Death in Hamburg: Society and Politics in the Cholera Years by Richard J. Evans Oxford: Oxford University Press Pp. xxii, 676.

Richard J. Evans is, at a relatively young age, one of the foremost English speaking historians in Germanic social, political and gender related topics. He is British, born in 1947, and has written or edited over a dozen publications starting with is first book in 1976 The Feminist Movement in Germany, 1894 - 1933 (Sage 1976), including In Hitler's Shadow: West German Historians and the Attempt to Escape from the Nazi Past (Pantheon Books, 1989) and more recently, editing Proletariat and Politics: Socialism, Protest and the Working Class in Germany before the First World War (St. Martin's Press, 1990).

Evans has written scores of articles in numerous historical journals. His research and writing has repeatedly questioned, challenged, and significantly changed the traditional historical positions of Germanic historiography on and off of the continent. He has been prolific and timely in his selection of issues and controversies to address, with Death in Hamburg predating most recent class questions of health care, Hitler's Shadow preempting a deluge of books on the subject during the fiftieth anniversary of the Second World War (1989-1995), and several women's studies publications hitting several peaks in the feminist movement over the past three decades.

Evans served as lecturer in history at Stirling University in Scotland from 1972 until 1976 and then obtained a position at the University of East Anglia in Norwich, England where he became a professor of European History in 1983. He also served as a visiting associate professor of European history at Columbia University in 1980. Evans was also the Editor of German History: The Journal of the German History Society from 1983 to 1986. All of this no small list of accomplishments for a man born since the end of the Second World War .

Evans is most exuberant with Death in Hamburg in showing how the details of everyday life reveal political, class differences and social structures which were the underlying causes for the spread and ineffectual reaction to the devastating cholera epidemic of 1892 in Hamburg, Germany. Evans asserts that "the solution of these problems was closely bound up with the structures of social inequality and social conflict in the city." This a recurrent theme in nearly all of Evans' works, with numerous titles reflecting this.

Evans took ten years to research this work. He draws on an immense amount of statistical information, and contemporary accounts to delve into the influences and attitudes of the inner city, the bourgeoisie, the immigrant workers, and the social elite of later 18th century Hamburg. Scouring city archives, contrasting medical, geographic, class, political and economic data to the mortality and morbidity information of the epidemic, Evans makes some revealing discoveries. His claim, based on these reconstructed demographics, is that the Hamburg epidemic exemplifies and illuminates the inevitability of the demise in nineteenth century German liberalism, and marks the rise of Prussianism, and "a triumph of state intervention over laissez-faire." This gains significance now, with the reunification of modern Germany and also the parallels with modern medical problems such as AIDS. Evans has given scholastic magnification to his genre as only an English Teutoniphile can.

More Book Reviews

The Dictionary of the First World War
Propaganda, Persuasion, and Espionage: Canada and America, 1763-1783
Death in Hamburg: Society and Politics in the Cholera Years
A History of Modern Germany: 1871 to Present (2nd Ed.)
Hitler's Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust
Uniting Germany: Actions and Reactions