Despite the recent proliferation of centenary literature on World War I, scholars have devoted little attention to the wartime alliance of Imperial Germany and the Habsburg Empire, or to the question of whether that coalition had any lasting effects on German national identity. According to Jan Vermeiren, many histories of the war presume that the Central Powers’ alliance both strengthened and legitimized nationalist demands for a “Greater Germany.” Their authors, have failed to test the validity of such assumptions, misled, he argues, by, inter alia, the enthusiastic rhetoric of July 1914. In this original, thought-provoking study, Vermeiren investigates the significance of the Dual Alliance in German national discourse, disputing the long-held narrative that the Austro-German coalition produced the “breakthrough of the ethnic or völkisch concept of the German nation” (335).

There is no question that World War I challenged established ideas about German national identity, but Vermeiren argues that the Protestant-dominated, Prussian-led Kleindeutschland of 1871 proved to be remarkably resilient up to 1918. The war created new opportunities for various interest groups to reimagine the German nation, thereby enabling radical nationalists, left-liberal idealists, and Catholics alike to advance alternative visions of the Bismarckian nation-state. Yet, despite expressions of jingoistic sentiment throughout the war, nationalist calls for the creation of a “Greater German” ethnic nation were the exception, not the rule. It was not the war itself, Vermeiren argues, but the Central Powers’ defeat in 1918 that represented “a major watershed in the history of the German national idea” (335). The lost war, the revolutions, and the collapse of the old political order engendered a break with prewar German national thought, thrusting the “German Question” into the political mainstream, as interest groups and parties on both sides of the spectrum supported Anschluss with the German-speaking remnant of the Austro-Hungarian Empire.

The book comprises nine thematic chapters that focus on issues such as war aims, the Mitteleuropa debate, German attitudes and policies toward Poland and Hungary, as well as the implications of these policies for the relationship with the Habsburg monarchy. The author has assembled a broad range of primary sources from archives in Germany and Austria, relying heavily on the unpublished papers of senior public officials, interest groups, and prominent intellectuals. He begins by writing about German attitudes toward Austria in the years prior to 1914, pointing out that the majority of Germans accepted the Bismarckian kleindeutsch nation-state as the ultimate source of political legitimacy. Germans undoubtedly felt a sense of kinship with the Austro-Germans living in the Habsburg Empire, a bond reinforced through shared history, culture, language, and institutions. But even far-right political activists and newspapers regarded the Austro-Hungarian Empire as a moribund state—an artificial, Slav-dominated construction that could never be assimilated into the German Reich. From at least 1879 onward, they saw the relationship with Austria-Hungary in more pragmatic terms: as a viable partnership that helped guarantee security and stability on the continent. There were conflicting and often contradictory viewpoints on these issues, to be sure, and the author deftly covers the spectrum of opinions espoused by intellectuals, journalists, and various political factions in pre-1914 Germany. In the end, however, German politicians and the general public adopted an attitude of “pragmatic realism” (34) toward the Danube Monarchy, expressing no overt desire to challenge the status quo.

The outbreak of World War I was accompanied by an outpouring of public enthusiasm for the Austro-German comradeship-in-arms, an imagined moment that was often portrayed in terms of the Nibelungentreue (the loyalty of the Nibelungs). Vermeiren warns his reader against overestimating the impact of such rhetoric, however. Although the vocabulary of the Nibelungentreue shaped official discourses during the war, they were a “temporary phenomena without practical consequences” (329) for German national identity in the long run.

Chapter 5, which focuses on the Mitteleuropa and war aims debate, is arguably the most intriguing part of the book. Here the author shows that debates about the future relationship between Austria and Germany were dominated, on the one hand, by interest groups such as Catholics, who saw the old Holy Roman Empire as an alternative to the Prussian-led Kleindeutschland; and, on the other, by German liberals such as Friedrich Naumann, who hoped for an economic union with Austria-Hungary—and for eventual economic domination of Central Europe—after the war. Ideological rationales emphasizing race and Volk played a surprisingly subordinate role in discussions at the time of the national question. Arguments advanced by the Pan-German League, for example, consistently privileged the practical interests of the German state over irredentist, völkisch aspirations. Moreover, as the conflict dragged on, Germany was forced to take on increased burdens as a result of Austrian military failures, thereby eroding the positive image of the Habsburg Monarchy as a strong and dependable coalition partner. By 1916, there were fundamental disagreements in the alliance over strategy, negotiations with the Entente, and plans for Mitteleuropa after the war. The increasing disenchantment was mutual, and one of the strengths of the book is that it throws light on Austria's role as an active and independent actor during the war.

In the final analysis, fighting side-by-side with Austria-Hungary did not bring about a fundamental break with previous German national thought and practice: there was little desire in Germany proper to incorporate the German-speaking population beyond the borders of the Reich. Only after the Central Powers’ defeat did political parties on both sides of the spectrum call for the ethnic German rump of Austria to join the Reich. Yet, even then, practical considerations were decisive. With the old Habsburg Empire in ruins, Austrian politicians saw a union with Germany as the only viable means of guaranteeing economic security, whereas their counterparts in Germany thought that a merger would compensate for anticipated territorial losses vis-à-vis France. Only the dramatically deteriorating economic, military, and political situation in Germany, as well as the opposition of the Allied powers, prevented these desires from becoming reality. The realization of a union between Germany and Austria was consequently left to Adolf Hitler, who celebrated the 1938 Anschluss as the culmination of a thousand-year struggle for German national unity.

Despite the merits of this meticulous study, further discussion of continuities in German history—and specifically of why arguments based on völkisch thinking eventually trumped traditional German state interests—is necessary. Vermeiren is right to see 1918 as a caesura: the scope and duration of ideas about the Nibelungentreue were limited, but their consequences were not. The rhetoric of Anschluss exerted a lasting fascination on later generations of Germans, as Social Democrats and Pan-Germans both sought to appropriate its appeal for their own purposes. But these are only minor criticisms. The First World War and German National Identity contains much of interest for scholars and readers interested in transnational European history, nationalism, and the complexities of history and memory in twentieth-century Austria and Germany. Vermeiren's work is convincing, in the end, not only because of the wealth of material it draws upon and the author's mastery of the mass of literature on World War I, but also because it questions established notions about the dynamic reciprocal relationship between war and society—something that had far-reaching implications for the further course of German history.