Kurlander (modern European history, Stetson U.) examines the precedents to the rise of nazism and finds that the argument that liberalism failed is not enough. He shows that German liberalism was actually caught between conflicting and openly competing forces of national identity, tracing the changes of 1898 to 1918 in the Völkisch liberalism of Schleswig-Holstein, including its univeralist paradigms of regional identity, the Völkisch nationalism of Silesia, including its attitudes about Jews, Poles, and others in the region, and the republican particularlism of the Alsatian liberal counterculture, including the intellectual shift in unity and the concept of progress. He then shows how each party or movement changed in the period from 1918 to 1933 as overall German political cultural shifted and how the resulting challenges to preserving liberal democracy engendered increasingly exclusionary practices, which liberals only exaggerated by embracing the Republic. Annotation ©2006 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)