Eva Kolinsky and Wilfried van der Will, eds. The Cambridge Companion to Modern German Culture.

Malone, Paul M.

Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998. xxii + 365pp. n.p.

The back cover of The Cambridge Companion to Modern German Culture presents it as "an authoritative account of modern German culture since the onset of industrialisation, the rise of mass society and the nation state," but in fact the book would be more accurately described as a series of accounts--sixteen in all--by different contributors, tracing the last two centuries of German history from the perspective of various aspects of culture.

Each chapter is independent of the others, recounting the development of one cultural activity ("prose fiction," "poetry," "drama, theatre and dance," "music," "art," "architecture," "cinema," "media of mass communication") or of one important aspect of German culture ("culture" itself, "citizen and state," "national identity," "elites and class structure," "Jews," "critiques of culture," "Volkskultur, mass culture and counter-culture"--i.e., collectively non-high culture). One chapter--by co-editor Eva Kolinsky--stands out from this neat division because it deals with "non-German minorities, women and the emergence of civil society." This is a broad and disparate mandate that seems to conflate non-Germans and women (and historically there have been commonalities in the treatment of these two groups); though in practice the chapter, except for an introductory paragraph that refers to these commonalities, is divided into two roughly equal but independent sections.

The chapters vary relatively little in quality: all of them are good brief overviews of their respective topics, though some are more fluently written than others. In length they are virtually identical, each chapter totalling about twenty pages regardless of the topic, and threatening to give the impression to the unwary reader that each topic is roughly equal in importance and/or complexity (in this context, Kolinsky's chapter functions almost as two half-length chapters, which seems less a comment on the marginalization of non-Germans and women than a continuation of it--why not two whole and separate chapters?). This uniformity is presumably meant to facilitate using the chapters as assigned readings in a culture course, a function to which they are nonetheless individually well suited.

Of course, the fact that all of the chapters cover essentially the same historical ground (with the exception of those that deal with media that did not exist for most of the 19th century) renders this book rather unsatisfying to read all the way through at one go. Again, however, as a series of course readings, this is much less disadvantageous; and for readers without much knowledge of German history the repetition can even be beneficial. Moreover, the chapters can be read in practically any order, or some can be left out, to accommodate any lesson plan.

Further evidence of the intended readership of this Companion is given by the presence at the beginning of the book of a chronology of German history from the French Revolution in 1786 to the first all-German elections of 1990 (xiv-xix); and of a list of abbreviations used in the book, which includes not only such specifically German items as "CDU," "SS," "Stasi," and "Ufa," but also more general abbreviations such as "GDP" (i.e., "gross domestic product") and even "Ph.D" (xii-xiii)!

Curiously, however, given the book's relatively late publication date of 1998, neither the chronology nor many of the chapters have much concrete to say about "unified Germany," even though almost every chapter has a section heading with that phrase in the title. Martin Swales's chapter on German prose fiction mentions no work later than 1989 (unless one counts the misprint which falsely dates Thomas Bemhard's Die Ursache to 1997 instead of 1975); nor doe s Michael Patterson and Michael Huxley's chapter on drama, theatre, and dance; nor again Erik Levi's chapter on music; while the latest dated artwork mentioned in Irit Rogoff's chapter on art is Joseph Beuys's 1976 Tram Stop (277; on page 278, Rogoff does mention exhibitions from 1982-84). Several other chapters make no historical references later than a vague mention of "the 1980s," though others do discuss developments of the early 1990s; and Martin Brady and Helen Hughes, in their chapter on cinema, even name films released as late as 1995 (319). The total effect, however, is that this collection leaves Germany still un-unified and poised in anticipation of further developments.

Finally, it should be mentioned that there area fair number of typographical errors and other mistakes. One obvious, if minor, example of the former is the fact that the index lists film director Doris Dorrie's name as "Dorric, Doris" (345); a more serious non-typographical faux pas occurs ominously on the very first page of text, where Kolinsky and van der Will mention the 1896 "erection of the Kyffhauser memorial commemorating Frederick II, also known as Barbarossa, a medieval emperor" (1). While there has been some confusion historically as to whether Frederick II or his grandfather Frederick I supposedly awaits resurrection in the Kyffhauser, hitherto there was no confusion about the fact that "Barbarossa" was the nickname of the earlier and arguably greater Frederick--Frederick II, however, had the more splendid nickname: "Stupor Mundi." This would be a minor error in many books, but not in an introduction to German culture.

One mistake seemingly combines the two forms of error; and though it is less misleading (since its real meaning is, I hope, quite clear), it is nonetheless somewhat more unsettling in its emotional effect. Andrei S. Markovits, Beth Simone Noveck, and Carolyn Hofig, in their chapter on Jews in German society, describe Ronald Reagan's 1985 visits to both the Bergen-Belsen death camp and Bitburg cemetery as raising a scandal by "publically equating a place where Jews were murdered with one in which their murders [sic] lay buried" (106). Whether this is a simple typo or a confusion with the German word Morder, it is certainly unfortunate and jarring.

To sum up, The Cambridge Companion to Modern German Culture is a very good source of course readings, some of whose limitations are probably unavoidable. However, both the number of minor errors and its general lack of good material on post-unification Germany make this book already ripe for a revised and, one hopes, slightly expanded edition.

Paul M. Malone
University of Waterloo