This is a work of substantial scholarship on a topic (or rather variety of topics) of significance and intrinsic interest. It is almost undone, however, by a misleading title, weak analytical structure, and a general disconnect between the material presented and various strained attempts to give it wider meaning. The title and subtitle barely hint at the book's actual contents; indeed, the one aspect of Germany and the east, 1914–1922, that Annemarie Sammartino does not examine in any detail is Germany's eastern border, the specific changes that it underwent, how and why these changes were made, and how they affected interwar German and European history. Nor is the border itself, as quasi-physical state-administered divide between different polities, shown to have been substantially different from most other European frontiers. What did make Germany's post-WWI eastern frontier somewhat different was the large number of people wanting to cross it, mainly to enter Germany—this turns out to be the principal focus of this wide-ranging study and its chief value to historians.

Sammartino focuses on several large populations (altogether about one million people) that entered Germany after 1918: Germans from territories ceded to Poland, political refugees produced by the Russian Revolution (or Red Army soldiers interned during the Polish-Soviet War), and other eastern Europeans, many of them Jewish, seeking relief from discrimination or violence in their home countries. She emphasizes the variable reception accorded each of these groups: fellow Germans were (not surprisingly) welcomed most readily, and anti-Bolshevik Russians also enjoyed considerable sympathy (in part because they did not intend to stay), whereas eastern European Jews were least welcome, although their asylum requests were seldom denied by Prussia's Social Democratic government. Sammartino's investigation, reflecting its reliance on official sources in German archives, focuses less on the exodus itself than on its reception by a German state and society currently dealing with many other challenges; it is concerned hardly at all with the conditions in these other countries that prompted the migrations. In other words, this is a very Reich-centric account—to the extent that eastern European places appear only under their German designations (e.g., Posen, Mitau, Dünemünde, Petersburg). These several chapters, the strongest part of the book, are preceded by three other case studies that seem less consequential and not a very good fit. They involve not large population movements into Germany but half-baked plans to encourage German settlement outside the Reich; in particular, a wartime project to resettle displaced Russian Germans in the occupied Baltic provinces, an unconsummated plan to let members of Freikorp units fighting in the Baltic settle there permanently, and an even more fanciful 1920 campaign by German communists to show their solidarity by relocating to a famine-ravaged Soviet Russia.

Sammartino has read widely and is an energetic researcher, but problems arise when she shifts from presenting her often interesting material to interpreting it and reaching for wider connections. A wide-ranging introductory chapter fails to define the question(s) to which the material presented is meant to be the answer—indeed, it would be a challenge to devise a title that reflects this book's thesis and contents. The conclusion is also problematic: part repetition of previous material, part allusion to often far-fetched theories only vaguely suggested or supported by her material. The text is replete with dubious generalizations that go well beyond what her evidence will support (e.g., “the flood of refugees from the eastern territories encouraged [the] utopian vision . . . of a German nation that encompassed the lost Polish territories”; the 1922 Rapallo agreement demonstrated a “commitment to reclaiming German territory in the east”; the Weimar Republic's programs to help the embattled German minority in Poland “laid the groundwork for a more far-reaching German imperialism).” Sammartino seems to see Lebensraum intentions almost everywhere (though one is relieved to learn that “there was a qualitative difference between the policies enacted during the Weimar Republic and those enacted by the Nazis”). Other statements defy comprehension (e.g., “the defeat and the treaty were understood as limits or boundaries; however, by incorporating the limit themselves—becoming the border—[Freikorps members] believed [they] could transcend it”; the war produced a population of “stateless and rightless minorities that . . . could not be managed within a set of gerrymandered international institutions”; “the image of Germany's impossible border—both too strong and too weak . . . links the sense of crisis in Germany to the broader European crisis of sovereignty”; “the failure of a state to guard its frontiers . . . has metaphorical consequences.” One of many conceptual hangers that she uses is the notion that the ability of so many people to cross Germany's eastern border uninvited produced “a crisis of sovereignty.” Possibly, but she does not consider the comparative questions that this trope must raise (e.g., does the vastly greater population of illegal aliens currently in the United States also represent a crisis of sovereignty?). And if one is to take seriously Hannah Arendt's odd (if biographically understandable) conjecture that the appearance of large stateless populations subject to police control was an important source of modern totalitarianism (which thesis figures prominently in Sammartino's conclusion), why did the vastly greater influx of such people into post-1945 Germany produce not totalitarianism but the most liberal state in German history?

This is a first book by a promising young historian that one does not want to judge too harshly. But it would clearly have benefited from anonymous referees who insisted on greater conceptual coherence and analytical rigor. One would also expect a reputable university press to employ a proofreader to catch the most obvious slips, both factual (“Entente forces pushed the Russians out of Galicia” in 1915; “residents of Upper Silesia conducted a plebiscite”) and grammatical (“Even though he was a known homosexual, the Berlin police president recommended an applicant named Milsch”). In the end, however, the thoroughness of the research that went into this book and the variety of interesting subjects it treats persuade one of its essential value. Interested historians will find it worth consulting, if not especially easy to read and digest in toto.