New Books in German Studies Podcast

On Hans Blumenberg's "The Legitimacy of the Modern Age" from 2022-12-09T13:00

Those of us living today generally think of ourselves as modern, that we live in modern times, and that we are very different from the people of the past. But there is an important thing that we sh...

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On Sigmund Freud's "Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality" from 2022-11-18T09:00

Sigmund Freud is probably best known as the founder of psychoanalysis. In his clinical practice, he established theories on how the human psyche develops and behaves, and his 1905 text Three Essays...

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On Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel's "Elements of the Philosophy of Right" from 2022-11-11T09:00

The notion of freedom and how to ensure it for all has occupied the minds of many modern thinkers. In his text Elements of the Philosophy of Right, German philosopher Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel ...

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On "Grimms' Fairytales" from 2022-11-02T08:00

You probably already know the story of Snow White—as well as Little Red Riding Hood, Briar Rose, The Frog Prince, and so many others. These tales have a rich history of oral storytelling. They’ve t...

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On Thomas Mann's "The Magic Mountain" from 2022-11-01T08:00

When Thomas Mann published The Magic Mountain in 1924, tuberculosis had a deadly hold on Europe and the United States, killing one in seven adults in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. If that...

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On Franz Kafka's "The Trial" from 2022-10-27T08:00

When reading a crime novel, we usually learn the crime within the first few page turns; the trick is discovering the perpetrator. Perhaps this is what makes Franz Kafka’s 1914 book The Trial so hau...

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On Immanuel Kant's "Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals" from 2022-10-17T08:00

Immanuel Kant’s early work wasn’t much to write home about. But as his career developed, Kant published incredible works of philosophy that continue to challenge and influence our greatest thinkers...

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On Hannah Arendt's "Origins of Totalitarianism" from 2022-10-11T08:00

In 1951, following the Holocaust and Second World War, Hannah Arendt wrote The Origins of Totalitarianism. Arendt’s aim was in part to document and reflect on the atrocities that had occurred. But ...

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On Johann Wolfgang von Goethe's "Faust" from 2022-10-05T08:00

Selling your soul to the devil in exchange for your deepest desire is a common theme in many western stories. The origins of this theme can be traced back to the German legend of Faust. The most we...

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On Immanuel Kant's "Critique of Pure Reason" from 2022-09-07T08:00

Scottish philosopher David Hume thought that rationalism didn’t work at all. German philosopher Immanuel Kant thought rationalism didn’t work by itself. Critique of Pure Reason, the first in a thre...

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On Johann Friedrich von Schiller’s "Letters on the Aesthetic Education of Man" from 2022-08-31T08:00

Play is an essential part of childhood. But according to German philosopher Johann Friedrich von Schiller’s treatise “On the Aesthetic Education of Man,” play was a key part of adulthood, too. In f...

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On Johann Friedrich von Schiller’s "Letters on the Aesthetic Education of Man" from 2022-08-31T08:00

Play is an essential part of childhood. But according to German philosopher Johann Friedrich von Schiller’s treatise “On the Aesthetic Education of Man,” play was a key part of adulthood, too. In f...

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Kiran Klaus Patel, "Project Europe: A History" (Cambridge UP, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Project Europe made waves when it was published in German in 2018 (CH Beck) and was soon translated into English as Project Europe: A History (Cambridge UP, 2020). A clue to its crossover appeal ca...

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Claudia Moscovici, "Holocaust Memories: A Survey of Holocaust Memoirs, Histories, Novels, and Films" (Hamilton, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Claudia Moscovici’s recent book, Holocaust Memories: A Survey of Holocaust Memoirs, Histories, Novels, and Films (Hamilton Books, 2019), is intended for educators and politicians to draw attention ...

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Tony Michels, “Fire in their Hearts: Yiddish Socialists in New York” (Harvard UP, 2005) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

I always assumed that the Jews who emigrated from Eastern Europe to New York and created the massive Jewish American labor movement brought their leftist politics with them from the Old Country. Bu...

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Douglas Morris, "Legal Sabotage: Ernst Fraenkel in Hitler's Germany" (Cambridge UP, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

During the mid-1930s, Germans opposed to Adolf Hitler had only a limited range of options available to them for resisting the Nazi regime. One of the most creative and successful challengers in thi...

