For more than four decades Jürgen Kocka has played a pivotal role in historical and social science scholarship on modern Germany. At Bielefeld-Universität, the Freie-Universität, the Zentrum für Zeithistorische Forschung in Potsdam, and the Wissenschaftszentrum Berlin, he has also been a highly skilled and creative organizer of scholarly production. On numerous topics, as a researcher and writer and as manager, he has advanced greatly our understanding of modern Germany. The present volume, composed of the revised Menahem Stern Jerusalem Lectures, which Kocka delivered in 2001, provides an excellent reprise and reconsideration of his scholarly opus and his up-to-date views on the course of modern German history—and, no less important, modern German historiography.

The first signal of how far Kocka's work has moved from his early, exclusive concentration on Germany comes in the title of the first substantive chapter: “Bourgeois Culture and Civil Society: The German Case in a European Context.” The title grows out of the large, comparative project on the European bourgeoisie that Kocka directed in the 1980s. Here he provides an excellent guide to the historical development of those concepts, ever so laden with meaning, ever so difficult to translate simply and directly into English—Bürger, Bürgerlichkeit, bürgerliche Gesellschaft. Kocka offers a structural analysis as well as a Begriffsgeschichte, reviewing the historical development of the German Bürgertum, its similarities and differences with its neighbors. We know the lines of argument here, but Kocka summarizes them admirably: the particular importance of Bildung for the formation of the German middle classes, the comparatively late development of a commercial bourgeoisie, the emergence of a culture that valued accomplishment rather than title. This Bürgertum could only develop amid the communicative and economic possibilities of towns and cities, where it forged its own kind of civil society. Kocka's chapter traces the Bürgertum as a particular social group and civil society as a distinctive social space, while he also explores the history of the concepts themselves. For Kocka, the exclusions that arose with civil society—of women, of Jews, of workers—only demonstrate the limitations of the practice of Bürgerlichkeit in the nineteenth century, not problems intrinsic to the very concept and to the liberalism of which it was so much a part. The universalist ideal of Bürgerlichkeit powerfully motivated individuals and social movements to tear at the practical limitations of civil society in Germany and to make it ever more democratic, ever closer to its essence as a practice. The reader easily senses that democratic Bürgerlichkeit remains Kocka's ideal as well.

Of course, the two dictatorships of the twentieth century went a long way toward destroying civil society. But they never could be totally successful, and out of the proverbial ashes of the Third Reich and the German Democratic Republic arose, yet again, the phoenix of civil society, each time more democratically than in the nineteenth century (though Kocka rather too conveniently bypasses the Weimar period). In the next two essays, Kocka provides a nuanced analysis of the communist state and society, and its comparison with the Third Reich, both in past and in memory. He reviews many of the debates about the character of the GDR and comes down in favor of a term he has offered previously, a “modern dictatorship,” with the stress on the modern. But he also draws fruitfully on the work of Alf Lüdtke and Thomas Lindenberger and their notion of Herrschaft als soziale Praxis. In their hands, and Kocka's, the GDR regime sought to realize its all-encompassing claims, but always ran up against the limitations of its own capacities and, even more important, the fractures and counterpressures of GDR society. Kocka gives due weight to the reality of the “workers and peasants state,” namely, that in the 1950s and 1960s the GDR served as a powerful engine of social mobility and sustained a culture that was distrustful of wealth, competition, and social and cultural experimentation. The regime hit stasis mode precisely as mobility waned in the 1970s and 1980s. Kocka might have drawn out more clearly the causal mechanisms that led to the stagnation of the 1980s. But one point comes through clearly: the culture of limited individual expectations became less and less appealing to GDR citizens, the allure of the west ever greater, undermining whatever legitimacy the regime had previously acquired. As he did in scholarly and public fora in the 1990s, sometimes in the face of harsh and wild criticism, Kocka stresses the differences between the GDR and the Third Reich, and the different kinds of memories that each has elicited. For all its dictatorial characteristics, the GDR, Kocka reminds us, never engaged in the racial antisemitism and systematic slaughter that defined the Third Reich. His call for a deeper comparison of the two postwar Germanies reveals where his scholarly sympathies lie: more is to be gained from examining the two postwar systems in tandem than from overheated and polemical comparisons of Nazism and German communism, from which little scholarly advantage is to be gained.

Over the course of a long and fruitful career, Jürgen Kocka has demonstrated an ability to absorb new ideas and approaches. Alltagsgeschichte, gender history, cultural history, and transnational history all put in appearances here. They modify and enrich the structural history that was Kocka's forte in his early publications. But they also do not provide central axes of research and interpretation for him. Kocka reviews historiographical changes in the final chapter through the example of writings on World War I. As ever, he remains committed to history as a discipline in search of the truth, always recognizing—good Weberian that he is—the impossibility of its final attainment. Maybe the eclecticism of method that Kocka now demonstrates is all to the good. Life was easier, but also more confining, when there was a fixed point of historical scholarship and fewer doubts about the truth.