In the post-1945 historiography, many German historians claimed that Germany followed a special path—a Sonderweg—that led to the atrocities of the Third Reich. Part of that story included the formation of the German empire, built on three foreign wars. That narrative cast the Danish, the Austrians, and the French as external others against whom German speakers could come together as a united Germany. Since the 1980s, however, several German historians, including Jasper Heinzen, a lecturer of modern history at the University of York, have placed German history in conversation with wider, global trends, arguing that German history was neither particularly special nor was its unification peaceful and complete.

Heinzen's book Making Prussians, Raising Germans: A Cultural History of Prussian State-Building after Civil War, 1866–1935 uses Prussian-Hanoverian relations from the 1866 “German War” up to the 1935 Nazi reorganization of state boundaries to examine that lack of accord. Through six thematically organized chapters, Heinzen examines Prussia as a metropole attempting to act as the head of a federated empire by shaping the memory of internal and external wars to promote a common national identity. Heinzen uses Hannover, a formerly semi-independent state that became a Prussian province to exemplify ongoing conflict after unification. Heinzen highlights how local state officials and citizens responded to Prussian attempts to build a state through the creation of war memorials, libraries, and schoolbooks as well as military organizations and charitable organizations. He explores how, even as Prussia sought to shape memory and teach nationhood, regional groups frequently altered or ignored Prussian directives and continued to stress local identities. Using those responses, Heinzen shows how “Germans” in Prussia and Hannover failed to reach an accord over what it meant to be German. For Heinzen, those continued tensions demonstrate how, instead of peaceful unification, continued divisions lingered among and between Germans, demonstrating that “hate should exist between Germans” (82). That hate, in turn, had “far-reaching implications for the study of state- and nation-building in modern German history” (3).

For Heinzen, one of the reasons the Prussian government attempted to promote German cultural unification was on account of the Europe-wide shift in the relationship between the state and the public, in part because of changes in military organization and the perception thereof. As many scholars have argued, universal male conscription necessitated a changing relationship between the state and the masses, shifting the perception of the military from a vehicle of royal absolutism to an embodiment of society (39). If the military reflected society, then the state had responsibilities to society if the government was to make use of its members. To that end, the Prussian state tried to shape perceptions of the empire and military through multiple cultural projects. To manage the memory of the German and the Franco-Prussian wars, for example, the Prussian state tried to control the production and form of war memorials. Additionally, to promote German nationalism, the state sponsored provincial libraries and political publications in order to feed one of the largest reading publics in Europe. Yet, as many changes as the Prussian state enacted, and as much as it used schools, for example, as mediators between local citizens and the Imperial government, the state could not entirely control the effects of its efforts (214–215). As Heinzen demonstrates through meticulous archival research, Hanoverian social leaders, newspaper editors, and teachers often neglected the messages handed down by Prussia. Just because schoolbooks made claims, this did not mean that teachers taught them or students learned them. Emphasizing that division between the different German states and a breakdown in implementation, Heinzen demonstrates that the center may have tried, but it could not control the periphery's response.

Exploring different layers of Hanoverian society, Heinzen differentiates between men and women's responses to Prussian efforts to shape memory and national identity by leaning into the Habermasian public/private divide. Unfortunately, in so doing Heinzen mixes up gender history and women's history, implying that “men” are a nongendered neutral even as he analyzes male homosocial spaces. For Heinzen, “men are the protagonists of war” (216), a stance that fails to consider that the role of protagonist depends on narrative perspective. That framing is particularly unfortunate because it detracts from his work implicitly exploring masculinity in terms of military organizations and burgeoning political fraternities in contrast with his history of women's charity work, which reads as an institutional and political history. For example, Heinzen provides a fascinating discussion of male participation in homosocial military clubs, demonstrating how these spaces developed as spaces for male comradery rather than out of love of war or pride as soldiers. As such, in contradiction to conservative generals’ intentions, these clubs became spaces for men to bond through a shared, local identity rather than a celebration of Prussian militarism (71, 83–84). Women, in contrast, joined philanthropic and religious organizations such as the Red Cross in order to participate in both the local and the national politics they were forbidden from openly engaging in, thus resisting and supporting Prussian involvement in response to a changing political environment.

For Heinzen, each of the cultural and social developments he discusses reflected widespread contests across the so-called West over the idea of nation and state unification rather than a special, German path. To highlight Germany's position in those widespread movements, Heinzen compares Prussian efforts and Hanoverian responses against the synchronous conflicts in the US, Italy, and Switzerland. Heinzen depicts the Swiss as pushing for extreme homogenization while the centralized Italian government opted for a loose, federalized system. According to Heinzen, the German empire under Prussia fell somewhere between those two extremes as the state attempted to push cultural unification across a federalized system emphasizing “unity in diversity” (46). Despite those efforts, the German empire failed to unify (69). Instead, ongoing territorial conflicts between the German states that forty-five years of empire were unable to resolve and “the unceremonious abdication of the Kaiser” only exacerbated internal conflict (258). As such, Germany was just one of many territories fighting over the idea of nation and testing the relationship between metropole and periphery.

Heinzen's Making Prussians, Raising Germans shines in the amount and breadth of detail it provides, reminding readers why dissertations turned into monographs continue to play an important part in academic scholarship. Here, Heinzen's argument rests on careful and extensive research performed across more than a dozen archives. As such, this book is for an academic audience familiar with the history of the long nineteenth century as opposed to an undergraduate or general public audience. For its intended audience, this book will serve as an important addition to the understanding of the complicated implementation of cultural policies, highlighting the gap between intention and reality.