In his pathbreaking essay on “invented traditions,” Eric Hobsbawm adduced the failure of Wilhelm II's effort to apotheosize his grandfather Wilhelm I as Wilhelm the Great as evidence of the limits to a state's mythmaking power. In Eva Giloi's new monograph we learn much more about how and why that project was so likely to fail, and about how myths, memories, and traditions develop. With explicit reference to Tim Blanning, Giloi traces not just the monarchical “culture of power,” but also what she characterizes as the less readily visible “power of culture” to shape politics (p. 76). Giloi aims to provide “a reception history of monarchy read through material culture” (p. 5). With objects related to royalty as the focus, the work ultimately emphasizes the productivity rather than the receptivity of the wider public in forming attitudes toward monarchy. Crowned heads are seen to have been as much the creatures as the creators of dynastic imagery.

The study concentrates above all on the exchange of Hohenzollern royal relics and their display in museum settings: that is, of objects having direct associations with members of the royal house, whether costly articles or humble items of daily use. At the same time, the author still pays considerable attention to the related spheres of monarchic memorabilia, royal display and pageantry, and monarchical representation in the media. The relics given as gifts to the monarchy in particular serve as independent checks on political and cultural attitudes and identities, sometimes providing further confirmation of existing historical views, at other points challenging them. Thus on the one hand, analysis of donations of relics to the royal house provides further evidence of the Hohenzollerns' limited capacity to serve as a locus for the coalescence of a nationally integrated German identity after 1871 that could transcend allegiances to the individual German states and their dynastic families. On the other hand, careful attention to the nature of the donations and the phrasing of the accompanying letters suggests the need to nuance the usual picture of the Kaiserreich's bombastic masculine-gendered militarism and patriotism, which was, if anything, less prevalent than the countervailing tendency to see the monarchy and nation in terms of weakness, vulnerability, and sentimentality. The “dyad” of the young Wilhelm I and Queen Luise, in exile and threatened by Napoleonic France, proved the mythic center of that image.

In line with the work of Hubertus Büschel, the author argues that the Hohenzollerns were not only slow to adapt to the new forms and languages of monarchic representation in the emerging consumer, entertainment, and media cultures, but that to a considerable extent they actually resisted it. The “humanization” of monarchs that took place across Europe in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, for example, also occurred in Prussia, but it was mostly the work of private individuals and entrepreneurs rather than of rulers and royal officials. Even when Hohenzollern rulers did attempt to harness the potential of new media or discourses for dynastic advantage—enter Friedrich Wilhelm IV or Kaiser Wilhelm II—they often failed to turn the tide of that more broadly based power of mythmaking from below. Wilhelm's efforts to restyle the monarchy in martial splendor were swamped in the public's continued adherence to a domestic and sentimental view of the royal family, and of Wilhelm I in particular, not least through his association with Queen Luise. Wilhelm I was more fortunate in his public relations, not, the author argues, because he shaped a strategy to attract the public in a certain way, but because he both happened to share their sentimental taste and was loath to disappoint their expectations of a certain degree of access to the royal person.

The book's thirteen chapters largely follow chronologically, interspersed with some thematic chapters devoted to specific institutions (e.g., the Hohenzollern Museum, established rather late, in 1877) or to specific sources and cultural phenomena (such as the photographic cartes de visite of the later nineteenth century or the general relationship between culture and power over the longue durée). Despite the “Germany” in the title, the work is focused on the Hohenzollern and Prussia in its coverage and source base. By way of context, readers do find out about developments in other German states, just as comparisons are made between the Hohenzollern and other European dynasties, or between trends in consumer culture and the media in Germany, France, Britain, or the U.S. The narrative, however, remains tied to Prussia.

The numbers of relics were much greater for the period of the Kaiserreich, hence to some extent the material is richer and the weight of evidence more compelling for the later chapters. It might also have been useful to have devoted roughly equal attention to the realm of commodities and souvenirs alongside the relics. But these are at most minor observations regarding an already extraordinarily well-researched study. Giloi digs deep into the archival records of displays and donations, makes nuanced and judicious use of various approaches from material and visual culture, and marshals a remarkable array of anecdotal evidence for the reception of display and entertainment culture throughout the long period covered. The study's contextualization is similarly wide and deep. Readers, for instance, get a broad treatment of the development of museums from baroque curiosity cabinets, with explanations of how institutional specialization and changes in collection organization bore implications for the display of royal objects and the possible narratives surrounding them. The discussion of panoramas is just as sound and insightful. Giloi proves equally well read across the many periods she studies, from the eighteenth century to post-1945, and not just in Prussian and German history but also in European comparison. Giloi's study represents an impressive work of scholarship. It makes a significant contribution to the literature on European monarchies and political culture in the modern era, and on the relationship between Prussia and Germany during the Kaiserreich as well.