REVIEWS 153 Catholics and encouraged them to draw ‘a sharp distinction between the elect and their enemies’ (p. 200). Freist’s sensitive and nuanced reading of her material highlights the complex impulses that could turn religious co-existence in a mixed marriage into open conflict or violence. No one theme draws these essays together, although the use of public space, the boundaries of tolerance, and familial negotiation are recurring concepts. Some contributions seem to fit more aptly into the titular notion of living with religious diversity than others. Marshall and Nolde’s contributions deal less closely with the intimate experience of religious pluralism than the other essays, and some studies, such as Walsham’s, perhaps raise a series of interesting insights rather than providing any definitive conclusions. However, the great strength of this collection is its wide-ranging, enquiring approach, which will surely stimulate further discussion and research on how people lived through and lived with confessional pluralism in early modern Europe. C. Scott Dixon identifies the contradictory impulses of intolerance and accommodation that characterized society in early modern Europe and he is surely correct that, by examining ‘the personal dramas of inclusion and exclusion’ (p. 20), we can attempt to understand these impulses. Katherine Hill Yiddish in Weimar Berlin: At the Crossroads of Diaspora Politics and Culture. Edited by Gennady Estraikh and Mikhail Krutikov. Pp. xvi + 270. Notes. Illustrations. Index. Studies in Yiddish. Vol. 8. London and Oxford: Legenda. 2010. £45. ISBN: 978-1-906-54070-8 In the early 1920s, Berlin became a leading destination for East European Jews fleeing war, revolution, and pogroms in their homelands. The atmosphere of political freedom and artistic innovation attracted intellectuals, while inexpensive printing due to hyperinflation transformed the city into a centre of Hebrew and Yiddish publishing. Yet, just as quickly as it rose to prominence on the Jewish map, Berlin’s role as a Jewish cultural mecca ended abruptly with the Nazis’ rise to power in 1933. One of the questions posed in this volume is the nature of this ultimately ephemeral Jewish centre. The editors describe it as ‘the major European metropolis of that imagined Yiddishland’, defined as ‘a modern extraterritorial Yiddish-speaking nation’ (p. x). Yet, as Gennady Estraikh notes in his introduction, this ‘metropolis’ was built on the shaky ground of the volatile Weimar economic and political order. Weimar Berlin has long exerted a certain fascination for Jewish scholars and has recently received renewed attention. A research group at the Freie Universität Berlin has produced Transit und Transformation. Osteuropäisch-jüdische Migranten in Berlin, 1918–1939, edited by Verena Dohrn and Gertrud Pickhan (Göttingen, 2010), while the volume under review focuses on Yiddish cultural activity in the city. Earlier accounts typically depicted East European Jewish émigrés as isolated from both native German Jews, who looked down on them with a sense of superiority, and local non-Jewish Russians. By contrast this newer work conceptualizes Berlin as a nexus of varied cultures, religious outlooks, and political ideologies, argued over in Yiddish, Hebrew, German, and Russian. It stresses points of connection between East European Jews and their German counterparts, as well as among the diverse subgroups within the East European camp. In their preface the editors describe this setting as ‘a “third space” between east and west, where adherents of different ideological and cultural views could communicate and interact’ (p. xi). Shachar Pinsker maintains that to understand the role of Berlin in modern Jewish literature one must focus precisely on this heterogeneity. Pinsker looks at the city’s portrayal in both Hebrew and Yiddish works against the background of German and Russian modernism. Yet the only other contributor to exploit this paradigm is Jonathan Skolnik, who argues that Yiddish modernism, particularly the work of David Bergelson, provides a useful context for 154 CENTRAL EUROPE, Vol. 9 No. 2, November, 2011 analysing Alfred Döblin’s Berlin Alexanderplatz. In her article on A. N. Stencl, Heather Valencia also discusses this poet’s interactions with German speakers, portraying him as more deeply rooted in the German milieu than his fellow Yiddish writers. In some cases, Berlin as a subject is notable by its absence. Both Jordan Finkin and Marc Caplan examine the role of place in works composed by Moyshe Kulbak during his residence in the city that make no explicit reference to the German capital. Sabine Koller discusses Leyb Kvitko’s cycle of poems on the Ukrainian pogroms of 1919, comparing their folkloristic tone to thematically similar but stylistically different works by David Hofstein and Peretz Markish. Other articles treat literary works that are about, rather than of, this time and place. As Mikhail Krutikov notes, most Yiddish novels set in Weimar Berlin were composed in the 1930s after their authors had left the city. He compares three such works, by Fishel Schneersohn, Sholem Asch, and Meir Wiener. Elvira Groezinger discusses The Family Carnovsky by Israel Joshua Singer, who himself made only brief visits to Berlin. All four novels portray Jews of East European origin living in the city and their interactions with local Germans, depicting a variety of reactions to the crises of the interwar period. Krutikov maintains that journalism rather than fiction provides the best contemporaneous portrait of Weimar Berlin. Estraikh surveys the role of the Berlin bureau of the New Yorkbased Yiddish daily Forverts headed by social scientist Jacob Lestschinsky. Amy Blau focuses on writing for the Forverts by Yiddish linguist Max Weinreich, while Anne-Christin Sass discusses poet and journalist David Eynhorn. Sass portrays Eynhorn as encouraging closer co-operation with German society in order to bridge ideological divisions, although, as a committed Bundist, a desire to make common cause with local socialists seems at least as plausible an interpretation. As Estraikh argues, by paying in American dollars, Forverts editor Ab. Cahan played an important role in sustaining local Yiddish writers financially while stimulating journalism in the city. Verena Dohrn discusses family letters sent to East European Jewish intellectual David Koigen and his wife Helene in Berlin. By focusing on letters sent to the Koigen family from Helene’s elderly mother in Russia in 1924–25, however, she sheds more light on the difficult situation in the Soviet Union than on Weimar Germany. Finally, Barry Trachtenberg examines the Berlin-based effort to create a general encyclopaedia in Yiddish. He argues that Yiddish scholarship responded to the rise of the Nazis by shifting from a model of what he terms ‘Jewish universalism’ to a focus on Jewish culture. Yet ultimately this project, like the others described in the volume, was forced to abandon the city. As in any such collection, certain topics beg further elaboration. While Koller discusses the visual art of book design, there is no piece focused on the Yiddish theatre, despite several references to the impact of the Vilna Troupe’s performances in Berlin. Novelist David Bergelson is notably absent since he was the focus of a previous volume in this series. If it does not ultimately resolve the question of Weimar Berlin’s place on the map of Yiddishland, this book helps to explain its continuing fascination. Bard College, Annandale-on-Hudson, NY Cecile E. Kuznitz The Limits of Loyalty: Imperial Symbolism, Popular Allegiances, and State Patriotism in the Late Habsburg Monarchy. Edited by Laurence Cole and Daniel L. Unowsky. Pp. viii + 246. Notes. Tables. Figures. Select Bibliography. Index. Austrian and Habsburg Studies. Vol. 9. New York and Oxford: Berghahn Books. 2007. £17.50. ISBN: 978-1-84545-717-4 The famous comment that Count Ottokar Czernin, one of the last foreign ministers of AustriaHungary, made in his post-war memoirs, that the old empire ‘had to die’, is reflected in a tradition of scholarship analysing the reasons for the empire’s ‘inevitable’ demise. More recently, however, scholars have focused instead on the empire’s endurance, and even its