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Philipp Stelzel, "History after Hitler: A Transatlantic Enterprise" (U Penn Press, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

The decades following the end of World War II witnessed the establishment of a large and diverse German-American scholarly community studying modern German history. As West Germany's formerly deepl...

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Samuel Kassow, “Who Will Write Our History? Emanuel Ringelblum, the Warsaw Ghetto, and the Oyneg Shabes Archive” (Indiana UP, 2007) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Scholars argue about whether the Holocaust was unprecedented. It’s a difficult question. On the one hand, slaughters litter the pages of history. On the other hand, none of them seem quite as calcu...

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Kaius Tuori, "Empire of Law: Nazi Germany, Exile Scholars and the Battle for the Future of Europe" (Cambridge UP, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In his new book Empire of Law: Nazi Germany, Exile Scholars, and the Battle for the Future of Europe (Cambridge UP, 2020), Kaius Tuori examines the inherent unity of European legal traditions that ...

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Laura K. T. Stokes, "Fanny Hensel: A Research and Information Guide" (Routledge, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Nineteenth-century composer Fanny Hensel is the subject of more published research than any other woman of the period, with the possible exception of Clara Schumann. A prolific composer, salon host...

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Mark Mazower, “Hitler’s Empire: Nazi Rule in Occupied Europe” (Penguin, 2008) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

It’s curious how historical images become stereotyped over time. One hears the word “Nazi,” and immediately the Holocaust springs to mind. This reflexive association is probably a good thing, as it...

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C. Browning, P. Hayes, R. Hilberg, "German Railroads, Jewish Souls" (Berghahn Books, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Raul Hilberg was a giant in the field of Genocide and Holocaust Studies. Frequently cited as the founder of the field in the United States, Hilberg wrote, taught, and mentored for decades. In a ser...

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Robert Gellately, “Lenin, Stalin, and Hitler: The Age of Social Catastrophe” (Knopf, 2007) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Today we’re pleased to feature an interview with Robert Gellately of Florida State University. Professor Gellately is a distinguished and widely read historian of Germany, with a particular focus o...

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Appeasement Eighty Years On from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

According to one dictionary definition, the term means: “to yield or concede to the belligerent demands of (a nation, group, person, etc.) in a conciliatory effort, sometimes at the expense of just...

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Daniel Reynolds, "Postcards from Auschwitz: Holocaust Tourism and the Meaning of Remembrance" (NYU Press, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Millions of tourists visit Holocaust museums and memorials every year. Holocaust tourism is a thriving industry and plays a crucial role in Holocaust memorialization and remembrance. However, Holoc...

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Han F. Vermeulen, "Before Boas: The Genesis of Ethnography and Ethnology in the German Enlightenment" (U Nebraska Press, 2015) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

The history of anthropology has been written from multiple viewpoints, often from perspectives of gender, nationality, theory, or politics. Winner of the 2017 International Convention of Asia Schol...

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Paul Mendes-Flohr, "Martin Buber: A Life of Faith and Dissent" (Yale UP, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In Martin Buber: A Life of Faith and Dissent (Yale University Press, 2019), Paul Mendes-Flohr, professor emeritus at the University of Chicago Divinity School and the Hebrew University of Jerusalem...

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Iain MacGregor, "Checkpoint Charlie: The Cold War, The Berlin Wall, and the Most Dangerous Place On Earth" (Scribner, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

There is perhaps no more iconic symbol of the Cold War than the Berlin Wall, the 96-mile-long barrier erected around West Berlin in 1961 to stem the flow of refugees from Eastern Europe. In Checkpo...

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Carlo Bonomi, "The Cut and the Building of Psychoanalysis, Vol. I," (Routledge, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Carlo Bonomi's two-volume set dreams the foundation of psychoanalysis as it writes its history. The work animates the reader's imagination, inviting them to journey the interwoven paths of Sigmund ...

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Susan Neiman, “Learning from the Germans: Race and the Memory of Evil” (FSG, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

When Tennessee’s Governor recently ordered a holiday to celebrate the memory of confederate general Nathan Bedford Forest, a convicted war criminal who helped found the Ku Klax Klan, the New York T...

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Kathryn Conrad on University Press Publishing from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

As you may know, university presses publish a lot of good books. In fact, they publish thousands of them every year. They are different from most trade books in that most of them are what you might...

