ABSTRACT
Charles W. Ingrao and Franz A. J. Szabo have assembled an impressive edited volume covering the complicated and often tragic relations between "Germans" and "the east." Elizabeth Drummond and Vejas Liulevicius chart the dissent into racialized discourses of Germanness hinging on the First World War. Drummond suggests that that while Jews were welcome in the Ostmarken Verein before the war, the loss of Prussia's Polish provinces obviated the need for a German-Jewish alliance against the Poles. The Austrian Empire's adoption of German as an administrative language in place of Latin for the sake of bureaucratic rationality led to endless battles in the nineteenth century, as Arnold Suppan documents. As non-German speakers demanded the right to express themselves in their native tongues in schools, courts, government offices, and universities throughout the empire, they eroded the German language's claims to universality.
