This remarkably thorough and readable synthesis of the latest scholarship on Nazism and the Holocaust seems destined to become the standard survey of German history from unification to the end of World War II for a generation for whom the notions of “globalization” and “postcolonialism” have become defining concepts. The novelty of Baranowski's synthesis lies in explaining the Nazis’ willful and irrational destructiveness as the radical culmination of Germany's belated and particularly violent entry into the scramble for colonial possessions and continental Lebensraum. In six carefully constructed chapters of roughly equal length, Baranowski moves from the German Empire through World War I and the Weimar Republic to Nazi Germany in peacetime, World War II, and the Holocaust. While rather perfunctorily dismissing Hans-Ulrich Wehler's now somewhat unfashionable (at least among non-German historians) Sonderweg paradigm, which attributes the root cause of Nazism to Germany's deviation from the liberal western model of political modernization in the nineteenth century, she does show how deeply rooted Nazi aims and methods were in the political and military culture of the “Second Empire” and especially in the colonial and expansionist aspirations not just of its ruling elite but of the broad middle-class public as represented in militant right-wing pressure groups as well. By tracing the intermittent radicalization of the right, a process that began well before World War I but gathered steam in proportion to the real and perceived decline of German fortunes in and after the Great War, however, she stresses discontinuities as much as continuities and leaves no doubt that despite genocidal colonial military campaigns in Southwest and East Africa, the methods of control and domination used both at home and abroad in the Second Empire were of a qualitatively different order compared to the much more extreme methods of the Third Reich. “Although the National Socialists would regret the incompleteness of the Bismarckian unification” she writes, “and underscore the faults of Imperial German domestic and foreign policy, they would build on the Second Empire's legacies even as they catalogued its failures” (p. 66). The peculiarity of German imperialism—what made it more destructive than the colonialism of the much larger empires of Germany's European rivals—lay in what Baranowski calls “the conflict between hubris and pessimism, the pride in German potential coupled with the fear that the struggle could be lost” (p. 54). “The prospect of annihilation coexisted with the euphoria of triumph” (p. 280). Again and again she returns to this characteristic combination of pride and fear, aspiration and insecurity, hubris and desperation: “the fear of annihilation lurking within the promise of greatness” (p. 38), which she calls “an explosive cocktail of will to power and the fear of dissolution” (p. 65).

Baranowski's analysis of the semi-absolutist features of the German Imperial constitution does not differ from Wehler's, although she mistakenly refers to the important upper legislative chamber of appointed representatives of the states as the Reichsrat rather than the Bundesrat (repeating an error apparently first introduced into American historiography by Hajo Holborn in the third volume of his A History of Modern Germany [1969]). This misnomer is not entirely trivial, as there was in fact a constitutionally unimportant Reichsrat as well, a purely advisory council of notables apparently modeled on the British privy council. The Bundesrat was renamed the Reichsrat in the Weimar constitution, thus presumably invoking the desired centralization of government in the republic, but the upper house reverted to its original name in the constitution of the Federal Republic after World War II.

Baranowski also agrees with Wehler and Fritz Fischer that imperialism was closely linked to the project of internal consolidation. “Imperialism came to the fore” (p. 14), as she puts it, as the means of resolving the problem of internal divisions (ironically deepened by Bismarck's misguided efforts to marginalize the SPD and the Catholic Center). While national consolidation remained Bismarck's top priority, an incoherently aggressive and expansionist foreign policy gained momentum when Wilhelm II took a more active role in policy making after 1890. Although she identifies Austria-Hungary as the “most trigger-happy” (p. 41) of the Great Powers, Baranowski describes World War I as a preventive war against Russia on the part of the German General Staff, a construction of the war that also helps to account for the support it initially received in the Reichstag even from the German left. Baranowski draws numerous lines of continuity between World Wars I and II, the most important of which probably was the organized campaign under Hindenburg and Ludendorff to create a vast German empire for exploitation and settlement in the east. Leaning heavily on Vejas Gabriel Liulevicius's pioneering study of Germany's eastern occupation zone Ober-Ost, War Land on the Eastern Front: Culture, National Identity, and German Occupation in World War I (2000), Baranowski points to suggestive continuities between Ludendorff's attempts to build a monolithic military state with a German civilizing mission and identity and the Nazis’ far more lethal plans for an ethnically cleansed racial utopia in the east. The Treaty of Brest-Litovsk “revealed the manner in which the war translated Pan-German pipe dreams into reality” (p. 103). The big difference, of course, was that while German troops were often welcomed as liberators by the Jewish populations in the east in World War I, the same was emphatically not the case in the genocidal Second World War.