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Amy Carney, "Marriage and Fatherhood in the Nazi SS" (Toronto UP, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

From 1931 to 1945, leaders of the SS sought to transform their organization into a racially-elite family community that would serve as the Third Reich’s new aristocracy. They utilized the science o...

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J. Neuhaus, "Geeky Pedagogy: A Guide for Intellectuals, Introverts, and Nerds Who Want to Be Effective Teachers" (West Virginia UP, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

The things that make people academics -- as deep fascination with some arcane subject, often bordering on obsession, and a comfort with the solitude that developing expertise requires -- do not nec...

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Ricky W. Law, "Transnational Nazism: Ideology and Culture in German Japanese Relations, 1919-1936" (Cambridge UP, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In his new book, Transnational Nazism: Ideology and Culture in German Japanese Relations, 1919-1936 (Cambridge University Press, 2019), associate professor of history at Carnegie Mellon University ...

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Yael Almog, "Secularism and Hermeneutics" (U Pennsylvania Press, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In the late Enlightenment, a new imperative began to inform theories of interpretation: all literary texts should be read in the same way that we read the Bible. However, this assumption concealed ...

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Brittany Lehman, "Teaching Migrant Children in West Germany and Europe, 1945-1992" (Palgrave Macmillan, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In her new book, Teaching Migrant Children in West Germany and Europe, 1945-1992 (Palgrave Macmillan, 2019), Brittany Lehman examines the right to education for migrant children in Europe between 1...

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Christopher E. Mauriello, "Forced Confrontations: The Politics of Dead Bodies in Germany at the End of World War II" (Lexington Books, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Christopher Mauriello’s groundbreaking book Forced Confrontations: The Politics of Dead Bodies in Germany at the End of World War II(Lexington Books, 2017) focuses on American soldiers reactions to...

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Mark Roseman, "Lives Reclaimed: A Story of Rescue and Resistance in Nazi Germany" (Metropolitan Books, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

What makes some people aid the persecuted while others just stand by? Questions about rescue and resistance have been fundamental to the field of genocide studies since its inception. Mark Roseman...

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Jasper Heinzen, "Making Prussians, Raising Germans: A Cultural History of Prussian State-Building after Civil War, 1866-1935" (Cambridge UP, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

How does civil war shape state building and national identity over the long term? What do the underlying conflicts between Hanoverians and the Prussian state reveal about the course of German histo...

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Alex J. Kay, "The Making of an SS Killer: the Life of Colonel Alfred Filbert, 1905-1990" (Cambridge UP, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Alex Kay’s The Making of an SS Killer: the Life of Colonel Alfred Filbert, 1905-1990 (Cambridge University Press, 2016) is a must read for those interested in the Third Reich, the Holocaust, and Wo...

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Chiara Russo Krauss, "Wundt, Avenarius and Scientific Psychology: A Debate at the Turn of the Twentieth Century" (Palgrave MacMillan, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

At the start of the 19th century, the field we now call psychology was still the branch of philosophy that studied the soul. How did psychology come to define itself as a separate area of inquiry, ...

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Evgeny Finkel, "Ordinary Jews: Choice and Survival during the Holocaust" (Princeton UP, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Can there be a political science of the Holocaust? Evgeny Finkel, in his new book Ordinary Jews: Choice and Survival during the Holocaust(Princeton University Press, 2017), answers Charles King's q...

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Danny Orbach, "Plots Against Hitler" (Eamon Dolan/HMH, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In his new book, Plots Against Hitler (Eamon Dolan/Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2016), Danny Orbach, Senior Lecturer at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem offers a profound and complete examination o...

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Stephen Alan Bourque, "Beyond the Beach: The Allied War Against France" (Naval Institute Press, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Did the Allied bombing plan for the liberation of France follow a carefully orchestrated plan, or was it executed on an ad-hoc basis with little concern or regard for collateral damage? How did the...

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Andrew Wright Hurley, "Ludwig Leichhardt’s Ghosts: The Strange Career of a Traveling Myth" (Camden House, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Andrew Wright Hurley talks about the life and afterlife of the Prussian explorer Ludwig Leichhardt, a man whose reputation has shifted to reflect the changing cultures of Australia and Germany over...

