recognizable portraits of famous artists, either?

Not all chapters are equally prone to produce migraine relieved by the occasional burst of laughter at ignorant howlers. There are some passages, lifted from works in the (one must hastily add: a very odd and unbalanced) bibliography, that offer unobjectionable if pedestrian accounts, for example of the changes in the art market in Imperial Germany. Many of the chapters read like straightforward expansions of lecture notes for an undergraduate course on “Weimar culture” derived from secondary literature (there is no pretense of primary research here). The author rarely applies his “theory” to a stable of names beyond Dix, Grosz, and Schlichter, but provides introductions suitable for neophytes to the usual avant-garde suspects—Munch, Kirchner, Schmidt-Rottluff, Heckel, Pechstein, Beckmann, Modersohn-Becker, Kollwitz, Kokoschka, and Marc. There are excursions into theatre, film, and even women's fashion, as one would expect from a lecture course (the slides are here, too, in the form of copious small black-and-white illustrations), but they have little particular connection to the overall theme of the book. There is nothing new enough in the unobjectionable passages, though, to justify the purchase of the book.

Vanity presses of course regularly dispense with knowledgeable acquisitions and copy editors, but one wonders if that is the only problem. Even some normal university presses increasingly lack the seasoned and knowledgeable editors of yore—or stretch them thin with multitasking. Ultimately authors must be responsible for the faults of their books. The profusion of mixed metaphors, confused grammar, factual ignorance, misspellings, illogic, and flat-out pointlessness that characterize this one make it painful to read, and despite the puffery of a couple of dust-jacket blurbs, it will inevitably be received abroad as further evidence of the decay of American intellectual seriousness. If it is indeed (as one blurb claims) “a truly Nietzschean book on Weimar aesthetic thought and the origins of fascism,” one has to wonder if the reference is not to Nietzsche after 1890.