In her treatment of the Weimar era, Baranowski restores political and international history to the salience these subdisciplines deserve but seems to have ceded to the more adulatory perspectives of cultural history in recent years. The Weimar Coalition faced a double dilemma, dependent as it was on the one hand on the imperial civil service and the army for the restoration of order and the smooth operation of government, yet forced at the same time to sign an unpopular punitive peace treaty. “Defeating Bolshevism took precedence over renouncing colonialism” (p. 112), Baranowski writes, especially as the higher civil service, the judiciary, the officer corps, and the bulk of large-scale employers were willing to suspend their opposition to the Weimar system only as long as it seemed to be the only viable alternative to the triumph of Bolshevism or Allied intervention. “The Junker nobility proved the most irreconcilable” (p. 128), Baranowski concludes, thus confirming a judgment she had already documented in detail in her excellent regional study, The Sanctity of Rural Life: Nobility, Protestantism, and Nazism in Weimar Germany (1995). Although Baranowski denies that the collapse of Weimar was predetermined and avers that in the last analysis “the Depression was decisive” (p. 169), she does provide plenty of evidence that through the Free Corps and its successor organizations, including the Nazi paramilitary organizations, continental colonial ambitions were kept alive throughout the Weimar era.

Baranowski clearly and succinctly summarizes the reasons for the Nazis’ successful rise to power, quite rightly pointing out that the horror of the early months of Nazi rule was not limited to the uncontrolled violence of the SA, but “lay also in the willingness of the Nazis’ conservative allies to encourage the ‘get tough’ punishment of ‘Marxism’ and to push for ‘legal’ measures of exclusion, believing that Jews had long enjoyed a ‘disproportionate’ influence in German society and culture” (pp. 186–87). Pursuing her overall interpretative theme, she demonstrates the close links of “racial hygiene” with Germany's colonial past. “Imperialism linked the two bourgeois phobias of socialism and racial mixing, in which workers were imagined much like ‘natives,’ unclean, insubordinate, and dark” (p. 190). She plausibly explains the absence of any significant resistance to the Nazi regime, which she describes as “an insidious web of repression and exclusion that functioned effectively precisely because it privileged the majority of Germans while ruthlessly punishing leftists, minorities, and the socially deviant . . . Common denominators of agreement bound the regime and its racially unobjectionable population together” (pp. 204 and 229). The fusion of anti-Marxism, anti-Slavism, and anti-Semitism reached its lethal climax in the invasion of the Soviet Union, which Baranowski calls “an eerie replay of the Second Empire's general staff's gamble in 1914” (p. 266). She attributes “the distinctiveness of the Judeocide” (p. 316) to the Nazis’ total war against civilians, their success in persuading the German population that the very survival of the Volk was at stake, and the weakness of any organized opposition to imperialism or genocide. At the end Baranowski returns to her central thesis, “the dialectic of annihilation and resurrection, of having an empire, losing it, and striving for it once more” (p. 356), as the defining element of German identity between 1914 and 1945.

This book has several strengths that set it apart from more traditional surveys of recent German history. The extensive and accessible footnotes provide not only thorough bibliographic references to recent research in the field, but touch lightly on most of the important historiographic controversies as well. The excellent maps are culled from a variety of sources, and the illustrations are pertinent and helpful. Of course in a book of this scope there are some minor inaccuracies as well, such as the misstatement that Ernst Toller was murdered after the suppression of the Munich Soviet in 1919. Happily, the book does not rely on secondary sources alone. Among the primary sources Baranowski mines for their insights are diaries, memoirs, letters, news reports, Hitler's Table Talk, and Hitler's Second Book. Her analysis stands out for its specificity and precise articulation. Perhaps most notable of all is her skill in explaining the destructive course of German history in a persuasive and plausible way while retaining the sense of contingency and open-endedness that most contemporaries experienced as they lived through these tragic times.