Vol. 19 · No. 2 · Issue 59 · Summer 2001 · pp. 92-105 (13)

Steven Beller

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Abstract

Michael Meyer, ed., Michael Brenner, asst. ed., German-Jewish History in Modern Times, volume 3, Integration in Dispute: 1871-1918; volume 4, Renewal and Destruction: 1918-194 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1997, 1998)

The concluding two volumes of German-Jewish History in Modern Times take the history of German-speaking Jewry from the hopes of German national unification, through the ambivalent success of the Wilhelmine and Weimar periods, with its political uncertainties and immense cultural and intellectual achievements, to the fatal years of the Third Reich and the Holocaust. In most respects the authors of this collaborative effort are to be praised for continuing the good, synthesizing work of the first two volumes. These are not, however, immune from, and certainly do not solve, the problems in interpretation and approach that marked their chronological predecessors. (For this author's review of the first two volumes, see German Politics and Society, vol. 17, no. 2, summer 1999.)