The gestation of German radical nationalism during the Imperial era continues to fascinate historians. Three books on the Pan-German League have appeared in the last fifteen years. Although it, too, is largely concerned with the same nationalist organization, Peter Walkenhorst's long-awaited monograph addresses radical nationalism as a broader ideological phenomenon. The results of his work represent a major achievement, even as they raise troubling methodological issues.

Walkenhorst defines “radical nationalism” in Germany as a “nationalism of a new sort,” which took shape after unification in 1871. Its protagonists were uncompromising to the point of opposing the German government; they were convinced that the “territorial, political, and social status quo” (p. 14) was deficient, that the existing order required both territorial expansion and thoroughgoing domestic reorganization in the name of ethnic homogeneity. The three principal parts of the book accordingly present an exhaustive analysis of the radical nationalists' mental universe. The first of these parts is devoted to the topoi that constituted German radical nationalism, in the first instance the “Nation,” “Volk,” and “Rasse” of the book's title. The second and third parts then treat in rich detail the programmatic consequences that radical nationalists drew from their evolving understanding of these constituent concepts. Here the analysis extends to questions of Lebensraum, armaments, ethnic minorities in Germany, and anti-Semitism. It also demonstrates the extent to which components of radical nationalism found acceptance in parliament and government, notably during the fashioning of a new Imperial citizenship law in 1913.

The basis of the monograph is the dissertation that Walkenhorst wrote in the framework of Hans-Ulrich Wehler's working group on nationalism in Bielefeld. The book claims to represent the new “constructivist” historical research on nationalism, whose axiom is that the nation is a cultural construction—an “imagined community” or, in the words of M. Rainer Lepsius, a “gedachte Ordnung.” The book also reflects Walkenhorst's understanding of the robust role of language in the constitution of culture. This approach has recommended a conceptual vocabulary that casts ideas as semantic structures, mental dispositions, systems of value (Wertvorstellungen), horizons of expectation (Erwartungshorizonte), and, above all, as interpretive frameworks (Deutungsmuster). The second part of the book thus enlists “Nation,” “Volk,” and “Rasse” in the “semantic, discursive, and political construction of radical nationalist Deutungsmuster.” The many insights reward the occasionally tough slogging through this terminology. Above all, Walkenhorst has provided a stimulating perspective on ideas that have occupied dozens of historians in the past. Better than anyone before him, he has worked out the discursive implications and associations among the many elements of what became a coherent ideology of radical nationalism; and he has provided a persuasive link to political practice, a powerful explanation of ideology's political force. In this light, the dynamic of nationalism's radicalization lay in “cognitive dissonance,” in which the expectations that the Deutungsmuster generated among the nationalists jarred with official German policy, which consistently frustrated these same expectations, whether the issue was colonial expansion, naval construction, or the Germanization of the Prussian east. In the end, the increasingly furious radical nationalists reasoned that only a European war offered the fulfillment of their ideological designs at home and abroad, and they set out to prepare for it.

The analytical insights come at a cost. The survey raises a number of problems that revolve around questions of language and agency. Language represents here an “autonomous, irreducible factor” (pp. 47–8). Ideas have “immanent associative potential” (p. 126). Discourses develop according to a logic of their own and function as agents—infiltrating (p. 15), connecting (p. 47), favoring (p. 87), performing service (pp. 97–8), or exhausting themselves (p. 113), among other things. One might conclude as well from the analysis that discursive or semantic structures have causative power (kausal herbeiführen or determinieren), although the author is at pains to deny them this capacity. Instead, he explains, they merely form (prägen), fix (bestimmen), enable (ermöglichen), and pre-structure (vorstrukturieren) thinking.

Walkenhorst is hardly alone in making these claims about language, although Hans-Ulrich Wehler's seminar was not reputed to be a receptive forum for doing so. In the present case, the difficulty lies in the fog that these claims throw over several critical questions about the history of German radical nationalism. The analysis is more effective in populating discourses, in defining what was “thinkable,” than it is in identifying who did the thinking, or why. It is not at all clear who the radical nationalists were. The footnotes are ruled by two names, Ernst Hasse and Heinrich Class, the men who chaired the Pan-German League between 1894 and the outbreak of war. Together they guided the discursive trajectory along which radical nationalism developed as it responded to cognitive dissonances that it had itself encouraged. A major step along the way was the adoption of racist anti-Semitism as a Deutungsmuster. The telos of the development was defined then in a series of documents that Class penned between 1912 and (September) 1914, which called in ever more ruthless terms for an assault on the powers of the Reichstag, the exclusion of Jews and other ethnic minorities from German public life, and a war undertaken in the name of German expansion in Europe as well as Africa. It is difficult to ascertain, however, who else embraced these demands, in part or in full. Walkenhorst claims that perhaps several thousand men, a “hard core of activists” or “perpetrators by conviction” (Überzeugungstäter) (p. 310), served as “multipliers” of the radical nationalist discourse, above all in the Pan-German League and Friedrich Lange's Deutschbund, although he argues that a broader circle of sympathizers was to be found in other patriotic societies, such as the Army League, the Navy League, the Colonial Society, and the Eastern Marches Society. Because the book casts but a casual glance at the histories of these organizations (including the tumult that rent the Navy League and the financial crisis that accompanied the radicalization of thinking in the Pan-German League itself), the question remains unanswered how broadly radical nationalism resonated within these other organizations.

Nor is it clear why radical nationalism was attractive to those who espoused it—why certain groups found the discursive associations particularly compelling. Walkenhorst accepts the conclusions of earlier historians that the membership of the Pan-German League, the Deutschbund, and the other patriotic societies was drawn largely from the academically educated Protestant bourgeoisie, particularly from the ranks of the publicly employed among them, and that outside the upper reaches of the Protestant middle class, radical nationalism found virtually no resonance. Noting that the Protestant upper-middle classes were home to all manner of ideology, the author closes the question. He chooses not to pursue the analytical significance of these striking patterns beyond allusions to the “Weltanschauungssbedürfnis” (p. 341) of the educated middle class or its receptivity to doctrines, such as racism, that could invoke the authority of science.

Two excurses at the end of the volume confirm the impression that the analytical strategy of this study was fashioned to exclude the play of social factors “exogenous” to discourse. A short survey of patriotic societies in other European countries before the war disdains the social foundations of radical nationalism outside Germany, while a brief account of developments in Germany after 1914 is silent on the broadening social foundations of radical nationalism in this land. These lacunae are a pity. The proposition that the nation is an imagined community has reinvigorated the study of nationalism, not the least by directing attention to the imaginers.