With this study of America's place within German colonialism and expansionism, Jens-Uwe Guettel has produced an insightful book that makes a significant contribution to modern transatlantic history. There is no doubt in my mind that this book is poised to become a textbook for classes in transnational and transatlantic history. Guettel takes on both German and American exceptionalism and clearly shows the intellectual interconnections between German and American imperialism. The author reminds us that European Liberals admired not only the democratic political system of the United States but also the example the country set in terms of colonial conquest, racist exclusionary policies, and genocide. American expansionism in the form of the westward expansion of the United States from the Atlantic to the Pacific and its racial policies with regard to the treatment of Native American populations as well as African-American populations “were seen as models that European colonizers could and should reproduce elsewhere in the world—in particular in Germany's own colonies” (p. 4). German proponents of colonial expansion into Africa found inspiration for restrictive marriage laws in the Jim Crow Laws of the American South. Reservations for Native American populations in the United States were considered by many German Liberals as valuable models for the treatment of native populations inside Germany's African colonies.

Guettel also clearly shows the rupture in Germany's expansionist policies that occurred with World War I. Arguing against traditional interpretations that have stressed the continuities from Wilhelmine colonial policies and practices in Africa to the Nazi conquest of living space in eastern Europe, Guettel convincingly shows that intellectual, personnel, and practical discontinuities between liberal colonialism that was focused on Africa and Nazi plans for settling eastern Europe with ethnic Germans outweigh the very few continuities. Africa did not matter in Hitler's plans for expansion “unless African territories fell into German hands without much effort” (p. 188). While Heinrich Himmler, Alfred Rosenberg, and Adolf Hitler appropriated Friedrich Ratzel's imperial concept of “living space,” they had little interest in its original meaning and integrated the term into their NS vocabulary, endowing it with new meaning. And while liberal colonialists of the Wilhelmine era made no secret of their admiration for American colonialism, Nazi politicians did not refer to the American model of imperialism. Nazi expansionism might have paralleled American expansionism but it did not actively invoke such similarities.

The most fascinating part of the book concerns the exchange of ideas and interpretations of the notion of the “frontier” between American and German intellectuals and academics. From the beginning, German intellectuals perceived the American frontier not as exceptional but as “an example of a global phenomenon” (p. 88). While Friedrich Ratzel praised Fredrick Jackson Turner's frontier thesis, he refuted American exceptionalist claims. As a global phenomenon, the frontier was for Ratzel a place “where indigenous peoples were pushed aside by white settlers” to provide living space “to sustain a species or a people” (p. 94). Ratzel's ruminations found a captivated audience among American academics in general and Harvard geologists and geographers who championed eugenics and immigration controls in particular. And even Turner extensively cited Ratzel in later publications.

Guettel also traces in great detail the influence of the Jim Crow laws on the formulation of restricted marriage laws in the German colonies in Africa. German citizenship rules automatically afforded children of German men and women German citizenship regardless of where they were born. Such rules stemmed from the precolonial times and did not take into account the possibility that the German and African people could produce offspring. When Germany came into the possession of colonies in Africa, the issue of skin color and citizenship suddenly turned into a great problem that caused colonial administrators and politicians in Berlin to change marriage and citizenship laws in ways that would have prevented people of nonwhite skin colors from claiming German citizenship. Ignoring models of racial segregation in the geographically much closer Transvaal Province, German colonial protagonists such as Wilhelm Solf, Bernhard Dernburg, and Hans Tecklenburg sought to study the state laws about racial segregation in the American South.

While this truly transnational study is inspiring and thought provoking, there are a few aspects where the author could have gone even further by integrating discussions from the American side on American imperialism. For a long time, American historians followed an interpretation in which the United States was claimed to have been different from European powers by not engaging in colonialism and imperialism. The continental westward expansion of the United States was—in contrast to the eastward expansion of the Russian Empire (to take a quite comparable example)—not conceived of as a colonial enterprise. The acquisition of former Spanish colonies in the Caribbean and the South Pacific as a result of the Spanish-American War was treated as anomaly. Interpretations have changed, however, and American historians have begun to reconsider the United States as a colonial power that acquired knowledge about the management of its colonies among other sources from its European counterparts. American colonialism influenced European colonialism as much as European colonialism influenced American colonialism. German Samoa, to take just one example, provided a model for American Samoa. Engaging the newer literature on transnationalizing American history produced by scholars such as Ian Tyrrell (Transnational Nation) and Thomas Bender (A Nation Among Nations), to name just the two leading scholars, could have furthered the exploration of transnational connections and influences across the Atlantic and the Pacific.

