At the foot of the front page of each edition of Julius Streicher's Nazi tabloid Der Stürmer was the motto “The Jews Are Our Misfortune” (“Die Juden Sind Unser Unglück”). The source of this quotation was an essay by National Liberal Heinrich von Treitschke in the journal that he edited, the Preussische Jahrbücher. Although in its original context, this provocative statement was ostensibly a report of what others “even in the best-educated circles” were saying around Treitschke, the general tone of threat and complaint in Treitschke's article launched a huge controversy among Germany's Bildungsbürgertum regarding the Jewish question—a question hitherto restricted to the more marginal “hep hep” political fringe.

Effectively leapfrogging the Nazi appropriation of Treitschke's essay, this work interrogates the Feuilleton controversy of 1879 and beyond in order to raise the question of the potential for anti-Semitism in similarly liberal states today. More broadly Stoetzler scrutinizes the problem of a seemingly “illiberal” liberalism, which professes to defend religious and cultural difference and freedom while demanding assimilation as a precondition for acceptance. According to Stoetzler, given that Nazism and its attending mode of anti-Semitism has been comprehensively defeated, that liberalism is more or less in the ascent, and that Treitschke's anti-Semitism is intrinsically liberal, then, “the type of anti-Semitism represented by Treitschke demands analysis more, rather than less, urgently than that of Hitler or Goebbels” (pp. 7, 273).

The first half of the monograph is a well-executed, closely argued (if at times slightly laborious) textual exegesis of both Treitschke's contributions to the debate and those of his chief respondents, including Theodor Mommsen, Moritz Lazarus, Harry Breßlau, and Ludwig Bamberger, some of which are appended to the volume. Although the scope of the analysis is not as broad as Uffa Jensen's Gebildete Doppelgänger, it nonetheless does very well what it sets out to do, to illustrate how the limits of liberal society in the national context manifested themselves discursively through the debate, in the face of the tension between apparent cultural and “racial” differences and the desire for national cohesion.

Given the exhaustive nature of this preliminary analysis, which treads sure-footedly through the various contributions to the debate, it is surprising that Stoetzler arrives at the conclusion that “a satisfactory answer to the question ‘What does Herr Treitschke want?’ has not been found yet” (p. 170)—particularly given that a plausible answer appears just thirteen pages later—“Treitschke's ‘demand’ is simply that the Jews give up their remaining reservations about ‘becoming Germans’” (p. 183). This call to assimilation was of course more than a superficial call to avoid the sartorial difference of the so-called “Ostjuden,” but included a desire for an overt commitment to “German” religion, nationalism, civic morality, and economic activity—areas that Treitschke saw as marked by arrogant assertions of Jewish difference. The other liberal participants in the debate tended to dispute that the putative Jewish differences Treitschke detected were, in fact, evident or important, but left Treitschke's enunciated desire for assimilation largely uncontested. The more marginal, unabashedly anti-Semitic commentators did not question the desirability of assimilation, either, asserting instead that Jews were simply unassimilable.

The book's second part contextualizes the debate within the broader landscape of anti-Semitism on the one hand and German liberalism on the other. More a suggestion than a criticism, it is arguable that the analysis here of the nature of anti-Semitism and its relationship with concepts of race more generally might have profited from comparison and contrast with German perceptions of race drawn from interactions from the extra-European world—perhaps even making use of some of the approaches emerging in the new field of “whiteness studies.” Similarly, Stoetzler's analysis would perhaps benefit from being more explicitly contextualized within the broader intolerances of German liberals for other forms of (often nonracial) difference manifest within the German nation, which liberals imagined as a homogeneous Kulturstaat. Jews were, of course, not the only ones required to change in order to become fully German. Catholics, socialists, Junkers, adherents to Kleinstaaterei, Poles, and Danes were among those other than Jews seen as requiring some improvement in order to live up to the liberal version of harmonious nationhood. As ferocious as Treitschke was about the Jews, this ferocity was also exhibited by Max Weber regarding Polish nationalism and by most National Liberals toward Catholics during the Kulturkampf.

The survey of anti-Semitism, particularly as it related to anti-Manchesterism, is sound, and it leads nicely into the discussion of nationalist liberalism, where Stoetzler neatly refutes the once-fashionable notion of a “liberal capitulation.” I would raise a friendly disagreement with Stoetzler over his vaguely idealist rendering of liberalism and his hints that free trade was integral to liberalism proper. Liberalism was the site of an ongoing debate between free traders and protectionists, and Friedrich List's advocacy of protectionism as the necessary form of liberal economics for late-coming international traders found a ready audience in sections of Germany's liberal literati. Charting the tension between Listian and Manchester liberalism within Germany would perhaps offer another dimension to Stoetzler's portrait of Treitschke (the Listian) and his anti-Manchester, liberal anti-Semitism.

With references to Horkheimer, Adorno, and Sartre, Stoetzler ends by illustrating how nineteenth-century liberal calls for Jewish emancipation became the demand that emancipated Jews fully assimilate into the national community. To this extent German liberals shared a common assumption that German Jews needed to become recognizably German and preferably bürgerlich, liberal, and perhaps even Protestant, for the sake of social harmony. The trick scholars have often attempted in the past has been to view this as a unique failure of German liberalism, as if German liberalism was alone in its demands for assimilation and national unity. Stoetzler correctly moves beyond this and illustrates that these assimilationist tendencies are intrinsic to liberal attempts to organize societies into nations.