Lauster, Martina, and Gunter Oesterle, eds. Vormirzliteratur in europaischer Perspektive II. Politische Revolution-Industrielle Revolution-Asthetische Revolution. Bielefeld: Aisthesis, 1998. 332 pp. DM 68.00 paperback. This volume is the second in a series of three, being the proceedings of three conferences sponsored by the British Council and the German Academic Exchange Service. The contributions are divided into three sections, corresponding to the categories indicated in the sub-title, and each section is introduced by one of the editors, but the contents of the first and third volumes are not given, so it is impossible to judge this book in the context of the overall undertaking. It may well be that the first volume addresses the important question that is immediately posed by the title: what exactly is understood by Vormarz? Here it is described variously as beginning with the publication of Heine's Franzosische Maler in 1831, as simply the thirties and forties of the 19th century, or as a continuation of the spirit of 1789. This fits in well enough with one established view of the term relating to the period from the June Revolution of 1830 up to 1848, apart from its inapplicability to England, but it takes no account of the other understanding of it as referring specifically to the period between the ascendance of Friedrich Wilhelm IV to the Prussian throne in 1840 and the German Revolution of March 1848. This latter view does not deny the part played by political and cultural issues in the thirties in the next decade, but the issues placed, both in a reading of events in Germany and in the rest of Europe, are very different. To those holding this latter view of the Vormarz it will be astonishing that these emphases are totally ignored in this volume, although it might well be that they will figure in one of the other ones in the series. The first section (Politische Revolution: Judische, deutsche and osterreichische Ambivalenzen and Verluste) is poorly balanced: there is a good analysis by Jurgen Eder of the interchanges between Gabriel Riesser and Karl Marx, with a response from Anita Bunyan, an excellent piece on Heine and das revolutionare Volk from Michael Perraudin, three contributions on the situation in Austria, plus a response to one piece, and an informative essay by Eoin Bourke on the radicalization of Carl Schurz between 1848 and 1850 that will be of interest to readers in the United States. …