Unter Preussenadler und Hakenkreuz is both an intrinsically interesting survey of a single German village's religious milieu from the mid-nineteenth century until the early 1950s and a highly-detailed analysis of those social and political dynamics that did so much to undermine that community's confessional cohesiveness. Basing his findings on extensive, painstaking research in local, regional and ecclesiastical archives, Klemens-August Recker traces the process by which a tightly-knit religious community, initially closed off and insulated from the outside world, was brought into contact with the wider world and modernity. To this end, Recker calls attention to the experience of Nordwalde, a small village of a few thousand inhabitants, located about twenty kilometres or so north-west of Münster, a major commercial hub and episcopal centre in what is today North Rhine Westphalia. With a predominantly Roman Catholic population and an institutional framework comprising a parish church as well as numerous lay associations and organisations, Nordwalde retained its cohesion and religious identity well into the twentieth century. At the same time, however, as Recker makes abundantly clear, that cohesion and identity was subjected to strong modifying forces, which, over time, altered Nordwalde's religious environment in dramatic ways. According to Recker, this changed environment owed something to the Prussian government's interference in religious affairs. No step in that involvement, he contends, was more significant than the Kulturkampf, a major Church-State dispute during the 1870s and 1880s that widened a Protestant-Catholic rift in Prussia and Germany that stretched all the way back to the sixteenth-century Reformation. Although this conflict mobilised mass religious sentiment and forged Catholic political allegiances, Recker also reminds us that restrictive legislation drove a wedge within Catholicism between laity and clergy, led to a decline in pastoral influence, and significantly modified Nordwalde's religious milieu. This diminished pastoral role and a more assertive, independent laity, together with widespread popular grievance regarding the post-1918 peace settlement, class divisions stemming from long-term economic diversification, and even those broader cultural horizons that appeared with the arrival of the railway, inevitably had political consequences. By exploiting these socio-economic fissures within Nordwalde's Catholic milieu, for example, the Nazis garnered almost 40 per cent of the village vote in 1933. Subsequent alterations in Nordwalde's religious homogeneity, according to Recker, also owed much to the enormous demographic shifts caused by the loss of Germany's eastern territories after 1945 and a flood of refugees – chiefly Protestant – who resettled in the village and elsewhere in Germany. Although Recker has much to say about Nordwalde's reshaped religious milieu, his dedicated and persistent analysis none the less tells us more about the external form or expression of religious practice than about religious belief as such. Overall, however, Recker's willingness to explore both coercive policies imposed from outside, as well as Nordwalde's internal social dynamics, make this book an important contribution to the discussion of the community's cultural response to those complicated socio-economic and political changes within Germany that marked the often tortured transition from the late pre-industrial era into today's modern, religiously less polarised, and stable democratic polity.