In A Deadly Legacy: German Jews and the Great War, Tim Grady offers a powerful study of the lives of German Jews during the First World War and raises important questions about how scholars situate the actions and attitudes of members of minority populations within larger national contexts. Grady places the experiences of German Jewish soldiers and citizens firmly within the context of German culture, and he reaches conclusions that are both compelling and unsettling. Looking backward through the lens of the Holocaust, we may be most inclined to see the ways that the violence and destruction of the First World War led to the rise of Nazism and the total exclusion of Jews from German society. Grady demonstrates, however, that during World War I German Jews were active participants in the wartime culture that ultimately turned against them. They were, Grady argues, “co-constitutive” in shaping German wartime culture. Their Jewishness may have colored some of their experiences, and ultimately determined their fate in Germany, but Grady convincingly shows that it did not overshadow their deeply held commitments to kaiser and country, or to the wartime cultural norms that Jews and other Germans helped to construct during World War I.

Grady identifies seven main aspects of the German war effort: war enthusiasm, total war, a culture of destruction, cases made for annexation and territorial expansion, the denigration of both internal and external minorities, divisions at home and among the troops, and the infamous “stab in the back” myth as means of explaining Germany's seemingly inexplicable defeat. Grady explores Jewish engagement with each of these aspects of wartime German culture, persuasively describing how German Jews bought into both the promise of 1914 and the violent and destructive path on which World War I set their country.

In chapter 1, Grady explores the forces that led Germany to enter the war and describes the somewhat tenuous position of Jews in prewar German society, where they were enfranchised citizens but still on the margins of many German institutions, particularly the military. For all Germans, but perhaps especially for Jews, the war seemed to offer a chance to create a stronger and more united national future. Following Kaiser Wilhelm II's announcement of a “civic truce,” in which differences of religion and political conviction would be set aside so that the country could unite in national defense, the vast majority of German Jews fully embraced the war. They did so, Grady argues, both as Germans supporting their country and as Jews imagining that this civic truce would establish their value and valor as German citizens and soldiers while simultaneously positioning them as the liberators of east European Jews oppressed by the antisemitic regime of the Russian tsar.

The first weeks of the war did not disappoint, as Grady shows in chapter 2. Jews and other Germans embraced war enthusiasm and rushed to volunteer for military service in order to hasten Germany's triumph and the establishment of a new German-controlled Mitteleuropa. Chapters 3 through 6 explore different aspects of the culture of total war, German superiority, and destruction that took hold as the war ground on in 1915 and 1916. In each of these chapters, Grady focuses on the roles that both average and influential German Jews played in shaping this culture. In highlighting the work done by Jewish shipping magnate Albert Ballin, industrialist Walther Rathenau, and others to bring food production, industry, labor, and chemical research into the service of an ever more deadly war effort; the promotion of German annexation and colonization projects in eastern Europe; the exploitation of defeated civilian populations as laborers; the celebration of death and brutality; suspicion of domestic and foreign Others; and highly racialized depictions of prisoners of war, Grady makes it clear that Jews were active participants in all aspects of Germany's war. At times, as when the Jewish Committee for the East proposed that Yiddish-speaking east European Jews would be more amenable to Germanization than their non-Jewish neighbors and thus could be made partners in bringing Russian Poland under German domination, German Jews approached the war with a distinctly Jewish perspective. But Grady makes it difficult to ignore the ways that German Jews—rabbis, soldiers, artists, scientists, poets, industrialists, and ordinary people—fully embraced nationalist projects and positions that tend to be associated far more with Germans than with Jews.

That is not to imply that all German Jews supported the war unquestioningly, or that they were unaware of the rise in antisemitic sentiment that accompanied many of these wartime trends. Throughout the book, and particularly in chapters 7 through 9, Grady examines the painful divisions that tore at German society as the stresses of war and home-front deprivation led to distrust and hostility within the national community that the kaiser's civic truce had promised to unite. The Jewish Census of 1916, which accused Jews of shirking their duty to fight; animosity between and among political parties on the Left and Right; and finally the myth that Germany had not lost on the battlefield, but had been stabbed in the back by domestic enemies all clearly threatened the position of Jews within German society. But in the midst of the war and the aftermath of the armistice, Grady argues, the demands of daily life consumed all of most people's attention.

Grady ends the book by contemplating a quote from German Jewish historian Ernst Kantorowicz, who wondered if by serving in the German army during World War I, he had unintentionally helped to create the conditions that brought Hitler to power. It is a disturbing question. And while it seems unreasonable to blame Kantorowicz, or any of the many German Jews who helped to shape and support their country's war efforts, Grady makes it clear that it is also impossible to entirely separate them from the wartime culture that eventually did lead to Nazism. German Jews entered the war convinced that it would finally make them fully German, but Grady argues convincingly that the German culture they helped to create was exactly the one that would later turn so violently against them. His provocative and engagingly written analysis will be compelling reading for anyone interested in the history of German Jews or in the complex relationships between national majorities and minorities in moments of change and crisis.