Between the eras of Louis XIV in the late seventeenth century and of Bismarck and Franz Joseph in the mid-nineteenth, the walls surrounding hundreds of German cities were torn down. In telling the story of how and why they fell, Yair Mintzker's fascinating book makes a contribution to urban history but also offers much more. Mintzker adds a spatial and physical dimension to numerous aspects of social and political life over the period, from the consolidation of territorial states and the handling of poverty and vagrancy to the formation of nineteenth-century liberalism. City walls become the Archimedean point from which Mintzker illuminates the lives and mindsets of the people who lived behind or outside them as well as the broader changes leading to urban modernity. At the same time that he questions the historiographic division between early modern and modern, Mintzker inscribes his own conceptual boundary between the two periods and provides a compelling new perspective on the longer-term transformation between them. The old world of the Holy Roman Empire was based on corporations and estates and conceived in organic terms as bodies: corporative and corporeal at the same time. The new world of nineteenth-century Germany was increasingly conceived in abstract terms of state and society, space and market economy. At the center of these changes, in Mintzker's view, stood the physical and conceptual transformation of German cities from closed places surrounded by walls and defended by burghers in arms to open spaces merged into the broader countryside and state apparatus.

Mintzker moves beyond the framework of Mack Walker's classic German home towns in part through his focus on fortifications, but also by looking across the German lands and by including larger cities. City walls served a variety of purposes. Not only could they fulfill a military function in making a city a fortress, but they also helped control the flow of goods and people into and out of town. Even after Berlin lost its defensive fortifications in the 1730s, for example, it retained its customs walls. At a symbolic level, city ramparts also represented the municipality's claims to autonomy and special privileges that set it apart from other institutions of the emerging territorial state.

Given the walls’ multiple potential functions, the forces leading to their destruction proved correspondingly disparate. Historians have typically argued either that such defensive fortifications became obsolete through advances in artillery technology in the course of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries or that the walls simply had to come down as obstacles to urban growth in the process of industrialization. Mintzker finds neither explanation fully convincing. Whether under Louis XIV or Napoleon, many walls were razed through French pressure, not because they were ineffective but because they were thought still to be so. Municipal authorities themselves, however, sometimes elected to tear down fortifications on the grounds that they only invited the destructive attentions of modern armies in battles that the besieged ultimately could not win. But walls also sometimes tumbled not as the result of foreign military pressure but because the rulers of territorial states desired in good absolutist fashion to amalgamate towns into the larger structures of their realms. Levelling the walls curtailed municipal autonomy and also lessened the distance between city and suburb and town and country, leaving each equally under the princely government's control. These varied reasons for defortification particularly came together during the “perfect storm” of the revolutionary and Napoleonic eras, when nearly 350 German cities lost their walls (compared to 150 in the century before 1789, and 180 in the years 1816–1866 [p. 89]).

On some smaller points scholars may find room for disagreement. Fortress prisons, for instance, were not only a development of the late nineteenth century after fortifications had begun to lose their military functions, as early nineteenth-century inmates of the Habsburgs’ notorious Spielberg in Brno like Silvio Pellico attest, or for that matter those in Württemberg's Hohenasperg during the eighteenth. When discussing the role of city walls in boosting governments’ repressive power over urban populations in the nineteenth century, it is also perhaps significant for the author's judgment of Metternichian Austria that several of the examples chosen came from 1850s Vienna, that is, following the uprisings of the 1848 Revolution and during the ensuing neo-absolutist era of Franz Joseph's early reign.

In its broader conclusions the book proves convincing and insightful, if still with room to have taken some themes further. Along with invoking James C. Scott's Seeing Like a State, the author might have explored resonances between his work on mural history and, for example, Ian McNeely's analysis of the role of practices of writing in the development of civil society, or the studies of Paul Nolte and Ralf Pröve on classical republican and stadtrepublikanisch views regarding citizen military service, or of Wolfgang Burgdorf on responses to the end of the Holy Roman Empire, when “a world view” lost “its world.” This is not meant as uncharitable critique of a book that has already done so much for not doing more. But there were opportunities to have made even wider and deeper connections between the destruction of the city walls and the changes in mindset and practice of burghers’ lives over the decades of the Sattelzeit. Perhaps these can become avenues for future research opened up by Mintzker's pathbreaking account.

It is difficult to do justice to the richness of this book's argument and coverage in a short review; the best advice is simply to read it. Mintzker's work certainly merits a place on graduate reading lists in German or European history, and if it ever comes out in paperback, in graduate or undergraduate seminars. One might even use individual chapters in undergraduate surveys of German or European history, as a way of getting students engaged in some lateral thinking about the changing forms and physical spaces of city life and their relationship to the broader worlds of politics, culture, and society, then and now.