BOOK REVIEWS 391

outright. Others, deemed by Moses the “German Germans,” retained a strong sense of
Germanness but sought to make that affiliation bearable by, for example, relativizing
the Holocaust or pointing to allegedly benign aspects of the pre-Nazi past. The
most interesting, and ultimately influential, group is the “non-German Germans.”
These Germans, whether in thought or deed, have at once placed the “stigma” of
Nazism and the Holocaust at the enduring center of German identity; zealously con-
demned residual prejudice and authoritarianism, as well as efforts at denial; and, most
recently, redefined Germany in powerfully multicultural, transnational, and even post-
national ways. Though this taxonomy may not capture every possibility for subjectiv-
ity, it illuminates the main currents of identity and can be productively applied to the
debates currently animating German politics and culture.
For all its virtues, Moses’s work is not without flaws. At times it felt too erudite, too
thorough. There is a value in defining key terms, but Moses’s lengthy excurses on
the meaning of such things as “generation,” “experience,” and “structure” grew dis-
tracting. His cataloguing of positions in given debates was so extensive that I some-
times forgot what was being debated. Dealing with 1968 and 1977, the periods I
know best, he sought to avoid rehearsing well-known events. But this gave
much of his discussion of public discourse a level of abstraction and remove from
the very concrete episodes that often inspired it. The ideas he so skillfully dissects
therefore lack the immediacy and embeddedness of their moment. Finally, there
is almost no inclusion of women’s voices or treatment of gender whatsoever in the
entire narrative. This doubtless reflects, in part, the domination of intellectual life
by men (in Germany, as elsewhere). But women surely had some purchase on
the weighty issues of memory, democracy, and national identity. Ideally, Moses
would have found a gendered domain of discourse and affect in which he could
have recovered women’s agency in a collective, national process.
These limitations, however, do little to diminish the overall achievement of this
ambitious project, which crackles with insight.

JEREMY VARON
THE NEW SCHOOL FOR SOCIAL RESEARCH
doi:10.1017/S0008938911000306

Comparative and Transnational History: Central European Approaches and

New Perspectives. Edited by Heinz-Gerhard Haupt and Jürgen Kocka.
New York and Oxford: Berghahn Books. 2009. Pp. viii + 294. Cloth
$90.00. ISBN 978-1-84545-615-3.

While historiography in France and Anglo-America in the course of the twenti-

eth century had moved away from traditional, state-oriented narrative history to
392 BOOK REVIEWS

broader social science approaches and increasingly after the 1970s to cultural
history, historical writing in Germany, before 1990 in the west, and then in a
united Germany, moved much more hesitantly away from older patterns. One
exception was the social science-oriented Gesellschaftsgeschichte initiated by
Hans-Ulrich Wehler at the University of Bielefeld which beginning in the
early 1970s concentrated on the analysis of social structures and processes gener-
ally focused on Germany as a national unit. A comparative note entered into
Wehler’s work to explain why the political development of Germany in an
age of industrialization did not develop democratic institutions that characterized
western modern societies, but went a way of its own (Sonderweg) and ultimately
ended in National Socialism. Jürgen Kocka, the coeditor with Heinz-Gerhardt
Haupt of this volume and a close associate of Wehler, introduced a much more
comparative transnational note in his work, including a major project on the
European middle classes (Bürgertum).
In 1975 the journal Geschichte und Gesellschaft (History and Society) was founded as the
organ of what its editors described as a “historical social science” (historische
Sozialwissenschaft).The contributors to this volume came from this tradition. They
all stressed the need for comparative studies, but they saw the limits of such studies
as generally practiced. Comparative history, Haupt and Kocka stress in the introduc-
tory chapter to this book, seeks “similarities and differences between two or more units
of research.” These units are frequently defined in national terms, but the task of the
historian is to “insist on relationships, transfers, and interactions” (p. 2). “Comparative
history” is thus distinguished from what the authors of the various essays in the book
call “entangled history,” Verflechtungsgeschichte, or histoire croisée, the latter a term
initiated by French historians. The result is that the units of study need no longer be
nations. Nations can no longer be viewed as homogeneous societies; they are rather
heterogeneous, multicultural societies (Jürgen Osterhammel, Sebastian Conrad).
Entangled history, histoire croisée, “deals with transfer, interconnection, and
mutual influences across boundaries” (Haupt, Kocka, p. vii).
All the authors in this volume seek to go beyond comparisons to the study of
the relationships between societies and cultures. Kocka has already pointed the
way in his Bürgertum project. Only one, nevertheless excellent article, follows
traditional forms of comparative history, Thomas Welskopp’s comparison of
German and U.S. labor in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, which in an
explanatory manner takes up Sombart’s question why socialism had so little
appeal to American workers. An article by Dieter Langewiesche focuses on the
remaining relevance of the nation for historical study. In all the other articles,
there are two central notes, the need to overcome Eurocentrism and the critique
of modernization theories. As Haupt and Kocka point out in the introduction,
there is a danger in overemphasizing Europe’s coherence and homogeneity
(p. 11). There are various social and cultural strains in Europe that transcend
borders. Philipp Ther points at the transfer of music throughout Europe and
 BOOK REVIEWS 393
beyond, taking Wagner as an example. Dirk Hoerder points at how migrations
have transformed European and North American societies and at the multicul-
tural identity of the migrants and their impact on their home countries. Several
articles (Haupt and Kocka, Osterhammel, Conrad, Shalini Randeria, Monica
Juneja and Margrit Pernau, and Andreas Eckert) stress the interaction of
Europe and its colonies, including Germany despite its brief colonial reign.
And they see this as a two-way encounter with not only the European powers
shaping the colonies, but also with the colonies exerting their influence in
shaping European identities.
The discussion of the colonial experience leads directly to the critique of the
concept of modernization which had played a central role in social science
approaches to history. As Haupt and Kocka point out (p. 8), even in Europe
there are multiple modernities. Jörg Requate demonstrates the limits of conver-
gence theories in central Europe by comparing economic developments in the
GDR, Czechoslovakia, and West Germany during the Cold War. Most articles,
however, deal with modernization in the relation of the west to the non-Western
formerly colonial world. As Juneja and Pernau stress, modernity is “a notion
grounded in European experience that relegates non-European societies to the
‘waiting room’ of history” (p. 110).
The volume is to be welcomed as a German contribution to current inter-
national discussions in social and cultural history. “Entangled history,” as the
editors acknowledge, by no means obviates comparative history (p. 2), but
enriches historical writing and points at the complexities of history. There is valid-
ity to the critique of modernization theory that sets the west up as a norm. But the
critique is also one-sided, as it is in Randeria’s essay “Entangled Histories of
Uneven Modernities,” when she argues that affiliations with caste are by impli-
cation seen wrongly as “signs of backwardness,” while civil rather than traditional
communal societies are viewed “as modern and desirable” (p. 77). This overlooks
the extent to which there are elements of modernity which, although they origi-
nated in the west, are also parts of the non-West, not only advances in science and
technology but also in human rights and civil society. As another Indian historian,
Sumit Sarkar, emphasized elsewhere, much of the European Enlightenment tra-
dition had become part of modern Indian political culture with its commitment
to civil, democratic, feminist, and liberal individual rights. This side of modernity
needs to be taken into account even in the face of diversity. These are excellent
essays. I only wish that they had not only developed a critique of modernization,
which is central to much postcolonial history, and with which I largely agree, but
had also dealt with the limits of this critique.
GEORG G. IGGERS
UNIVERSITY AT BUFFALO (SUNY)
doi:10.1017/S0008938911000318
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