Looking back at Germany during World War I through the lens of the Holocaust, this book provides an important opportunity to remember that German Jews experienced military service in the German army, as well as life on the German homefront, at surprising levels of equality with non-Jews. Tim Grady's well-researched book provides ample evidence of how World War I provided German Jews with opportunities to further their integration into German society, which, in hindsight, provided them with a false sense of belonging and safety, given what would later transpire under Adolf Hitler. Yet, during World War I, there was no reason for German Jews not to believe that they were in the process of becoming more integral to Germany and more accepted there by their fellow non-Jews.

The book starts out with an overview of discrimination from 1871 to 1914 in the German Army, which denied the rank of officer to Jews (though it was slightly more accepting of converts to Christianity). This changed when Germany needed soldiers for World War I, a development the author underscores with examples of field rabbis who provided religious services alongside their Protestant and Catholic colleagues. German Jews were directly involved as well in the conquest of Eastern European territory. To that end, Max Bodenheimer and Franz Oppenheimer founded the Komitee für den Osten (Committee for the East, KfdO), which sought to integrate Eastern European, Yiddish-speaking Jews into German plans for colonizing the East, namely, by taking advantage of their linguistic skills. The goal was to free Eastern European Jews from Russian oppression, while finding a place for them in Germany's plans of conquest. The KfdO argued that they would adapt to the German language much more quickly and be more loyal than other groups in the region. Austria-Hungary, which already had large territories in the Eastern crownlands of Galicia and Bukovina, embraced similar efforts.

One especially interesting figure discussed at length in this study is Nathan Birnbaum, an Austrian-Jewish political activist who was an early supporter of Zionism, as well as the initiator of the first Yiddish-language planning conference, which took place in Czernowitz in 1908. Birnbaum “rejected any suggestion that the Eastern European Jews were somehow culturally German” (87), believing instead that Eastern European Jews had their own national identity, and that Yiddish was their national language and should not be subsumed into German. Given that many other German Jews agreed with Birnbaum, there was clearly no unified position on how to integrate German Jews and other European Jews into the German national construct. This is a crucial argument in this study, which depicts World War I as an important period in German history when Jews attempted to participate constructively in the building of a German national identity—even if extreme forms of nationalism under the Nazis would ultimately exclude Jews from public life and become a root cause for the Holocaust.

The question of allegiance took two different directions for German Jews during World War I. Whereas the Jewish community as a whole “faced hostile questions over their commitment to the war”—one thinks of the infamous “Jewish census” (Judenzählung) of 1916—some German Jews willingly participated in the “exploitation of non-Germans” (120). Grady explores this important issue in a chapter titled “The ‘Other,’” which shows that German Jews could simultaneously be fully integrated members of German society, yet still remain outsiders. Later developments notwithstanding, German Jews emerged from World War I with an increased sense of belonging to Germany.

In his epilogue, Grady cites the German-Jewish medieval historian and war veteran Ernst Kantorowicz, who claimed in 1949 that his participation in the German army had “prepared, if indirectly and against [his] intention, the road leading to National Socialism” (212). This is certainly not to say that Jews were responsible for the rise of Nazism, but that they were an integral part of Germany's war effort—which was, in the end, the main cause for fateful developments during the Weimar Republic. By the end of the World War II, and after revelations about the Holocaust, survivors could hardly believe that they had once fought for imperial Germany. This book should be of great interest to scholars and students interested in understanding the history of German Jews in the decades preceding the Holocaust; it underscores how unimaginable later developments under Hitler were at the time—not least for those who suffered most directly following Hitler's rise to power.