The reconceptualization of American history occurs in the larger context of transnational and modern transatlantic history. Guettel references in his study the criticism rightfully leveled against Atlantic history as an outdated field that all too often is reduced to colonial British-American history. While Guettel's study has nothing to offer to traditional or even newer Atlantic historians, it is of great interest to modern transatlantic historians who focus on the nineteenth-century experience of intercultural transfers that contributed to the making of nation-states within the Atlantic world. Neither American culture/identity nor German culture/identity emerged in isolation but were the result of intensive exchanges across all fields of knowledge and culture. Karl May's novels about the “dying” native civilizations of North America were part and parcel of this exchange and contributed to the production of images and identities more than travel and serious reports. Yet it seems that Guettel is beating a dead horse when he reminds his reader that May's popularity should not be confused with genuine German sympathy for the fate of Native-American populations. May was very clear that their fate might have been tragic, but it was in his eyes and the eyes of his readers inevitable since the Native-American populations with their customs, traditions, and beliefs stood in the way of progress and therefore had to vanish. That nineteenth-century Germans might also have seen an inherent kinship with Native-American tribes, projecting a romanticized tribal Germanic past onto the North American presence, did not necessarily provide proof of sympathy. In general, Guettel's book could have gained even more relevance by locating its argumentation not only within traditional German historiography but also within the newer historiography of transatlantic history and works such as Daniel T. Rodgers's Atlantic Crossings. In the context of the newer approach of transnational history, it would be wrong to suggest, as the author unfortunately does, that “Germans, at least until 1884, remained onlookers with respect to the ‘Atlantic worlds’” (p. 12). It might well be the author just confused Germans with the German state. German-speaking settlers, merchants, and organizers of migration (as, for instance, in the project to create a German colony in Texas in the 1840s) played a role that should not be underestimated in the peopling of North and South America. German settlements emerged across the continent. And German cities and towns with their cultural and social infrastructure provided inspiration for the creation of urban infrastructures across North America's urban centers.

Yet, Guettel raises in the context of discussing the existence of the German literary tradition from Friedrich Gerstäcker to Karl May, in which the lives of Native Americans were romanticized, an interesting question that needs more transnational research. Guettel suggests that the “German fascination with and interest in Native Americans seem less exceptional” (p. 83) if one compares this literary tradition with those of other European countries. Is there an equivalent to Karl May in Spain, Italy, or Hungary? Guettel mentioned only a French (Gustave Aimard) and an English (Percy S. John) author. It seems from my limited (in terms of language competency) perspective that only little comparative research has been done on this subject. Before we can establish that Germans' infatuation with stories about Native Americans was in fact not exceptional, we need proof.

The decision of the publisher—and I assume it was the decision of the publisher and not the author—to have extensive footnotes at the end of paragraphs instead of shorter footnotes attached to the particular citation is quite awkward and of little help when one wants to identify a particular citation or idea. On page 24, to take just one example, the first paragraph ends with a lengthy citation that is attributed within the text to Margaret Lavinia Anderson. But the footnote attached to the citation does not start with a reference to Anderson's book but with a reference to Heinrich Class and Roger Chickering. And this is no exception. Such confusions can be found throughout the book. On page 76, Guettel provides a very interesting citation from a text by Alexander von Humboldt according to whom oceans were, in the nineteenth century, no longer considered obstacles but connecting channels. This phrase immediately reminds the versed reader of the famous phrase coined by Rodgers in his book Atlantic Crossings about the Atlantic “as a connective lifeline” rather than a “barrier” (p. 1). There is clearly an intellectual tradition that transatlantic scholars would be keen to unearth. Yet, Guettel does not even provide a footnote to refer to the source of this Humboldt citation.