This is a book in serious danger of underselling itself. Ostensibly an anthology of 22 songs, bookended with introductory and concluding essays, it is so much more than a critical edition of songs. John and Robb introduce an Anglophone audience to the evocative term Liederhort, or song treasury, and while this collection absolutely earns itself that appellation as a hoard of historical treasures, its implications transcend its relatively niche demarcation of subject matter. This is an absorbing, even essential study for any scholar interested in historical or political song, irrespective of time and place. Yet – whether out of (refreshing) modesty or pragmatism – it shies away from making this case, and refrains from engagement with the thriving interdisciplinary, transhistorical conversation that is its natural home.

I say ‘it’ and ‘the book’ advisedly. In the introduction, John situates the project within a rich fabric of German scholarship on the songs of the 1848 Revolution and Vormärz period (loosely, 1815–1848), rather than making reference to broader discussions (pp. 14–15). In the conclusion, Robb's focus on 20th-century afterlives draws on an ‘international’ context (p. 309) – meaning the US and UK – but stops short of completing the circle and demonstrating the wider relevance of the German example. However, most of the ‘underselling’ is a matter of structure and paratexts. Don't judge this book by its cover: the illustration of revolutionary leader Friedrich Hecker is sadly pixellated. Nor by its subtitle: it promises a ‘protest song tradition’ yet eschews this term as anachronistic. Indeed, although John mentions Emanual Geibel's ‘Protestlied für Schleswig-Holstein’ from 1848 (p. 13) – more than a century before the Oxford English Dictionary notes the usage of ‘protest song’ – Geibel's song is not included.Footnote ¹ Editorial decisions are puzzling: each of the 22 songs (no reason is given for that number) takes the form of a short essay preceding one or more variants of the lyric, followed by settings of the melody, which seems a little cart-before-the-horse. This may be an ideological decision, as the focus is on context and reception more than an erroneous conception of ‘the work’. Yet as a reader, it is confusing not to start with the song. This is compounded by chapter titles derived from first lines, rather than from standard song titles. As the latter is the authors’ general usage in the text, we are confronted with endless parenthetic alternatives – a case, perhaps, where a desire for accuracy has gone too far. Taken individually, these are minor details, but in a book so rich in such detail, they hinder the reader's engagement.

Given that these are the songs of a failed revolution, there is an apt sense of missed opportunity here. The funded project from which this stems took place in 2008–2012, at the start of a decade of innovative scholarship of which this forms a curiously isolated part. That project involved a website, liederlexicon.de, which could be far better integrated with the book.Footnote ² The biggest disappointment seems intentional. In his superb analysis of the songs’ afterlives, Robb concludes that ‘they finally took their place as liberal democratic heritage’ (p. 327), setting an end date that more or less coincides with the 150 year anniversary in 1998. No new recordings accompany the book, which both mitigates the songs’ accessibility to those unable to sight-read and reinforces an impression that these songs are now ‘dead’. While there is a thorough discography, it is of out-of-print cassettes and CDs, without reference to the admittedly unstable incarnations of recordings on streaming sites – I particularly recommend the posthumous album of songs by Peter Rohland.Footnote ³ For a book so admirably concerned with dissemination, reception and reinterpretation, this is frustrating: it holds itself apart when it is so well placed to contribute. For a specialist study of performed song, the overall impression is curiously bibliographic.

Beyond these self-imposed handicaps, the book is a delight. The case studies are roughly chronological, and their cumulative effect is hugely rewarding: each new song enriches a complex, unfolding narrative of the intoxicating interplay of song and revolution. While the avowed task of this ‘critical song research’ is ‘to reveal the making of [later] myths and to counteract them by way of reconstruction and analysis of the actual histories of the songs’ (p. 26), it also functions as an absorbing account of the German revolutionary epoch itself. John and Robb are astute interpreters, especially good at navigating the challenges of reception history, juggling between bibliographic records, the ‘oral tradition’, and interventions from stage and press (such as on pp. 80–82). John's discussion of ‘politics’ (pp. 2–3) is fascinating. The contributions to the analysis of contrafacta are sensitive and instructive (pp. 18–20 and 165), while Robb's conclusion shines when analysing the motivating factors among the post-1945 folk scenes on both sides of the wall. Throughout, the authors provide an object lesson in keeping historical agency in mind, never lapsing into the tropes of an abstracted tradition that can still bedevil song scholarship.

One could ask for more – a consideration of gender would be especially welcome, given the centrality of masculine rhetoric and the total absence of women from the narrative – but each case study is nonetheless a jewel in the hoard. The translations are impeccable, meaning that language is no barrier to appreciation. And there is a trump card in the form of Friedrich Hecker: not only the chap on the cover and the subject of several of the songs, but himself the author of an 1848 essay, ‘Das politische Lied’, which is analysed extensively in the introduction. I can think of few cases in which a principal historical actor provides such a compelling analysis of the subject at stake, and I would disagree with John's demurral that he offers ‘a somewhat simplistic view of song’. The authors are rightly wary of Hecker's post-Enlightenment idealism. However, a little more of his firebrand enthusiasm would help to sing the virtues of this really rather brilliant contribution to the study of historical song.