James Retallack, one of the most profound scholars of Imperial Germany writing in either English or German, has published a timely set of essays on Germany's Second Reich. It is timely because its center of gravity concerns the grey zone between conservatism and right-wing mass politics in a rapidly modernizing society ruled by an authoritarian government. The present-day echo is hard to overlook, as the question of the viability of genuinely conservative politics, shorn of radical visions of nationalist dystopias and emotional appeals to intergroup enmity, animated reflective politicians then as it does now.

Retallack's book is not a systematic treatment of the German right—for that the reader should turn to his other publications. Instead, the volume contains a series of thoughtful sketches and portraits that illuminate the Second Empire from various angles. Divided into three parts—“Pan,” “Focus,” and “Twists”—the book begins with an overview of the period, comments next on the views of British envoys on nineteenth-century Germany, and then offers an extended commentary on the Digital German History Archive of the German Historical Institute in Washington, D.C. Retallack's thoughts on the British envoys are especially interesting, given that he had access to the not-yet-published post-1866 volumes in the series British Envoys to Germany, edited by Markus Mösslang, Sabine Freitag, and Peter Wende. Predictably, the envoys had a great deal of sympathy for the position of German liberals. But what this meant in terms of their hopes and anxieties is a bit more surprising. They evinced a sincere and abiding fear not only of revolution but also of democracy, which, for them, still rung with the distant echo of the French Revolution. They also had a healthy mistrust of Otto von Bismarck—less as a geopolitical schemer than because of his radical interventions, such as the introduction of universal manhood suffrage. Retallack argues that British diplomatic reporting was nevertheless better informed and differentiated about Germany than about any other country. The reports are therefore high-quality sources for students of domestic as well as international relations. Because Great Britain had a series of envoys in various courts, they tended to be sensitive to regional variation—noting, for example, that even in the south and west of Germany, where one would expect to find greater liberal influence, authoritarian structures and habits of mind remained perceptible.

A second theme of the work is, then, that the power of conservatism remained conspicuous, a point often underappreciated by historians focusing, perhaps too insistently, on the politics of the bourgeoisie. Yet conservatives faced their own dilemmas. This comes out especially in one of Retallack's essays on Ernst von der Heydebrand und der Lasa, the de facto leader of the German Conservative Party from 1908 to 1918, and on Cont Kuno von Westarp, another conservative politician and founding member and leader of the Weimar-era German National People's Party (Deutschnationale Volkspartei, DNVP). Their letter exchange reveals the misgivings of Heydebrand, who stood for an older style of conservatism, as well as the hesitations of both men about a more aggressive, racial antisemitism that had, by 1918, become a staple of conservative agitation. Yet Westarp learned to embrace that antisemitism, especially in speeches: he, like Adolf Hitler, found that fanning the hatred of Jews was a propitious means to move the masses.

How to move the masses—and yet remain anchored in a recognizable conservative frame—was a central problem for the old right, and is a thematic center of gravity for Retallack's analyses. In “The Authoritarian State and the Political Mass Market,” an essay that explains why it is not a cliché to call the Second Empire an authoritarian state, Retallack contends that the authoritarian polity allowed conservatives limited forays into the political mass market. But the fundamental politicization of German society was not a process that could easily be reversed. This politicization, which occurred in the context of continuing structures of authoritarian politics, led in important but by no means inexorable ways to 1933. For Retallack, that year remains an important vanishing point, for the failure of liberalism implied the victory of racist politics and a collapse of fellow feeling. It was both the precondition, and the portent, of subsequent catastrophes.

Retallack's collection of essays is marked by sharp and thoughtful analytical distinction, judicious and critical reflections on the work of colleagues in the field, and beautiful, clear writing. One might have wished for an argumentative conclusion, and one might quibble about the inclusion of this or that “miniature” in this collection. Yet scholars will read these essays with considerable profit, especially if they glimpse how Imperial German paradoxes appear more and more like distant mirrors of our own political predicaments today.