The expansive title of Wilkins's book pinpoints what is both a strength and a weakness of this monograph, which seeks to link landscape art of the 1960s and 1970s to the literary and aesthetic Romantic period that followed the French Revolution. Questioning the supposedly sharp East-West divisions between the two Germanies, the author describes the art of post–World War II painters who were well-known in the Federal Republic and the German Democratic Republic (GDR), such as the neo-expressionist Jörg Immendorff and the medievalizing GDR artist Werner Tübke, along with more obscure artists such as Günter Richter, Michael von Biel, and Ursula Mattheuer-Neustädt. Wilkins characterizes her account as being “rooted in the premise that a collective cultural association with—and common commitment to—the native environment, both in its actual form and in its imagined symbolic state, bound together Germans not only from both sides of the Berlin Wall for the phenomenon of the Green Party unification, but also historically across a broad span of troubled times” (1–2).

She supports this claim in discrete chapters that discuss and analyze landscape paintings of the early nineteenth-century artists Caspar David Friedrich, Philip Runge, and Carl Blechen, and then attempts to demonstrate that their imagery of ruined Gothic churches and medieval structures was appropriated by postwar artists in the East and the West. For example, Wilkins provides a lengthy discussion of Günter Richter's Red House (1974), comparing it to Friedrich's Abbey in the Oak Forest (1809). It is unfortunate that the monograph contains no images of the Romantic paintings extensively described by the author. Without being able to make direct visual comparisons, readers will have difficulty evaluating the author's arguments. Friedrich's deep religiosity and melancholy, stemming from personal troubles and from the revolutionary upheavals of the Napoleonic era, have been explored by numerous art historians for the better part of three decades. Wilkins supports the interpretation that Romantic painters’ interest in the medieval was colored by contemporary political and religious concerns.

What is novel is Wilkins's attempt to demonstrate that East German artists, such as Richter, appropriated the idea of ruined architecture to make a political statement. She notes that the Red House apparently represented the ruined bourgeois culture that, following the establishment of the GDR, was to be replaced and improved by socialist art. Wilkins reads another Richter work created ten years later, a monochromatic rendition of Bourgeois House Overgrown with Dead Plants (1984), as “a subversive critique of East German socialism, a reminder of a proud pan-Germanic past and a universal hope for a truly postwar future” (72). Yet, if this interpretation is valid, it represents a different aesthetic point of view from the one advanced by early nineteenth-century Romantic painters. The latter wanted to show the temporality of human endeavor and to demonstrate how nature triumphed over time. The GDR artists selected by the author were familiar with the Romantics but obviously worked in a very different cultural environment. One wonders if East German artists were as concerned with the issue of nature's dominance over human endeavor.

The obvious similarity between early nineteenth-century Romantic painters and the artists of postwar East and West Germany was that post-1945 Germans, like the earlier Romantics, had to contemplate their future based on a series of recent catastrophes and war—yet this may be the limit of the similarities between them. Another caveat specifically regarding Richter's images is the difference between the decades in which they were produced. By the 1980s, political discussions over nuclear weaponry, the environment, and other issues were beginning to be debated in both East and West Germany more forcefully than had been the case during the earlier decades discussed by the author. Other chapters describe the generation of protesters who became known as the ’68ers, gender relations in a divided Germany, and changing views on religion. For example, Wilkins uses Werner Tübke's art and its relationship to the Protestant Reformation and to the Peasants’ War to illustrate how artists grappled with religion in an ostensibly atheistic Socialist state. Along similar lines, she selects the West German artist Michael von Biel to demonstrate an increased interest in spiritualized landscapes, reminiscent of the nineteenth-century Romantics.

The author introduces a number of themes that range across sociology, history, aesthetics, and literature. Yet, for this reason, it is difficult to discern the book's fundamental argument about the postwar artists’ use of landscape. It is also difficult to tease out the precise nature of Wilkins's argument about a West and East German congruence over issues of religion, gender, and the environment because her discussion is frequently lost in a welter of political and historical digressions. There is also an eclectic quality to Wilkins's selection of artists (primarily those of the Düsseldorf Art Academy and the Leipzig Art School), for which the author does not provide a rationale or explanation of the method she used. Finally, there are key secondary texts dealing with both nineteenth- and twentieth-century art history that might have aided Wilkins in focusing her discussion—for example, the massive exhibition catalogs by Eckhart Gillen (Deutschlandsbilder [1997] and his co-curated Art of Two Germanys: Cold War Cultures [2009]), which discuss the aesthetic and political tensions, as well as the commonalities, among East and West German artists after 1945. Landscape Imagery, Politics, and Identity in a Divided Germany nevertheless reminds us of the persistent hold of landscape upon German painters—despite changing politics and governments.