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Elizabeth Otto, "Haunted Bauhaus: Occult Spirituality, Gender Fluidity, Queer Identities, and Radical Politics" (MIT Press, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In this segment of New Books in History, Jana Byars talks with Elizabeth “Libby” Otto, Associate Professor of Art History and Visual Studies and Executive Director of the Humanities Institute at th...

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Katharina Karcher, "Sisters in Arms: Militant Feminisms in the Federal Republic of Germany since 1968" (Berghahn, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In her new book, Sisters in Arms: Militant Feminisms in the Federal Republic of Germany since 1968 (Berghahn, 2017), Katharina Karcher Lecturer in German at the University of Birmingham, examines a...

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Elizabeth R. Baer, "The Genocidal Gaze: From German Southwest Africa to the Third Reich" (Wayne State UP, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In her new book, The Genocidal Gaze: From German Southwest Africa to the Third Reich (Wayne State University Press, 2017), Elizabeth R. Baer, professor of English at Gustavus Adolphus College exami...

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Carina L. Johnson, "Archeologies of Confession: Writing the German Reformation, 1517-2017" (Berghahn, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Carina Johnson is coeditor -- with David Luebke, Marjorie Elizabeth Plummer, and Jesse Spohnholz -- of Archeologies of Confession: Writing the German Reformation, 1517-2017 (Berghahn, 2019) and she...

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Reinhart Kössler, "Namibia and Germany: Negotiating the Past" (U Namibia Press, 2015) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Today’s Namibia was once the German colony of South West Africa, for a 30-year period spanning of 1884 to 1915. From 1904-1908, German colonial troops committed the first genocide of the 20th centu...

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Peter E. Gordon, "Migrants in the Profane: Critical Theory and the Question of Secularization" (Yale UP, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

A beautifully written exploration of religion's role in a secular, modern politics, by an accomplished scholar of critical theory, Migrants in the Profane: Critical Theory and the Question of Secul...

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Caroline Boggis-Rolfe, "The Baltic Story: A Thousand Year History of Its Lands, Sea, and Peoples" (Amberley, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

The story of the littoral nations of the Baltic Sea is like a saga, that genre perfected by those tenacious inhabitants of the rocky shores of this ancient trading corridor. In it, we meet pirates...

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Sara J. Brenneis and Gina Herrmann, "Spain, the Second World War, and the Holocaust: History and Representation" (U Toronto Press, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Spain has for too long been considered peripheral to the human catastrophes of World War II and the Holocaust. This volume is the first broadly interdisciplinary, scholarly collection to situate Sp...

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Tiffany Florvil and Vanessa Plumly, "Rethinking Black German Studies: Approaches, Interventions, and Histories" (Peter Lang, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Black German Studies is an interdisciplinary field that has experienced significant growth over the past three decades, integrating subjects such as gender studies, diaspora studies, history, and m...

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Lenny A. Ureña Valerio, "Colonial Fantasies, Imperial Realities: Race Science and the Making of Polishness on the Fringes of the German Empire, 1840-1920" (Ohio UP, 2019 from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In Colonial Fantasies, Imperial Realities: Race Science and the Making of Polishness on the Fringes of the German Empire, 1840-1920 (Ohio University Press, 2019), Lenny Ureña Valerio offers a trans...

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Tim Bouverie, "Appeasement: Chamberlain, Hitler, Churchill and the Road to War" (Tim Duggan Books, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Appeasement: Chamberlain, Hitler, Churchill and the Road to War(Tim Duggan Books, 2019) is a groundbreaking history of the disastrous years of indecision, failed diplomacy and parliamentary infight...

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L. Hilton and A. Patt, "Understanding and Teaching the Holocaust" (U Wisconsin Press, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

I wish I had seen Laura Hilton and Avinoam Patt's Understanding and Teaching the Holocaust (University of Wisconsin Press, 2020) six months ago. I taught a course in the fall titled "The Holocaust ...

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Tobias Straumann, "1931: Debt, Crisis, and the Rise of Hitler" (Oxford UP, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

What can we learn from the financial crisis that brought Hitler to power? How did diplomatic deadlock fuel the rise of authoritarianism? Tobias Straumann shares vital insights with 1931: Debt, Cris...

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Carol Rittner and John K. Roth, "Advancing Holocaust Studies" (Routledge, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

I think this is the fifth time I've interviewed John K. Roth for the podcast (and the second for Carol Rittner). He has always been relentlessly realistic about the challenges, intellectual, practi...

