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Reviews of Books
More attention might also be paid to the important
role played outside the universities by military medical
schools and medical-surgical academies in making
practical instruction so attractive to university-educated physicians. "In effect," writes Broman, "the
graduates of surgical academies possessed knowledge
and skills identical to the [university] physicians" (p.
67), a conclusion that seems to contradict his earlier
decision to consider only university graduates as real
physicians. Further explanation is also needed to clarify how the development of a "public sphere" in the
last years of the eighteenth century accounted for the
many earlier efforts to accommodate practical instruction in a number of the universities.
For all these cavils, this is a wise and provocative
book that is destined for an important place in the
literature of medical education. Based on a relentless
combing of the archives and the printed primary
sources, it states boldly an interpretation of academic
medicine's transformation that is the most persuasive I
have seen. Like any significant work, it raises as many
questions as it answers. Unfortunately, the book lacks
a bibliography, which is a major omission in any work
aimed at so highly specialized an audience.
THOMAS N. BONNER
Arizona State University
GUNTRAM HENRIK HERB. Under the Map of Germany:
Nationalism and Propaganda 1918-1945. New York:
Routledge. 1997. Pp. xi, 250. $59.95.
In this interesting monograph about nationalism and
mapmaking in Germany during the 1920s and 1930s,
geographer Guntram Henrik Herb analyzes German
map production in terms of the broader intellectual
underpinnings of German cartography and in terms of
the political goals of geographers and map publishers.
His thesis is that German academics and publicists
created a nationalistic climate of treaty revisionism
and expansionism that paved the way for the foreign
policy of the Third Reich.
Drawing on extensive archival work, contemporary
periodical and academic literature, and secondary
studies in both geography and history, Herb focuses on
the cartographers and publicists who responded to the
territorial losses of 1918-1919 by drawing maps that
aimed both to make those losses graphic to a larger
public and to point toward the regaining of territory in
the future. Herb contends that the nationalist vision of
a "Greater Germany" was a creation of both academic
geographers on the one hand and volkisch activists (a
term that he uses-more inclusively than most historians would-to indicate a broad range of conservative
and revisionist views) on the other. The most intensive
map work in representing a revisionist program was
carried out, Herb shows, by the school of Geopolitik
(especially strong among German geographers in the
subset of the "geo-organic" school, which viewed
ethnic-territorial groups as living organisms) and by
advocates of the concept of Kulturboden, which could
AMERICAN HISTORICAL REVIEW
encompass many versions of the idea that German
civilization was superior and had performed a civilizing
role in the East. The efforts of these academics (like
Albrecht Penck and Wilhelm Volz) and publicists (like
Karl C. von Loesch) led to the invention of new ways
to show the ethnic makeup of Europe as well as new
ways of getting across the needed message. Hence,
"suggestive" cartography entered a heyday in the late
twenties. By means of striking color contrast, bold
arrows, and "loaded" labeling, the map makers were
able to warn of specific threats from the Poles, the
Czechs, and others as well as to suggest that Germany
should retake the area that constituted its Kulturboden.
By the late 1920s, these cartographers had managed to
put together a loose institutional structure that supported their efforts.
In the final, and perhaps less convincing, third of the
book, Herb argues that these mapmakers provided a
kind of academic support group for the National
Socialist regime, and that, in turn, their ideas and maps
assisted the regime in its aggressive behavior. This
conclusion seems partly to contradict the evidence
Herb has assembled: the government and the party
agencies drew on relatively little of the sophisticated
work of the 1920s. Herb shows that the military sought
after some of the new, accurate ethnographic maps to
help in planning for conquest in the East; that the
Publikationsstelle-Berlin (object of in-depth study in
Michael Burleigh's Germany Turns Eastward: A Study
in Ostforschung in the Third Reich [1988]) often assisted the Foreign Office with maps and information;
and that von Loesch, a party member himself, made his
way into this hierarchy. But for the rest, much of the
work of the 1920s was problematic from the Nazi
perspective. If "suggestive" cartography was designed
to bring an idea to a broader public, many of the new
techniques of the ethnographic cartographers were far
too complex for mass consumption. Further, Herb
demonstrates that cartographers and map publicists
were in agreement that postwar Germany was too
small, but that they were not at all in agreement as to
how to define the legitimate territory of the German
state. Even the most excessive territorial demands of
the mapmakers imposed limits on "Germandom,"
where the Lebensraum concept was really an argument
for the limitless. When push came to shove, the Nazi
government and the military ignored the greater part
of the complex work of academics during the 1920s
and demanded not persuasive, "suggestive" maps but
accurate maps to assist in the conquest of Europe.
Hitler himself, as Herb shows in an interesting passage
(p. 168), was more interested in mapmakers of a
flexible turn, who could make whatever point needed
making, regardless of accuracy.
