With the downfall and the dissolution of the three empires ruling in east central Europe during and after World War I, several new states gained independence. Klaus Richter has chosen the cases of Poland and the three Baltic states to analyze and describe developments from 1915–1929. Thus, he is able to include the war experience, German occupation, the different wars and conflicts after WWI, state and nation building, and the period until the Great Depression. This is a highly ambitious and certainly interesting book, but it also contains major weaknesses. The guiding thematic line for the author is the fragmentation of a formerly unified space.

Richter draws his narrative from an impressive amount of sources located in seventeen different archives, from contemporary newspapers, and a lot of literature. Using seven languages and this broad amount of sources is in itself laudable. The problem lies in the detail; the author does not really master the historiography of the four countries. There are enormous gaps in the used literature directly related to his topics. The German perspective through sources from the war and the interwar period is clearly present, some British sources are included, but the Russian and later Soviet view is completely lacking. Baltic German newspapers are quoted too often, even when representing only small ethnic minorities in Estonia and Latvia.

Drawing the text closely from sources and not being so familiar with historiography poses a certain risk—misunderstandings from the sources are uncritically repeated. For example, according to a source by the German foreign office from February 1918, Baltic Germans and Latvian nationalist feared “that a future Polish state would seek to conquer Latgale to gain access to the sea” (38). Yet, the region of Latgale is located 200 km east of the Baltic Sea. Minor mistakes and typos always happen but the author should have checked much more thoroughly all the information he presents the reader directly from sources.

Richter's main topic—the fragmentation of a formerly unified space—is thought provoking and causes critique at the same time. First, in his sample are four states, and the largest and most populous, Poland, representing more than eighty percent of the sample's population, mainly witnessed in this period the unification of three separate territories once belonging to three empires. Of course, drawing new borders added more fragmentation. Second, Richter imagines that those regions that were part of the Russian Empire “were subjected to the same legal code, the same logics of nationalities policy, and to the same economic and infrastructural policy for more than a century” (7). This is simply wrong. In the Baltic provinces and the successor states the Baltic provincial civil law was applied until the late 1930s. Serfs were liberated with a time difference of nearly fifty years and under different conditions. Compulsory schooling existed in the Baltic provinces since the eighteenth century and was introduced under German occupation in Lithuania and Russia's part of Poland. Concerning the Polish uprisings, the imperial policy towards the Polish nobility was quite different from the one towards the loyal Baltic German nobility. Nationalities policy concerning Estonians and Latvians differed enormously from the treatment of Lithuanians. In other words, the Russian empire's western provinces were not a unified place in the century before WWI. All this weakens Richter's main argument.

While the author writes in a readable style, his way of presenting the narrative makes it sometimes hard to follow. He is namely moving quickly in time and space, “zooming in and out” (7). So you read a piece on Poland, move quickly to Estonia and hop back to Lithuania. Even as a specialist I have to acknowledge sometimes losing track. This movement in time and space definitely helps to track connections, networks, and similarities, but should have been used more cautiously.

Richter starts with a short introduction stressing the importance of international history and entanglement. In the next chapter he deals with German wartime plans for the region and the emerging of new states. The following chapter analyzes problems of repatriation, refugees, citizenship, and minorities. The topic of Chapter 4 is borders and territorial questions. There existed plans of regional cooperation, however, they did not become reality. In Chapter 5 economic issues from wartime German exploitation via foreign trade and the building of homegrown merchant classes are central. The following chapter deals with infrastructure, access to the sea (essential for Poland and Lithuania), and the role of the state. Land reform and property redistribution are at the center of Chapter 7, while a concluding chapter also looks towards the future of economic crisis, authoritarianism, and revisions of territory.

Despite the mentioned critiques, one needs to admit that the author has chosen an ambitious topic. Some of the selected quotations are extremely well chosen. The reader learns a lot from this text, even with some inaccuracies and problems to keep track off. The topic of fragmentation is well argued and illustrated by good examples from all four countries. This book might still be recommended with the caveat that there are certain weaknesses.