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Kristen Ghodsee, "Red Hangover: Legacies of Twentieth-Century Communism" (Duke UP, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

I am a child of the so-called transition in Bulgaria and growing-up I could never understand why my parents and grandparents would spend our family gatherings talking about the socialist past. It w...

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Jesse Spohnholz, "The Convent of Wesel: The Event that Never was and the Invention of Tradition" (Cambridge UP, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

We are here today with Jesse Spohnholz, Professor of History and Director of The Roots of Contemporary Issues World History Program at Washington State University in beautiful Pullman, Washington, ...

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Jeffrey T. Zalar, "Reading and Rebellion in Catholic Germany, 1770-1914" (Cambridge UP, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Popular conceptions of Catholic censorship, symbolized above all by the Index of Forbidden Books, figure prominently in secular definitions of freedom. To be intellectually free is to enjoy access ...

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Leslie Waters, "Borders on the Move: Territorial Change and Forced Migration in the Hungarian-Slovak Borderlands, 1938-1948" (U Rochester Press, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

The movement of borders and people was a remarkably common experience for mid-twentieth-century Central and Eastern Europeans. Such was the case along the border between Czechoslovakia and Hungary,...

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Kara Ritzheimer, "'Trash,' Censorship, and National Identity in Early Twentieth-Century Germany" (Cambridge UP, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Convinced that sexual immorality and unstable gender norms were endangering national recovery after World War One, German lawmakers drafted a constitution in 1919 legalizing the censorship of movie...

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Anna Hájková, "The Last Ghetto: An Everyday History of Theresienstadt" (Oxford UP, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Anna Hájková's new book The Last Ghetto: An Everyday History of Theresienstadt (Oxford UP, 2020) is the first in-depth analytical history of a prisoner society during the Holocaust. Terezín (Theres...

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Heidi Tworek, "News from Germany: The Competition to Control World Communications, 1900-1945" (Harvard UP, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In our current moment marred by media monopolies and disinformation campaigns, it is easy to get caught up in the dizzying temporality of the news cycle and think these are new phenomena. Heidi Two...

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Monika Black, "A Demon-Haunted Land: Witches, Wonder Doctors, and the Ghosts of the Past in Post–WWII Germany" (Metropolitan, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In the aftermath of World War II, a succession of mass supernatural events swept through a war-torn Germany. As millions were afflicted by a host of seemingly incurable maladies (including blindnes...

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E. Douglas Bomberger, "Making Music American: 1917 and the Transformation of Culture" (Oxford UP, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

There has been a recent trend in books that explore one year in detail: 1914, 1927, and 1968 have all received this treatment. E. Douglas Bomberger’s new book Making Music American: 1917 and the Tr...

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Cathal J. Nolan, "The Allure of Battle: A History of How Wars Have Been Won and Lost" (Oxford UP, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

History has tended to measure war's winners and losers in terms of its major engagements, battles in which the result was so clear-cut that they could be considered "decisive." Marathon, Cannae, To...

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Heike Bauer, "The Hirschfeld Archives: Violence, Death, and Modern Queer Culture" (Temple UP, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Influential sexologist and activist Magnus Hirschfeld founded Berlin's Institute of Sexual Sciences in 1919 as a home and workplace to study homosexual rights activism and support transgender peopl...

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Jeremy Black, "The World at War, 1914-1945" (Rowman and Littlefield, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In one of his latest books, The World at War, 1914-1945 (Rowman & Littlefield, 2019), Professor of History at Exeter University, Jeremy Black, the most prolific historian in the Anglo-phone world, ...

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Stephen Fritz, "The First Soldier: Hitler as a Military Leader" (Yale UP, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In his new book, The First Soldier: Hitler as a Military Leader (Yale University Press, 2018), Stephen Fritz professor of history at East Tennessee State University reexamines Hitler as a military ...

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Clayton Whisnant, "Queer Identities and Politics in Germany: A History, 1880-1945" (Harrington Park Press, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Germany in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries witnessed key developments in LGBT history, including the growth of the world's first homosexual organizations and gay and lesbian magaz...

