Historians' opinions of the German Confederation have long followed the contempt and hostility of nineteenth-century German nationalists. As incapable of maintaining its position among the European powers as it was of guaranteeing unity and freedom in the German states, the Confederation was swept away, and deservedly so, by Bismarck's policies that combined Prussian expansion and German national unity. Since 1945, this view of the Confederation as a governmental entity unsuited to the modern world has begun to fade. The problematic results of the extreme nationalism of the Third Reich, the success and longevity of a federalist German republic, embedded in the European Union (EU), have made the German Confederation appear as a predecessor of successful twentieth-century institutions, rather than an exemplar of failed nineteenth-century ones. Wolf Gruner's book, appearing in a Beck Verlag series of short accounts of important concepts, institutions, and processes for university students, summarizes the new, more favorable view of the Confederation. As an exposition of the diplomatic history of the years 1815–66, the work is unquestionably effective; as an evaluation of the Confederation, both in its contemporary context, and in view of the developments of the second half of the twentieth century, it is somewhat less successful.

The book is structured as a chronological narrative, beginning with the Confederation's founding at the Congress of Vienna and ending with its dissolution following the Austro-Prussian War of 1866. Centered on the diplomacy of the Great Powers and the mid-sized German states, Gruner's narrative emphasizes the Confederation's successful functioning, its openness to reform, and its compatibility with the rise of a political public sphere and the growth of nationalism. He rejects assertions that unpopularity or anachronism doomed the Confederation; rather, it was destroyed by the victories of the Prussian army implementing Bismarck's policies. In his conclusion, the author sees the Confederation as an experiment in the peaceful resolution of disputes that emerged from conflicts of the Great Powers, changes in political culture brought about by the French Revolution, and social and economic transformations of the age of industrialization. Complementing the clear and concise narrative is an excellent bibliography, so that anyone interested in the structure and functioning of the German Confederation or its origins and history can consult Gruner's work with profit. Questions do arise, though, about the author's interpretations, which bear on the more favorable post-1945 historical opinion of the Confederation presented in the book.

One concerns the activities of the Confederation. Gruner's focus is on its role in diplomatic relations. While he mentions other features of its actions (the standardization of weights and measures; the drafting of a code of commercial law, adopted by all the German states; the establishment of a fixed exchange rate between the taler and the gulden, central Europe's two major currencies), he has little to say about them or their relations to the diplomatic controversies he considers. Some of what might be seen today as the most interesting and forward-looking features of the Confederation's actions do not receive their due.

Popular politics also plays a relatively marginal role in the book. The author suggests that the refusal of the Confederation to respond to complaints about the abrogation of the constitution of the Kingdom of Hanover in 1837 was a crucial turning point, alienating the Confederation from an emergent public sphere in central Europe. Such an assertion assumes that the policy makers of the individual states had an interest in aligning their Confederation with popular aspirations in the first place. All efforts at confederal reform emerged from or were a reaction to popular initiatives, a point left unemphasized in the author's narrative. Gruner maintains that the 1848 revolutionaries failed because they rejected the draft for a German constitution drawn up by the Confederation, were too centralist, and did not respect the sovereign existence of the individual German states—an analysis that rather coincides with the attitudes of contemporary Bavarian diplomats. The book's discussion of the Austrian reform proposal of 1863, the most important effort at institutional change in the Confederation's history, completely neglects the background of the intense nationalist agitation in central Europe at the time, which has been fully explored in the writings of Christian Jansen.

Even within Gruner's own focus on the diplomacy of the powers, he notes that the Prussian government generally opposed reform of the Confederation; the Austrians gave it a low priority; and the mid-sized states, while taking it more seriously, could never agree on it. This inability of the main structural elements of the Confederation to bring about change and the major role of external forces—the nationalist movement and the expanding public sphere, more generally—in getting them even to consider it, does suggest that some of the older negative evaluations of the Confederation, when stripped of their strident nationalism, were not entirely inaccurate.

Finally, it might have been interesting if the author had made some more explicit historical comparisons with the Confederation's predecessors and successors. He observes, in regard to the Hanoverian constitutional controversy, that Germans often petitioned the Confederation about what they regarded as abuses of their governments. Was this an example of the potential alignment of the Confederation with nineteenth-century constitutionalism, as the author implies, or a survival of the corporate mentalities of the Holy Roman Empire? A comparison of the Confederation with the EU might have led to some interesting points as well: the possibilities for legal arbitrage when political authority is divided, in unclear ways, between nominally sovereign states and a confederation to which they belong, for instance, or the ability of more powerful members of a league of states to push around the weaker ones, in spite of their formal legal equality.

All these observations do suggest a certain skepticism on the part of this reviewer about the largely positive post-1945 appraisal of the Confederation and its skillful presentation by Wolf Gruner. One does not have to be a nineteenth-century German nationalist to understand that the German Confederation was an institution that contained strong elements of inflexibility or that its functioning tended to place it in opposition to some of the major trends of the era.