Although scholars have long invoked the notion of a Catholic milieu to discuss German Catholics as a social and, above all, an electoral group during the Weimar Republic, studies of the Catholic subculture between 1918 and 1933 remain thin on the ground. Indeed, while there exist plenty of indications that confessional affiliation continued to structure German social life in key ways after 1918, historians have devoted curiously little attention to investigating what it meant to be Catholic in day-to-day terms. Were Catholics finally leaving their Kaiserreich-era ghetto? Or was Catholic sociability and daily life still being constructed largely around specifically Catholic institutions, organisations (educational, professional, charitable etc.) and media?

In many respects, Jeremy Stephen Roethler's volume is well poised to address these lacunae. He proposes to investigate a notable element of Weimar's Catholic subculture: the Catholic fraternities. As he notes, Catholic university students flocked to these organisations – CV, KV, Unitas – after 1918, a development that reflected both an ongoing climate of hostility to Catholics at Germany's universities and Catholics' post-war sense that belonging to a Catholic fraternity would not damage their career prospects. But, he insists, the fraternities were not just important for defending Catholic students' interests as Catholics and maintaining their ties to Catholicism. They also played a critical role in preparing future generations of Catholic leaders. Critically, and echoing an argument advanced recently (and with much greater sophistication) by Udi Greenberg (The Weimar century: German émigrés and the ideological foundations of the Cold War, Princeton 2015), Roethler claims that West Germany's leading Catholic statesmen drew on Weimar-era discourses from the Catholic fraternity milieu in their efforts to rebuild German state, society and nation after the Second World War.

Sadly, the book will leave most readers profoundly disappointed, precisely because it has not successfully made the leap from dissertation to scholarly monograph. A first challenge is the volume's lack of focus. After an initial chapter on the Catholic fraternities prior to 1914 that neither provides necessary background information on German Catholic students (overall enrolment patterns, degree of participation in fraternities of any sort) or probes significantly the confessional tensions that pervaded university life during the Kaiserreich, Roethler offers a chapter on Catholic students' military experiences and war memories, generally as reported in fraternity periodicals. Likewise, he spends most of chapter iii examining political discourses about the Weimar constitution in the fraternity press, before painting a brief picture of the increasingly conservative bent to postwar German fraternity life and the problems that created for the Catholic fraternities. Thereafter, the focus shifts to the relationship between the Catholic fraternities and the Centre party, which also provides the context for passing remarks on fraternity membership trends. Apart from a short section in chapter vi which is devoted to the Catholic fraternities' refusal to add an ‘Aryan paragraph’ to their statutes, chapters v and vi ignore completely the fraternities as such, opting rather to scrutinise discussions of such topics in their publications as the nature of the state, justice and the nation. In chapter vii Roethler ably explains the Catholic fraternities' coldness towards National Socialism, a posture that further isolated them from other fraternities, but once more his main interest is in the anti-Nazi discourse in their publications. The book then concludes with a brief chapter that recounts the Catholic fraternities' demise after 1933 and their revival after 1945.

But what is this book really about? Is it a history of the fraternities as organisations? If so, Roethler's portrait is rather anaemic. Apart from the summary data presented on pp. 72–3, he provides precious little detail about the students in these organisations (including their socio-economic and geographical backgrounds), how these groups were organised locally and nationally, and how they evolved during the period. Or was this intended to be a study of Catholics who were members of fraternities? If so, the fruits are especially slim picking. Or perhaps he envisaged an extended analysis of the fraternity press as a sort of intellectual history? This is what he has largely produced. Notably absent from these pages, however, is any discussion of these publications and their specific status vis-à-vis their respective organisations. What kind of circulation did they enjoy? Who wrote for them? And, above all, to what degree can they be regarded as ‘official’ publications?

A second shortcoming is the lack of sufficient intellectual rigour and careful writing. The book is replete with awkward statements and generalities. For instance, he writes ‘For much of the previous century, the German government had treated its minority as national outcasts' (p. 3). But which century is meant? If the nineteenth, Catholics could only be ‘national outcasts' during the final decades, for a German national state did not exist before 1871. Problematic, too, is the weak engagement with the scholarly literature. For instance, in mentioning the notion of the ‘Catholic milieu’ (p. 4), Roethler fails to mention any of the major contributors to this literature (for example, Olaf Blaschke, Franz-Michael Kuhlemann and Anthonius Liedhegener). Likewise, he twice refers to Derek Hastings's pioneering work on the links between Nazism and Catholicism, but not only is the work missing from the bibliography, but he ignores its analyses completely, for example concerning the Nazi appropriation of the Catholic student Albert Leo Schlageter (p. 132). Curious, too, is Roethler's basic avoidance of Lisa Fethergill Zwicker's recent monograph on the confessional culture of German fraternities in the Kaiserreich.

In short, this is a modest book with much to be modest about. To be sure, Roethler raises some interesting questions and has stumbled across some fascinating material. But the work's conceptual and historiographical inadequacies prove fatal: it convinces neither as a history of German Catholic fraternities nor as a history of German Catholic thought during the Weimar Republic.