H. Glenn Penny

The Fate of the Nineteenth Century in German Historiography

* I am grateful to Mathew Conn, Lisa Heineman, Joe Perry, and Jennifer Sessions for their comments on this essay. The books reviewed in this essay include Celia Applegate, Bach in Berlin: Nation and Culture in Mendelssohn’s Revival of the St. Matthew Passion (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2005), pp. xii 288,

Material Connections: German Schools, Things, and Soft Power in Argentina and Chile from the 1880s through the Interwar Period

35.00; C. A. Bayly, The Birth of the Modern World, 1780–1914 (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2004), pp. xxiv 540,

The American West and the Nazi East: a comparative and interpretive perspective

34.95; Mark Cioc, The Rhine: An Eco-Biography, 1815–2000 (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2002), pp. xiii 263,

Germany at the Fin de Siècle: Culture, Politics, and Ideas

24.95; Sebastian Conrad and Jürgen Osterhammel, eds., Das Kaiserreich Transnational: Deutschland in der Welt 1871–1914 (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2004), pp. 327, €26.90; Peter Fritzsche, Stranded in the Present: Modern Time and the Melancholy of History (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004), pp. 268,

Objects of Culture: Ethnology and Ethnographic Museums in Imperial Germany

27.95; David Gramit, Cultivating Music: The Aspirations, Interests, and Limits of German Musical Culture, 1770–1848 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002), pp. xi 272,

Worldly Provincialism: German Anthropology in the Age of Empire

40.00; Jonathan M. Hess, Germans, Jews, and the Claims of Modernity (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2002), pp. 256,

Kindred by Choice: Germans and American Indians since 1800

42.50; Isabel V. Hull, Sexuality, State, and Civil Society in Germany, 1700–1815 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1996), pp. xiii 467,

Elusive authenticity : The quest for the authentic Indian in German public culture

24.95; Birthe Kundrus, ed., Phantasiereiche: Zur Kulturgeschichte des deutschen Kolonialismus (Frankfurt a. M.: Campus Verlag, 2003), pp. 328, €34.90; Thomas M. Lekan, Imagining the Nation in Nature: Landscape Preservation and German Identity, 1885–1945 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003), pp. 334,

German Polycentrism and the Writing of History

52.00; Matthew Levinger, Enlightened Nationalism: The Transformation of Prussian Political Culture, 1806–1848 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000); Ian F. McNeely, The Emancipation of Writing: German Civil Society in the Making, 1790s–1820s (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003), pp. xii 329,

The Politics of Anthropology in the Age of Empire: German Colonists, Brazilian Indians, and the Case of Alberto Vojtech Fric

65.00; Sankar Muthu, Enlightenment against Empire (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2003), pp. xiv 348,