Perhaps disciplinary norms are different for geographers, but for most historians, Herb's very brief attempt in the introduction and conclusion to hang his
work on a framework of quite recent, sometimes fairly
ephemeral, political controversies (for example, the
wild claims of a 1989 map disseminated by die Repub-
JUNE
1998
Modern Europe
likaner) will seem distracting. His research does indeed have a contemporary resonance, but that resonance is far more complex than superficial
comparisons of his geographers in the 1920s with
recent extremist political discourse. An unrelated disciplinary characteristic might be mentioned: the confusing mixture of internal citation and endnotes often
necessitates juggling the book while searching for the
full citation. Simple endnotes would have made reading the book much more efficient.
This is a solid work. Specialists in Germany between
the wars will find it a contribution to the analysis of
Weimar neoconservatism, Social Darwinism, and the
whole range of issues involving German relations with
the East in the interwar period.
T. HUNT TOOLEY
Austin College
ANTHONY KAUDERS. German Politics and the Jews:
Dusseldorf and Nuremberg 1910-1933. (Oxford Historical Monographs.) New York: Clarendon Press of
Oxford University Press. 1996. Pp. 214. $65.00.
This book examines political anti-Semitism in Diisseldorf and Nuremberg between 1910 and 1933. Anthony
Kauders seeks a wider understanding of Jew-hatred in
Germany during the late Wilhelminian period and the
Weimar Republic. Although the sample of just two
cities is admittedly small, their historical reputations
represent two extremes: Dusseldorf, in the predominantly Catholic Rhineland, was noted for relative
peace between Jews and Gentiles, while Nuremberg, a
Protestant enclave in Catholic Bavaria, was known for
its anti-Semitism and friendly reception of National
Socialism. A comparison of the two extremes, Kauders
suggests, affords us a picture of public attitudes toward
Jews in Germany as a whole before 1933. He also
concludes that popular anti-Semitism during the Weimar Republic was universal and fixed, suggesting that
the German people as a whole were easily won over to
Nazi Jewish policy in all its forms after 1933. To its
credit, the book joins a recent trend that sees Weimar
Germany no longer as a time of progress and security
for German Jews but rather as a period of growing
isolation and increasing insecurity, an era that had
more in common with the popular mood of the Third
Reich than with the relative good times of the Second.
To its detriment, it seems to lean in the direction of
sensationalist conclusions about a uniform, collective
German will regarding Jews and the "Jewish Question," as assumed by Daniel Jonah Goldhagen in
Hitler's Willing Executioners (1996).
Kauders rejects the arguments of Ian Kershaw and
others that Germans tended to be indifferent toward
the Jewish Question during the Weimar Republic and
thus were a hard sell on Nazi anti-Semitism and Jewish
policy after 1933. He also asserts that Hitler's relative
disinterest in the Jewish Question before 1933 can be
explained by his conviction that Jew-hatred was already so deeply ingrained in ordinary Germans that
AMERICAN HISTORICAL REVIEW
917
intense anti-Semitism and Jew-baiting could be left to
local politics. Kauders concedes that Germans tended
to support the German National People's Party
(DNVP) and the Nazis for reasons that had little to do
with anti-Semitism, an apparent contradiction that
provides an essential justification for the book. It was
on the local level, according to Kauders, that popular
Jew-hatred manifested itself during the Weimar years.
The author does a fine job of examining local politics
and the Jews in Dusseldorf and Nuremberg, particularly during the Weimar years. In each city, he considers the attitudes of liberals and conservatives, socialists
and communists, and the Protestant and Catholic
churches toward Jews and the Jewish Question. Kauders's conclusion that there was less Judeophobia in
Dusseldorf than in Nuremberg is certainly not surprising. His contentions, moreover, that political antiSemitism moved from the periphery of political life in
Wilhelminian Germany to the very center of German
politics after 1918, and that it attained a higher level of
public tolerance during the Weimar Republic, are
conclusions that few would contest. But this otherwise
interesting history of political anti-Semitism in these
two cities during the decades before the Third Reich
does not use local history to illuminate national history
in any new or important ways, as the book's title
suggests. Kauders's conclusions about the significance
of the circumstances in Dusseldorf and Nuremberg for
the rest of Germany before 1933 are not new, and his
conclusions about the significance of these events for
Germany's future are not at all convincing. Although it
is true that racism became mainstream in these cities
and throughout Germany after 1918, the author does
not demonstrate precisely how or to what degree
ordinary Germans suddenly embraced the anti-Semitism that political parties, as well as institutions such as
the churches, brought from the periphery to the center. In Nuremberg, for example, the Nazis received
37.8 percent of the popular vote in the July 1932
election, dropping to 32.8 percent in the November
1932 election (p. 194). These were about the same
percentages the Nazis received nationwide. How, precisely, do these figures reflect popular attitudes specifically toward Jews and the Jewish Question? Moreover, Kauders concludes that most Germans "usually
held views on issues concerning the Volk and fatherland which made it possible to accept Nazi racism after
1933" (p. 192) without describing the substance of
those views or the specific aspects of Nazi theory and
policy that, eventually, Germans supposedly embraced. In short, while the book provides interesting
local history, it falls far short, as so many have before
it, of that elusive definition of the nature and substance
of popular antipathy toward Jews that was indeed
prevalent in German society during the first half of this
century.
FRANCIS R. NICOSIA
Saint Michael's College
JUNE 1998