In this ambitious book, Adelheid von Saldern models a comparative cultural history of Germany and the US during a period of some of their most intense and conflicted interactions. Her book is meant explicitly as a defense of comparative (national) history in order to deepen our knowledge of debates about national culture, argue for a more crucial engagement, and in the process see these histories in a fresh new perspective. Von Saldern's jumping-off point in this analysis is explicitly the frameworks of Eric Hobsbawm and Benedict Anderson, especially emphasizing the ideological critique of each in their focus on invented or imagined communities. In this regard, “nation” is very much a cultural term for von Saldern, gaining its definition through debates about ethnicity or race, gender, modernity, and other social categories. This is not a book about individual feelings of home, but rather those often exaggerated and divisive myths of nation that can be mobilized politically and directed against civil institutions. The author locates our ability to analyze such broad nationalist claims in the organization, production, and reception of art in the two countries, above all (although not exclusively) fine art, music, and mass culture. The latter is represented mostly by examples drawn from radio and film history.

The book is organized in three large sections, indicating the intended dialectical nature of the project: the first section focuses on “art nationalism” in the USA, the second in Germany, and the third emphasizes the comparative and converging dimensions of culture in the two countries. Each of the national sections opens with the anxiety over and debates about a national style, especially as these intersected with concepts of the modern, both “moderate” and avantgarde. These sections survey the mostly well-known terrain of the cultural history of each country. The second chapters in the national sections review debates and tensions concerning “high” and “low” art, focusing on what was celebrated in terms of popular culture and folk traditions. The third chapters continue this subject but specifically within the realm of folk music and popular music. The fourth chapters—the most analytical in these sections—take up the question of diverging and converging constructions of nationalism and nation in the respective states, with a particular interest in the US under Franklin Delano Roosevelt and Germany under Adolf Hitler. The third, overtly comparative section of the book highlights transatlantic relationships, such as the immigrant/ex-patriot experience; convergent phenomena like regionalism or an interest in folk arts; national political culture, especially as it crystallized in concepts like “national character”; and the tensions inherent in art nationalism.

As the last section of the book makes clear, von Saldern is interested in arguing that comparative analysis makes clear the political specificity of each state and that we can get to that specificity by examining cultural exchanges as well as particularities. Her methodological commitments are best evidenced in the opening of the convergence chapter of the last section. Here she argues that to do comparative work we need a mesoanalysis of specific artistic groups, a microanalysis of individual exceptions, and a macroanalysis of the broader context. Only in this way can we do critical comparative work that can draw out cultural parallels while at the same time avoiding a false transparency between distinct states. This allows for an analysis of the Bauhaus as it came to influence US culture and institutions during the Nazi period, or Hollywood movies swamping the German market during and after the Weimar Republic, that attends to converging cultural tastes and markets while simultaneously seeing the reception of each as distinct in their own national context. Thinking through the shifting sands of what nationalism meant as it came to be highlighted in artistic debates is a strength of the book. In this regard, von Saldern is especially interested in figures who nuance or obscure any simple lines between nationalism and art. Not surprisingly, thus, the US section opens with Marion Anderson's 1939 concert at the Lincoln Memorial, where she sang spirituals but also German Lieder. In these choices, and in this context, what—or who—was “American” and what music was “art” became thoroughly entangled in racist politics as well as progressive political aspirations during Roosevelt's era. Perhaps the best German equivalent is the example of Kurt Huber, the nationalist and antisemitic musicologist who taught in Munich and joined the Nazi Party in 1940; he was also later arrested in 1943 for his activity in the White Rose resistance group and executed. Huber's complicated relationship to nationalism and music helps clarify how and who claimed authenticity over German music in these years.

The strengths of the volume are in its scope and comparative focus; at the same time, these also point us to some of the book's limitations. While the reader will find a strong synthesis of cultural history with a rich bibliographic range, as with any book that tackles the broad sweep of the literature, each reader will also come with bibliography that s/he finds missing. I was surprised, for example, that Andrew Hemingway's deep work on art and leftwing politics in the US did not feature in the text, nor did such canonical figures as Berthold Hinz make an appearance on the German side. With the example of Hemingway in particular, some of these exclusions mark a particularly odd omission from the book, i.e., the lack of attention to political history. For von Saldern, cultural comparison rests almost always in the ideological realm. The nuances of party politics, the institutional change over time within a political regime or era, or the reorientation of cultural actors with ever-shifting relations to the state are in the background at best. Indeed, the “state” is rarely a focus here, other than as a patron for the arts or in the guise of a few key actors, such as Joseph Goebbels. (In this regard, the reader might look at another work that also came out recently, Otto Karl Werckmeister's The Political Confrontation of the Arts in Europe from the Great Depression to the Second World War [2020], with its even-more rigorous dialectical structure and laser focus on the state.)

That critique aside, von Saldern's book is a satisfying synthesis of the variety of painting, architecture, film, orchestral music, jazz, literature, and other arts connected to the complex debates around nationalism in these two countries in the first half of the twentieth century. It serves as an introduction to major movements and artistic players but also as a methodological challenge to scholars for a more critical and complex comparative cultural history.