Adam Kożuchowski's book is a sustained comparison of nineteenth-century German and Polish historical writing. In particular, he focuses on the way each group of historians wrote about vanished states that, they imagined, embodied an era of national greatness. For the Germans, this meant the Holy Roman Empire before the Treaty of Westphalia, whereas the Polish historians whom Kożuchowski examines looked with longing to the vanished glory of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth (Rzeczpospolita). In so doing, Kożuchowski hopes to accomplish several things: to show that the history of German-Polish relations was not dominated solely by conflict, to complicate standard accounts of the emergence of history as a scholarly discipline, and to add a transnational element to the history of historiography.

Unintended Affinities is intellectual history in its most rarefied form. Kożuchowski relies on close readings of the published works of historians both well known, such as Joachim Lelewel and Gustav Droysen, and more obscure, such as the Catholic German Julius Ficker or the Galician Ludwik Kubala. The author illuminates their shared assumptions, points of digression, logical structures, and philosophical debts. He is primarily interested in exploring these intellectual currents from within—Kożuchowski assumes a great deal of context is known, and he does not make a sustained attempt to connect the historiographical discourses he is analyzing to wider political, social, and cultural shifts.

The book opens with a whirlwind tour through the history of Western historiography, noting several enduring themes, such as the link between personal decadence and political decay, that became part of the shared intellectual tradition on which Polish and German historians would draw. The rest of the book proceeds by dividing up the chosen historians’ works, not by the period when they were written, but by the chronology of the works themselves, moving from the ancient past to early modernity. Kożuchowski compellingly illustrates that both German and Polish historians shared a view of their respective ancient histories as somehow definitive, with each nation manifesting unique characteristics that would endure throughout time, making their national histories unique as well. The chapter titled “The Zenith” is the analytical heart of the book. Here Kożuchowski shows how Polish and German historians extolled the greatness of the past, whether in the form of the Empire or the Commonwealth, though Kożuchowski is always careful to note dissenting trends and voices that do not fit his schema.

The rest of the book illustrates the way both groups of historians wrote about the decline of the relevant states. For the Germans, the Holy Roman Empire's terminal decline set in with the Treaty of Westphalia in 1648. In Poland, there was less of a consensus about the causes of the Commonwealth's decline and no comparable date posited as the point of no return, but there was a general sense that the nobles had degenerated into petty squabbling, selfishness, and moral turpitude. (Both historical schools shared the same general definition of failure and decline: weak political institutions, chaos, disunity, and anarchy.) The Protestant Germans, at least, were able to conclude on a triumphant note with the Prussian-driven creation of the German Empire. No such recent glories were available to the Polish scholars.

Kożuchowski is an excellent writer, a fact all the more impressive in light of the fact that he himself translated this book from the original Polish. His description of the imagined histories of the distant past, which animated historical writing in the nineteenth century as “reasoned hallucinations” (26) is splendid. He is also exceptionally erudite, able to move with ease from ancient to modern historical philosophy, and enlivens the text with a well-chosen Shakespeare quote or two. Still, in his conclusion Kożuchowski gives a scholarly shrug and refuses to tell us what he thinks his extended comparison ultimately has to say about German history, Polish history, and the history of historiography. These questions are left, unsatisfyingly, for the reader to decide. Focusing on one of the compelling points of comparison might have led to a more thesis-driven book. For example, Kożuchowski notes that both German and Polish historians had an ambivalent relationship with the idea of progress in history, as manifested in its Whig interpretation. This was inextricably linked to uncertainty over how each nation might be related to the cultural construct known as “the West”—an idea deserving of fuller analysis, especially in a book dedicated to Jerzy Jedlicki.

Similarly, Kożuchowski shows that, for Germans and Poles alike, the nation was the proper subject for historical analysis. Seeing themselves as participants in a shared European past was alien to their habits of mind. This latter point ultimately serves, in a roundabout way, to remind the reader of a figure conspicuously absent from the narrative: Karl Marx, a German historian whose powerful originality is made all the more evident by how little he fits within the historiographic trends outlined in this book.