Among the plethora of recent studies dedicated to ethnic identity-building, nationalism, and National Socialism among Europe's ethnic Germans during the first half of the twentieth century, very few have paid attention to these phenomena's underlying economic dimensions. As Bernd Robionek shows convincingly in his recent book, however, questions of socioeconomic class, material relations, and economic ties both locally and globally played a crucial role in helping to define the “ethnic boundaries” (22) and corporate identity of ethnic Germans targeted by the twentieth century's identity-casting schemes.

Robionek's study analyzes the seldom explored economic cooperatives of the ethnic Germans in the Vojvodina, a post-Habsburg borderland in northern Yugoslavia, to investigate issues of interwar national mobilization in a multiethnic space. Focusing in particular on the “Agraria”—the central agricultural cooperative of Yugoslavia's ethnic Germans—Robionek's book for the most part is organized chronologically. Following a lengthy introduction, which stakes out the book's geographical, temporal, and thematic parameters in great detail, Robionek's first chapter is dedicated to the proliferation of ethnic German cooperative activities during the 1920s. With great acuity, Robionek contextualizes the Agraria's 1922 establishment by leaders of the local pro-German organization, the Kulturbund, as a “top-down” attempt to foster an ethnic (and ultimately nationalist) particularism among the Vojvodina's German minority, some 84 percent of whom lived in an agricultural setting (35).

Cooperatives, Robionek explains, were no novelty: the Habsburg period had already seen the establishment of cooperatives aimed at furthering a combination of “rational production” methods and “cultural tasks.” In keeping with prevailing social patterns, however, these cooperatives were generally “ethnically indifferent” (42–43). After 1918, the establishment of the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats, and Slovenes, extensive land reforms that favored the region's Slavic (particularly Serbian) minorities, and waves of economic depression formed a turning point, as Robionek argues. Increasingly interested in “safeguarding” the local German minority— and supported by an irredentist Germany— the region's pro-German activists soon veered beyond the cultural and political organizational spheres to attempt the minority's economic integration.

The largescale organization of ethnic Germans into a pro-German economic cooperative in no way followed an inevitable teleology toward ethnic exclusivity and National Socialism, as Robionek's first chapter in particular demonstrates. Thus, although farmers during the 1920s had many incentives to join the Agraria—including access to cheaper hardware and fertilizers, larger economic markets, and privileged sales prices—the pro-German organization represented only one of several alternatives. Organizations from across 1920s Yugoslavia's ethnic and political spectrum—such as the Croatian Peasant Party's initiatives, the “zadruge” agricultural cooperatives, the Serbian-led “Savez zemljoradnika” (Peasants’ Union), or various traditionally pro-Hungarian, Catholic peasants’ organizations—all pandered to, and often found support among, the region's ethnic Germans.

As Robionek shows, however, a range of factors bolstered the German cooperative's popularity. On the one hand, with direct financial support from Germany, the Agraria became the most effective association in providing economic aid for ethnic Germans in need. Following a devastating flood in 1924, for instance, hundreds of thousands of dinars were channeled through the Agraria to newly established local chapters, while collapsing agricultural prices, inflation, high taxes, and, ultimately, a global economic depression created an economic precariousness that was most efficiently counteracted by Germany's expanding resources for Europe's ethnic Germans. On the other hand, the Agraria itself became a placeholder for (temporarily) quashed nationalist ambitions. Especially after the German minority's political and cultural associations were forced to close following King Alexander's 1929 proclamation of Yugoslavia as a “royal dictatorship,” the Agraria stepped in as the last official form of German nationalist organization. Joining the Agraria became a proclamation of one's self-identification as “German.” Henceforth, the cooperative was adopted by “ethnic entrepreneurs as a subtle method of recruitment in a Vojvodina shaped by multilingualism and ethnic ambiguity” (91).

The Agraria's multivalent character as both a (nominally) ethnically exclusive economic cooperative and a nation-building tool helped propel its success during the following decade. In his second chapter, Robionek charts the Agraria's path through the politically and economically fraught 1930s. Again, the Agraria was forced not only to navigate a complex web of Yugoslav authority, German intervention, and rival political models in a multiethnic space; it was also faced with considerable intra-ethnic discord. Robionek thus shows how generational and ideological differences, coupled with opportunism, gave rise to numerous competing agricultural and welfare cooperatives. These included health-care cooperatives such as the Zentrale Wohlfahrtsgenossenschaft, led by the former socialist turned right-wing eugenics-aficionado Johann Wüscht, or the Kultur- und Wohlfahrtsvereinigung der Deutschen Slawoniens, led by Branimir Altgayer of the pro-Nazi “Erneuerer” (“renewers”) movement. Enjoying considerable Reich support, these cooperatives flourished in the economically desperate mid-1930s, providing tens of thousands of ethnic Germans with access to health care, loans, and acts of charity. By the late 1930s, the right-wing turn that occurred across the Kulturbund also affected the Agraria, which was taken over by the Erneuerer and paved the way for further political radicalization during World War II.

Robionek's deeply researched book offers much interesting food for thought. His discussion of the Agraria's poultry cooperative Avis's “progressive” gender agenda—which urged women to set up their own businesses under the Agraria's aegis—or his disturbing description of rising antisemitic tendencies within the cooperative offer crucial insight into sociopolitical dimensions of the ethnic German experience. Mastering several languages, Robionek further highlights the many perspectives and crucial inconsistencies inherent to the region's nationalist causes: while the Avis propagated a staunchly pro-German agenda, dedicated in part to “fighting . . . the local prosperous Jewish wholesale trade” (137), the cooperative in fact continued trading with Jewish businesses until the late 1930s, while deriving many of its products from non-German farmers. Nevertheless, as Robioniek convincingly shows, German economic cooperatives formed a crucial component of “ethnopolitical mobilization,” which—in combination with larger cultural and political developments—helped solidify the boundaries of local “Germanness” (15, 213).

Despite its many merits, Robionek's book might seem alienating to an English-language readership, especially in relation to its format. A published version of a German doctoral dissertation, the book consists only of two lengthy chapters, contains a most rudimentary index, and provides reading that, in comparison to the rhetoric of many English-language equivalents, is rather dry. Thematically, too, his study neglects several potential points of interest. A global audience thus might find interest in the Agraria's larger contexts, such as its inclusion into the International Cooperative Alliance (mentioned only fleetingly on page 11), or its complex relationship to socialist and anti-socialist ideologies more broadly. Occasionally, Robionek perhaps overstates the Agraria's importance, such as when he claims that, after 1929, the Agraria for some time became “the only instrument of public organization of ‘Germandom’” (98)—a statement that ignores recent research on other forms of enduring German nationalist, social, and cultural mobilization. Moreover, considering crucial ongoing research into the German minority during World War II, the Holocaust in Yugoslavia, and questions of economic dispossession and restitution in southeast Europe, it is unfortunate that Robionek's study ends before the Axis's occupation of Yugoslavia in 1941. Finally, although his approach, inspired by a critique of the cultural turn's neglect of “actual economic circumstances” (10), enrichens our understanding of ethnic politics, Robionek's focus on state policies, organizational structures, and accounting ledgers occasionally obscures the lived reality of the very population he is interested in. His rare inclusion of micro-level case studies, individual voices, or an approach nearing an “Alltagsgeschichte” of economic realities only underlines the need to integrate economic, social, and cultural histories of twentieth-century southeast Europe. But that is perhaps a task for future historians, who will only benefit from Robionek's insights.