JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.Bernhard Giesen examines German national identity through history and divides it into several periods. The strength of the book is his description of themes in German national at different points in time. He covers what he calls the "patriotic code," the "code of Romanticism," the "code of Realpolitik," and concludes with a discussion of the German identity between 1945 and 1990. The differences are interesting and informative and constitute the substantive meat of the book.The explanatory sociology, though, is a little thinner. Giesen's central claim is that through "the communication rituals specific to intellectuals . . . there arise-mostly without conscious intention, and in a manner shaped by the specific logic of the intellectual community the ideas of the 'general,' the Allgemeinheit, the encompassing collectivity that lies in the other worldly order, i.e., the very ideas that define codes of collective identity" (p. 45). This puts a big burden upon a rather small class of individuals (intellectuals) as the source of a very large entity (German national identity).But the explanation is even narrower, for Giesen claims it is the discourse patterns involved in how intellectuals associate that holds the key to understanding the underlying codes of national identity. "Inasmuch as the free association of individuals in the Verein [clubs and associations] serves as a model for modern socialization, this form of communication also fosters the idea of history as progress through free and reasonable action" (p. 72). But an idea such as "history as progress" seems to have origins somewhere else besides the free associational character of German clubs and associations. Its not only a very old, but a very big idea, and its adoption, acceptance, or institutionalization would seem to have more to do with historical class formations, political structures, or deeprooted cultural traditions than with the rise of clubs and associations. Such an interactional explanation is just too narrow and light to carry the explanatory width and macro weight of such IrLtellectuals and the Nation: Collective Identity in a German Axial Age, by Bernhard Giesen. Translated by Nicholas Levis and Amso Weisz. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998. 246 pp. $64.95 cloth. ISBN: 0-521-62161-5. $24.95 paper. ISBN: 0-521-63996-4.
