An arresting and highly appropriate image adorns the cover of this excellent essay collection: a female photographer is perched precariously on a crane, high above the rooftops of Berlin, with the dome of Kaiser Wilhelm II's pompous new cathedral to the left and the tower of the utilitarian “red” city hall to the right. Her clothes and the cityscape date the image to the years around 1910, a time when “the future was just around the corner, and everyone wanted a hand in shaping it” (4). The open and contested nature of that future is at the heart of this volume, which focuses in particular on the efforts of contemporaries to give competing and often contradictory visions of the future a tangible form. The photograph, which can be viewed at the German History in Documents and Images website (http://germanhistorydocs.ghi-dc.org/sub_image.cfm?image_id=1638), was highly staged, of course. But, as the editors make clear: “Even in the very process of its inception, modernity was always-already ‘staged’ … announcing its arrival as a category of aspiration, often normatively conceived from experiences assumed to be unfolding next door” (14). The editors describe their book as “the result of a long conversation … that took place during five meetings at four institutions”: the so-called “Rethinking German Modernities” seminars at the universities of Toronto, Michigan, Cincinnati, and Texas (Austin), which they organized, together with Edward Ross Dickinson, more than a decade ago. The “conversation” is even longer, in fact, stretching back to a 1990 conference in Philadelphia, “The Kaiserreich in the 1990s: New Research, New Directions, New Agencies,” originally conceived by Geoff Eley and Thomas Childers.

Many of the themes and approaches that were advanced tentatively in Philadelphia, and which reached a wider audience through Eley's Society, Culture, and the State in Germany, 1870–1930 (1996), reappear here with greater confidence and maturity, following two decades of productive research. The book highlights four of these themes in particular: empire, transnationalism, and globality; subjectivity in social life; the “meta-thematics of reform”; and politics “very broadly conceived.” But the current volume is not formally structured around them, and many of the contributions touch on more than one theme. The first three chapters are essentially historiographical in approach: following the editors’ introduction, Young-sun Hong examines “Narratives of Modernity and Welfare” (an important essay that first appeared in Social History [May 2005]), and Eley asks “What Was German Modernity and When?” The second cluster of four chapters, by Annemarie Sammartino, Scott Spector, Andrew Zimmermann, and Dennis Sweeney, “approach the topic from its borders—via transnational, imperial and comparative perspectives” (12).

The largest section of the book, consisting of seven chapters, presents “specific moments of Wilhelmine and Weimar contestation” (12). While these inevitably reflect the diverse research interests and agendas of their authors, they have just about enough in common—“the local negotiation of modern conditions and possibilities” (15), as the editors put it—for the volume to retain a degree of overall coherence. Four of the chapters examine issues surrounding individual autonomy vis-à-vis the state and/or society. Looking at “The War on Tuberculosis and Infant Mortality,” Larry Frohman provides an empirical case study that complements Hong's historiographical discussion; Tracie Matysik examines “Secularism, Subjectivity, and Reform” through the lens of the German Society for Ethical Culture; Kathleen Canning focuses on the question of women's citizenship in the turbulent years between 1914 and 1920; and Marti Lybeck explores gender and sexual politics in the later Weimar period through three little-known but fascinating case studies. The other three chapters in this section all have an aesthetic dimension. John Maciuika and Jennifer Jenkins both look at episodes in the history of the German Werkbund, which famously brought together designers, businessmen, politicians, and government officials in the hope of “ennobling” industrial production and stimulating exports; Manuela Achilles looks at the Werkbund-inspired role of the Reichskunstwart, a government office situated at the intersection of art and politics in the Weimar Republic. The book is not generously endowed with illustrations, but two of the most interesting come in the latter contribution. The complexity of symbolic politics in twentieth-century Germany is nowhere more apparent than in the republic's official “Flag Table” of 1921, which displayed no fewer than ten banners: five in black-red-gold, and five in black-white-red. Against this background, the Reichskunstwart's proposal for a German unity flag (Einheitsflagge), combining both sets of colors with a version of the iron cross, seems an admirably rational response—though, as Achilles observes, it fell victim to “a political climate that favored the decisive logic of ‘either-or’ over compromise” (274).

The book's final contribution, Mark Roseman's “National Socialism and the Limits of Modernity,” is a short essay that originally appeared as part of a roundtable in the American Historical Review (June 2011), and its inclusion here represents something of a risk because it highlights “the fatal limitations of modernity as a concept with which to explain change in the modern world” (333). Indeed, as Roseman pointedly observes: “A growing number of historians have sought to acknowledge … diversity and contingency while rescuing the underlying idea of modernity by talking of ‘modernities’ in the plural. Yet as Frederick Cooper has pointed out, this merely buries the problem” (333). It is greatly to the editors’ credit that their volume ends on this skeptical note, inviting further study of the multiple ways in which modernity was staged, debated, and contested in Germany between the 1890s and the 1930s. The individual essays are all rich in interesting detail, but it is the volume's collectively written introduction that is likely to find the widest audience, offering not only a succinct summary of ways in which global discussions about the concept of modernity can help us to understand the course of German history, but also some pointers on how the German case can contribute to “the global historical discussion” (21).