The overarching theme of Austrian history, according to Beller, is the changing and uncertain nature of “Austrian” identity. For centuries, Austria has been searching for a definition to provide a coherent reason why there should be an Austrian state. Habsburg Austrian rulers adopted various definitions at different points in time, none of which stuck, because the rulers ultimately believed that no justification other than divine right was necessary. When the dynasty fell in 1918, the Austrian state it ruled disappeared as well because it had no reason to exist without the Habsburgs.

Beller explains that the post-1918 Republic of Austria rejected its multiethnic heritage in terms of its self-identification. While its residents' desire for Anschluss with Germany was blocked, the overwhelming majority of the population nevertheless defined Austria as a “German” state in ethnic terms. The author asks what kind of legitimate authority a state has when its population is forced to accept independence against its will. The German takeover of Austria in 1938, Beller explains, represented a continuation of, rather than a break from, Austrians' interwar German consciousness.

In the wake of the Second World War, defining Austria as “German” was no longer an option. The Third Reich's defeat created a desire for a new, independent (i.e., non-German) definition of Austria. Beller contends that this new, post-1945 identity as “Austrians” remains problematic because of their ambivalence about their past, both the Nazi and Habsburg eras. “Zero hour” may have been 1945 for Austrian identity, but resetting the clock on “Austria” did not change the historical legacy of those lands and the people who lived there. Beller explains that many contemporary Austrians continue to cling to the narrow, post-1945 Austrian identity that allowed them to avoid, for a few decades, honestly dealing with their Nazi past. He urges them, however, to embrace their earlier, polyglot, and heterogeneous Habsburg legacy, the ambiguity of which helped seed the cosmopolitan cultural contributions of Vienna and Austria around 1900. Rather than ignore the ambiguities and problems of identity in their history, Austrians should, he argues, relish those fruits.

Beller begins Austria's story two millennia ago. He quickly enters the Habsburg era and moves deftly into the period of Theresian/Josephinian reform. Here Beller digs in and examines the ultimately unsuccessful attempt after 1792 by the Habsburg Monarchy to adapt to an age that increasingly located sovereignty not in the monarch but in the people.

In his analysis of the period 1867–1918, Beller emphasizes Habsburg Austria's political instability. In this, Beller stands against historians such as Gary B. Cohen, whose recent article, “Nationalist Politics and the Dynamics of State and Civil Society in the Habsburg Monarchy, 1867–1914,” in Central European History 40, no. 2 (2007): 241–278, highlights the “vitality of civil society” in Cisleithania and even Hungary. Second, Beller offers an overview of the high-modern culture of “Vienna 1900.” He explains how, as a result of its disproportionately Jewish and Jewish-descended progenitors, the rest of Austro-German society condemned it as “foreign.”

In the interwar period Austrians defined their nation as being part of the German Volk. Beller refers rightly to the “Culture Wars” of the late 1920s and 1930s as the struggle over that definition between the “Alpine” provinces and “Red Vienna.” The view that won out proved largely compatible with that of the Nazi regime. Beller contends that the disagreement over Austria's independence between the Christian Social corporatists and the Nazis was “within the German family” (p. 225).

While there may not have been an “Austria,” Austrians certainly bear a great deal of responsibility for the crimes of the Nazi state. Furthermore, most Austrians accepted their integration into Germany, because they identified themselves since (at least) 1918 nationally as Germans. Austria did not act like an occupied country, nor did Berlin treat it as such. The abandonment of Austrians' Germanness in favor of an Austrian identity occurred for most only at the tail end of the war, and almost exclusively for pragmatic reasons. This new “Austrian” identity relied on a collective amnesia about the Nazi era by which Austrians convinced themselves that those years were not part of Austrian history, but rather the history of Germany, and that they were the Nazis' “first victims.”

Post-1945 Austria, while rejecting the German identity of the previous era, did not embrace the supranational Austrian identity of the Habsburg era, either. It created a new, ethno-national Austrian identity that was explicitly Christian and monocultural. The Waldheim affair brought this “amnesia” out into the open and forced Austrians to reexamine their Nazi-era history and how it related to their post-1945 national identity. During the 1990s this reexamination has led to a serious attempt to reengage not only with Austrians' crimes but also with the Jewish contributions to the culture and history of Austria. A significant minority has resisted this more open approach to Austrianness, in particular regarding new immigrants to Austria, but also in its ambivalence toward the European Union, which, according to Beller, offers “the resolution of Austria's search for legitimacy and authority” (p. 307). Still, Beller notes that the xenophobia seen in politics is countered by more tolerant and internationalist trends in the broader Austrian society. He ends optimistically.

Beller has done something truly impressive in this book. He has successfully explained well over two thousand years of the history of a region that is now a state, one that is as complex as any other in Europe, in barely 300 pages. This book will appeal to students and scholars in the fields of nationalism and Austrian and Jewish history, as well as to the general public. Such a broad survey cannot be comprehensive, but Beller's work coheres in a way few books this ambitious do. Yet this book does much more than tell a complicated story in a coherent fashion. It is also an extended essay on the development of identity in Austria, one that interweaves the history of a land with the story of how a people have defined themselves over time in light of ever-changing borders and political systems. Finally, it offers a powerful, prescriptive call for Austrians to examine their history with open eyes and take what is best from it as they move into the future. For what more can a reader ask?