According to Sebastian Schäfer, the journalist and pacifist Rudolf Olden “stood in the center of artistic and political-pacifist efforts to secure democracy and protect the [Weimar] republic, even if the groups in which he took part are to be counted among society's outsiders” (410). This intellectual biography, which began as Schäfer's 2018 dissertation at the Technical University Chemnitz, offers those interested in numerous themes associated with Weimar Germany's left-wing intellectuals considerable insight into the agendas and associations of Olden, who was one of the most prominent journalists of his era, a practicing attorney who took on a number of politically charged cases, and a biographer of prominent contemporaries.

The book is a somewhat uneasy hybrid of conventional and intellectual biography; that is, Schäfer endeavors to write about the full scope of Olden's life while focusing mainly on Olden's agendas and influences on him. There are chapters on Olden's youth in Germany and young adulthood in Vienna, a short and detailed chapter on his experience as a soldier in World War I, and, near the end, a chapter covering his life in exile. Anchoring the book are two long chapters that take up almost three-fourths of the text, exploring Olden's writings and public activities from 1919 till 1933. Schäfer's main focus is on his subject's eclectic ideas and agendas and their intellectual roots. Because Olden could be described using various terms (pan-European, pacifist, progressive, liberal, intellectual, cultural figure), Schäfer explores the many different influences on his thought. Among the people and ideas Schäfer ties to Olden are early-nineteenth-century German romanticism and mid-nineteenth-century liberalism; English Fabian socialism and the writings of George Bernard Shaw; the French humanism of Balzac and the pacifism of Henri Barbusse; and social democracy as embodied by the interwar Austrian publisher Benno Karpeles, who launched Olden (who had studied law) on a journalistic career. These sections are deeply examined and explored by the author, but with the unfortunate side effect that Olden disappears for pages at a time while Schäfer examines the ideology of this or that influence on his subject.

At the core of the book, Schäfer explores Olden's years as a reluctant but successful journalist in Vienna (chapter 5, covering the period 1919–1926) and his even more notable career in Berlin as a commentator and editor with a sideline as a practicing attorney (chapter 6, covering 1926–1933). Each of these long chapters is divided into thematic sections that examine Olden's writings on key issues of the day, which were overwhelmingly focused on developments in Germany even when Olden was writing from and living in Vienna. Schäfer thus focuses on topics like Germany's international relations, the means to secure the Weimar Republic against its internal challengers on the right, the role of the military in German life and politics, and political and social justice. Attempting a comprehensive analysis of numerous, often interrelated topics, Schäfer writes more, and on more issues, than may be warranted in a biography of a figure who even Schäfer acknowledges lacked the “historical charisma” of contemporaries such as Carl von Ossietzky, Theodor Wolff, or Ludwig Quidde (410).

The book's strengths are, in many ways, also its weaknesses. Schäfer focuses with laser-like precision on Olden's thought, utilizing Olden's extensive journalistic output—mostly commentary rather than news reporting—to locate and evaluate his subject's agendas. What emerges is that Olden was undogmatic and, indeed, was not tied to any one particular school of thought, party, or organization. The narrow focus on Olden, however, also means that Schäfer rarely writes about how his commentary was received, either by supporters or critics, or whether he wrote any of his analyses in response to publications or opinion pieces by others. The near complete absence of citations from private correspondence (from or to Olden; Schäfer consulted only two archives, one of which is a partial archive of Olden's private letters exchanged with family members before 1920) in these two long chapters also means that the reader never gets a sense for Olden's private thinking on the topics of the day; rather, more so on his very public commentary as published mainly in the pages of several Viennese papers and the Berliner Tageblatt, of which he was an editor from 1926 till 1931.

Readers who want to utilize parts of the book for their scholarly research may find themselves frustrated by the combination of the book's length (426 pages of text) and the absence of an index. The book is intellectually sophisticated and well written. It also has some of the “baby fat” of a doctoral dissertation: it is sometimes bloated by unnecessarily long and detailed recapitulations of basic Weimar history (for example, 331ff., 340) and pointless, page-by-page résumés of Olden's biographies of Gustav Stresemann (321–27), Adolf Hitler (354–59), and Paul von Hindenburg (383–87). Schäfer's thoughtful and rewarding conclusion (chapter 8), at thirty-one pages, incorporates considerable analysis that either could have been presented earlier in the body of the work or could have allowed Schäfer to shorten some of those earlier chapters; the conclusion, in any case, partially recapitulates material in the “interim conclusions” he inserts between chapters 5 and 6.

Rudolf Olden died a broken man, so weakened from internment in Britain in 1940 as an enemy alien that, although he managed to get on a ship to the United States two months later, he was “‘in bed and too ill to stand the exposure’” (394) when the ship was sunk by a German U-boat and many passengers escaped on lifeboats. Sebastian Schäfer has written a solid and thoughtful biography of this man, who was both well intentioned and ineffective in his own time, and whose agenda for Germany and Europe has largely been fulfilled in the century since he did most of his writing.