Northwestern Germany has provided the setting for many important local studies of Nazism's rise to power. David Imhoof turns to the same region in his analysis of culture and politics in the university town of Göttingen. His objective is to show how popular cultural practices in the 1920s helped lay the foundations for state policies in the 1930s, or, as he writes, “how cultural activities began to turn Göttingen into a Nazi town” (p. 12). The activities that he has chosen for analysis were anchored in the local network of sharpshooters' clubs, the Händel Festival for which the town became renowned in the 1920s, and the city's cinemas. Together, these venues offer vantage points on the cultural practices of a broad spectrum of the local citizenry. The sharpshooters were recruited from a largely lower-middle-class male constituency. The Händel Festival, which was associated with the university, attracted a more educated audience, while the movies drew a cross section of the population. Everywhere, however, prevalent attitudes and understandings of culture subverted the foundations of republican government, particularly the legitimacy of partisan conflict. In practice as well as theory, sharpshooting was an exclusive realm of male supremacy run by traditional elites in the service of military values. The Händel Festival, the subject of the most interesting chapters in the book, demonstrated that daring experimentation, including expressionist stagings of baroque opera, could itself be enlisted in the service of cultural conservatism, in this case the monumentalization of the composer as a German cultural hero. Finally, officials and cultural critics in Göttingen regarded moving pictures less as culture than mass entertainment, and they sought, as a consequence, to promote films that avoided controversial social issues and emphasized safe themes drawn from German literature and history. Imhoof argues that in stressing male control of the public realm, tradition over innovation, and unity over political dissension, the habits of mind that were cultivated in all these cultural fora promoted policies later pursued by the Nazis.