Hans-Joachim Bieber: SS und Samurai: Deutsch-japanische Kulturbeziehungen 1933-1945 (Monographien, herausgegeben vom Deutschen Institut für Japanstudien, 55).

• Margaret Mehl

Until recently the cultural relations between Germany and Japan in the 1930s and 1940s have received much less attention than the political alliance, although the political and military priorities of both countries were too divergent for the Anti-Comintern Pact in 1936 or the Tripartite Pact (including Italy) in 1940 to have much influence on the policies and military strategies of the countries’ leaders. Hans-Joachim Bieber, Professor of modern history at the University of Kassel from 1994 to 2005, has presented the first comprehensive treatment of a relatively neglected subject. The length of the volume suggests that he has aimed for complete coverage of every aspect, and for the German side he may well have come close to achieving this. Perhaps it is just as well that he does not have the expertise to work with Japanese sources and had to rely on the (limited) secondary literature in German for the Japanese side: certainly it is hard to imagine that he could have treated even more material in one volume.