In 1971 Mack Walker's German Home Towns argued that understanding Germany's small-town environment was an essential avenue for understanding large portions of German history and society in the early modern and modern periods. Walker's book was seminal, and the results were visible in the burgeoning interest in small towns, local and regional identity, and related concepts such as Heimat. Merkl grew up “deeply immersed” in the small-town culture of Bavaria (p. xi) and never hides his personal connections to the material treated here. Merkl deftly deploys his intimate knowledge of the west middle Franconian region that serves as the location for his book; his personal references generally work well and make the book more approachable. Although Merkl is concerned with the 1970s and 1980s, the links to Walker's earlier work are obvious, both in vocabulary, with Americanisms such as “hometown,” and in the subject itself: the impact of “modernization” on Germany's small units of local self-government (p. 1).

Merkl's book is organized in six chapters, which function as pairs. Chapters one and two provide historical background on the changes underway in small-town Franconia after World War II. Here he describes the “decades of postwar social change that ‘hollowed out’ their [small towns'] sense of community and social reality” (p. 18). Many historians will find these chapters to be the most interesting part of the book. Dozens of interviews with mayors, schoolteachers, priests, and ministers in fifteen small communities located west of Nuremberg, along with extensive surveys and statistical data for the same territory (some of it in the first eleven tables of data in the Appendix) allow Merkl to describe the “slow erosion of the old, self-contained community” (p. 4) in carefully measured terms. In doing so, Merkl indirectly points out how well these small communes had survived previous waves of modernizing pressures in the nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries. The only truly problematic statement I found in this discussion was the assertion that the number of Bavarian farmers declined in the 1960s “under the impact of the Common Market” (p. 33), a view that does not stand up even to Merkl's own discussion on the following pages. Because these chapters rely so little on secondary historical literature, the somewhat dated body of those references is an inconsequential flaw.

Chapters three and four explore the great territorial reform of the Bavarian countryside in the 1970s, including Franz Josef Strauss's “reform of the reform” in 1978-80. In the end, more than 7,000 small communes were consolidated down to just over 2,000. The result, as intended, was a penetration of the countryside by the new administrative organs of the state, bringing an unprecedented level of service (the Dienstleistungsstaat) to rural residents. These chapters reflect more strongly the social science roots of the author. Readers will be well aware that this is a political scientist's thorough analysis of a large-scale West German administrative reorganization with its own planning jargon and bureaucratic language. The origins and implementation of the reform's new basic administrative units for the countryside, the Einheitsgemeinschaft (EG) and the Verwaltungsgemeinschaft (VG), are treated in depth.

Chapters five and six discuss the post-reform position of small towns in the current state, federal, and European structures of the Federal Republic and the EU and explore the enduring attraction of small-town life in contemporary Germany.

Despite some slow going in the middle chapters, the book has clear potential as a teaching tool—for graduates surely, and for advanced undergraduates perhaps as well. Merkl has decades of experience explaining German politics to American audiences, and his skill is on display here. German terms are used freely throughout, but are explained in English; even “Autobahn” gets a parenthetic “freeway.” The introduction explains the scope and argument of the book very clearly, and the opening chapters ground the reader well in the setting and issues. Merkl is also generally conscientious about alerting readers to trends and developments that were unique to the relatively poor region he examines and those that were more typical of Bavaria, West Germany, or even western Europe as a whole. Table A14 gives basic numerical data on communal reforms in other West German Länder, providing a comparative perspective, but also showing that a deep-reaching reorganization of the countryside was the order of the day in the 1970s. Chapter six in particular offers several passing comparisons between the small-town life and ideals of Bavarian Franconia and other locations in America, France, and Austria, to name a few.

Ironically the book is also valuable for what it does not discuss. There is no discussion of Nazism, World War II (just a bit on refugees in Bavaria), or the Cold War. Readers are indirectly reminded that some extraordinarily important developments in the postwar era, such as transformative rural-urban migration, did not result from Germany's troubled past or its divided state but rather from larger forces of “modernization” that operated in west middle Franconia much as they did elsewhere in western Europe.