Grady's sober, well-researched, and well-organized monograph treats the experiences of German-Jewish World War I veterans in the context of German efforts at commemoration, and in the case of the Nazi regime, nearly successful erasure. Basing his findings on numerous archives, newspapers, and memoir literature, Grady draws a convincing picture of the ins and outs of remembering World War I, with ample attention to general context, politics of memorialization, and changing times. Grady has a fine eye for telling incidents and great skill at reconstructing lost stories: the book begins with the dedication of a memorial plaque to the fallen of Würzburg in 1960 (pp. 1–2); includes the post-World War II efforts of Heilbronn's mayor Emil Beutinger, forced into retirement in 1933, to restore Jewish names to an Aryanized remembrance site (p. 161); recounts the peculiar meeting of Franz Josef Strauss with German-Jewish veterans in New York in 1961, “We talked like war comrades, like two front line soldiers—he from the First and from the Second World War” (p. 194); and the collaboration of a German-Jewish veteran (William Wertheimer) and the Willy Brandt government to plant a 12,000-tree forest in Israel (pp. 203–205).

Grady spends much time on the Jewish student fraternity Salia and even more on the Reichsbund jüdischer Frontsoldaten (RjF), founded in 1919. While I am not convinced that the RjF “has been shunned rather than embraced,” at least, not by recent German–Jewish historians (p. 5), or that the RjF constituted the second-largest Jewish association in interwar Germany (including the Central Verein deutscher Staatsbürger jüdischer Glaubens, religious organizations, and Jewish student fraternities?) (p. 5), Grady rightly insists on the importance of this group. The RjF proudly represented the substantial Jewish contribution to the war effort, and, with other Jewish groups, ensured that the number 12,000 (Jews who died in combat duty—100,000 served overall) stayed in the nation's consciousness. As Grady shows, only the death of Hindenburg and the progress of the Nazi Gleichschaltung dislodged the claim that Jewish World War I veterans deserved preferential treatment rather than special treatment.

Grady makes a good case for discrete stages in this process, captured in his six principal chapter titles (Dying 1914–1918, Mourning 1918–1923, Commemorating 1923–1929, Forgetting 1929–1945, Discovering 1945–1960, Embracing 1960–1980). While Grady grapples with the notorious November 1916 Judenzählung, which cast an official cloud on the nature of Jewish military service, he cautions against overestimating this event. Along with other Germans, Jews entered the war enthusiastically and slogged their way through to the armistice of November 1918. The exchange of civilian for military dress in 1914 affected 13.2 million Germans (p. 27) and must have been the most visible sign of a new reality. From special photographs, to special prayers, to importuning the war office for information, Jews experienced the same blend of excitement, anxiety, and trauma as other Germans. Almost as soon as the war ended the mourning began, and by commemoration stage (1923–1929), the politicization of World War I was well underway. Grady shows how doggedly the German right, the Stahlhelm in particular, tried to co-opt the meaning of the war. But German liberals and German Jews fought back, often successfully. The Day of National Mourning and others commemorations, calendrical and physical, continued to include Jews. This ceased to be the case in 1929–1945—Grady chooses his dates deliberately, since he sees slippage even in the waning years of the Weimar Republic. Grady ably reconstructs the Federal Republic's efforts at rehabilitation, and finally, embracing the contributions of German-Jewish veterans to the Vaterland. Grady's chronology and presentation of the memory culture of World War I performs a great service to the field of German history by addressing this subject so thoroughly and over the course of nearly a century—we are but a couple of years away from the century-mark of the beginning of this utterly avoidable slaughter.

From the perspective of Jewish history, a host of questions remain unanswered: were the service memories of Jewish soldiers different? Did Jewish soldiers on the eastern front experience their Judaism differently from those in the trenches of Belgium and France? Studies such as Steven Aschheim's and Michael Brenner's suggest this may be the case. Grady passes quickly over the Ostjuden issue, but this is certainly an important one in German-Jewish historiography. How did soldiers feel about antisemitism in the ranks? Deborah Dash Moore's G.I. Jews (Harvard University Press, 2004) shows that American combat soldiers were keenly aware of their Jewishness. Could the situation in the trenches of World War I have been that different? Given the historiography on modern Jewish soldiers, there are a few surprising omissions in Grady's notes, beginning with Bryan Mark Rigg's Hitler's Jewish Soldiers (University Press of Kansas, 2002). Grady has a fine eye for striking visuals: war memorials, tombstones, and sculptures are represented in seventeen well-chosen figures. Yet this iconography begs some specifically Jewish questions: were the artists who created the semi-clad soldiers in the 1920 Offenbach memorial (Figure 16, p. 199) aware of how jarringly untraditional these images are in Jewish culture? Or, for that matter, how aware were those who reintroduced, in 1969, the very traditional phrase “may his soul be entwined in the circle of the living,” more pointed than Grady's neutral, “an inscription in Hebrew” (Figure 17, p. 209). The absence of an iconographic equivalent to the famous, fictitious scene of German-Jewish soldiers observing Yom Kippur after the battle of Metz in the Franco-Prussian War, intimates that German Jews experienced the war no differently than German Christians—as does Grady's warm endorsement of Till van Rahden's “seminal” Jews and Other Breslauers (p. 8). I am not convinced that the tolerant, multicultural Breslau he portrays was more than an ephemeral moment, and I have similar reservations in regard to Grady when he writes that German Jews “were also keen to immerse themselves in the language of German nationalism and militarism” (p. 2). Ernst Lissauer's “Hate Song” notwithstanding, I suspect this is an “ism” too far. Still, Grady has done a great deal in this book, done it well, and those interested in Germany's memory culture owe him their thanks.