As indicated in his title, Felix Brahm seeks to make a comparative study of scholarship on Africa in Germany and France from the inter-war era through the first postcolonial decade, with specific attention to paradigm shifts and institutional change. The outcome is somewhat narrower than the goal: there is little on theoretical formulations beyond a general turn from colonial/eurocentric/racist perceptions of Africa towards more universalistic notions of ‘development’ or ‘modernization’. The comparison between the German and French institutions is undermined by the author's far greater concern with Germany and by the radically different colonial histories of the two countries. Decolonization also enters the story rather late and, in the German case, plays second fiddle to the broader issues of Nazism and the Cold War. This book is mainly a history of specific institutions and of the politics and academic aspirations of individual scholars and administrators.

Brahm has undertaken a prodigious amount of research into academic archives to draw extensive lists of courses on Africa offered by the various institutions in question. A similarly quantitative approach to his book suggests that the author devoted about 20 per cent more attention to Germany than to France. The comparisons are rendered particularly problematic in the context of decolonization – for the period under consideration in the book (1930–70), Germany had no colonies and in general it had only a very brief colonial history. One academic outcome of this political difference that Brahm might have taken more systematically into account is that German scholarship on Africa (Afrikanistik) tended to follow the philological model of language and literature (in this case mainly language) rather than the social science direction of France, Britain, and the United States. Brahm does give great attention to the ideological issues of the Nazi era and the subsequent division of Germany into two states on opposite sides of the Iron Curtin. France never went through quite the same changes; nevertheless, the author misses opportunities for comparison by not paying more attention to Vichy fascism, to the prominent role of Marxists in French Africanist scholarship, and even to the New Left student uprisings of 1968 (which Brahm discusses only in the German context).

The institutional history of African studies in France and in Germany has been covered in a number of works which Brahm acknowledges in his extensive bibliography and notes. His most interesting effort at originality consists of choosing parallel sets of ‘sites’ (Standesorten), meaning clusters of institutions (both academic and extra-university) in the capital of each country (Paris, Berlin) and in port cities connected commercially to Africa (Bordeaux, Hamburg). However this doubly-comparative structure breaks down after the Second World War. Bordeaux becomes rather peripheral to French African studies in France. In East Germany a new Africanist center at Leipzig overshadows that of Berlin. In West Germany Cologne takes a major role because of its proximity to the Federal Republic capital of Bonn. In all these cases there are efforts (least successful in the more extensively discussed German cases) to create inter-disciplinary African/area studies centers on the American model.

Brahm has relatively little to say about the content of the scholarship produced in these various institutions other than to note elements of colonialism, racism, and collaboration (by several prominent German Africanists) with the Apartheid regime of South Africa. His most extensive engagement with theory concerns the structuralism of Claude Levi-Strauss, whose dubious relevance to African studies is never even discussed. There is a useful account of the struggles to found a new West German African Studies Association (Vereinigung von Afrikanisten in Deutschland) more in keeping with postcolonial scholarship, but no account of parallel developments in France.

The most engaging sections of the book involve the intersecting careers of German scholars, with their varying ties to the Nazi regime; all, even one involved in genocide against Sinti/Roma people, are ultimately exonerated. It is perhaps significant that Brahm prefaces his introduction with a 1958 quote by Hamburg professor of ‘Overseas History’, Egmont Zechlin, in which he points to ‘the emancipation of the colored world from the system of European domination’ as a sign that the ‘modern era has come to an end’ (p. 9). Zechlin was a very ambiguous character who promoted post-Second World War African studies, but had previously not only supported the Nazis but also attempted to use the German occupation of Paris to seize thousands of books from French colonial libraries. Brahm dug Zechlin's unpublished pronouncement on global history out of the archives but like much else he has unearthed here, it is not clear what we are to make of it.