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Henning Pieper, "Fegelein’s Horsemen and Genocidal Warfare: The SS Cavalry Brigade in the Soviet Union" (Palgrave Macmillan, 2015) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In his book, Fegelein’s Horsemen and Genocidal Warfare: The SS Cavalry Brigade in the Soviet Union (Palgrave Macmillan, 2015), Dr. Henning Pieper, examines the conduct of the SS Cavalry Brigade dur...

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Christian Goeschel, "Mussolini and Hitler: The Forging of the Fascist Alliance" (Yale UP, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In his new book, Mussolini and Hitler: The Forging of the Fascist Alliance (Yale University Press, 2018), Christian Goeschel, Senior Lecturer in Modern European History at the University of Manches...

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Discussion of Massive Online Peer Review and Open Access Publishing from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In the information age, knowledge is power. Hence, facilitating the access to knowledge to wider publics empowers citizens and makes societies more democratic. How can publishers and authors contri...

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Jennifer Ronyak, "Intimacy, Performance, and the Lied in the Early Nineteenth Century" (Indiana UP, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

The Lied is one of the most important genres of nineteenth-century Romantic music, and one of the most intriguing. Balanced between public and private performance, an expression of both poetic and ...

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Geraldine Heng, "The Invention of Race in the European Middle Ages" (Cambridge UP, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In The Invention of Race in the European Middle Ages (Cambridge University Press 2018), Geraldine Heng collects a remarkable array of medieval approaches to race that show the breadth and depth of ...

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Samuel Hayim Brody, "Martin Buber's Theopolitics" (Indiana UP, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Martin Buber is known as one of the 20th century's greatest Jewish scholars and thinkers, but he is less well known for his political theory and activism. In Martin Buber's Theopolitics (Indiana Un...

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Dagmar Herzog, "Unlearning Eugenics: Sexuality, Reproduction, and Disability in Post-Nazi Europe" (U Wisconsin Press, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In her new book, Unlearning Eugenics: Sexuality, Reproduction, and Disability in Post-Nazi Europe (University of Wisconsin Press, 2018), Dagmar Herzog examines the relationship between reproductive...

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Volker Berghahn, "Journalists between Hitler and Adenauer: From Inner Emigration to the Moral Reconstruction of West Germany" (Princeton UP, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

What can the lives of journalists under Hitler and Adenauer reveal? How did they navigate the Third Reich as "internal emigrants"? How did the emerging Cold War shape new tensions with their govern...

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Tim Mohr, "Burning Down the Haus: Punk Rock, Revolution, and the Fall of the Berlin Wall" (Algonquin Books, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In Burning Down the Haus: Punk Rock, Revolution, and the Fall of the Berlin Wall (Algonquin Books, 2018), Tim Mohr examines East Germany punk rock and its role in the collapse of the East German di...

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Sarah Thomsen Vierra, "Turkish Germans in the Federal Republic of Germany: Immigration, Space, and Belonging, 1961-1990" (Cambridge UP, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

After years of being overlooked, there has been a growing interest among academic historians in the history of Turkish Guest Workers in West Germany. In her new book, Turkish Germans in the Federal...

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Daniel Stahl, "Hunt for Nazis: South America's Dictatorships and the Prosecution of Nazi Crimes" (Amsterdam UP, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

How did the search for Nazi fugitives become a vehicle to oppose South American dictatorships? Daniel Stahl’s award-winning new book traces the story of three continents over the course of half a c...

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Brian Crim, "Our Germans: Project Paperclip and the National Security State" (Johns Hopkins UP, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In his new book, Our Germans: Project Paperclip and the National Security State (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2017), Brian Crim, Associate Professor of History at the University of Lynchburg, lo...

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Noah Benezra Strote, "Lions and Lambs: Conflict in Weimar and the Creation of Post-Nazi Germany" (Yale UP, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

It has long been assumed that stability was imposed on Germany after World War II; that the United States in particular taught Germans, among other things, how to be “good democrats” and to value c...

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McKenzie Wark, "General Intellects: Twenty-One Thinkers for the Twenty-First Century" (Verso, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

McKenzie Wark’s new book offers 21 focused studies of thinkers working in a wide range of fields who are worth your attention. The chapters of General Intellects: Twenty-One Thinkers for the Twenty...

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Daniel Siemens, "Stormtroopers: A New History of Hitler’s Brownshirts" (Yale UP, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In his new book, Stormtroopers: A New History of Hitler’s Brownshirts(Yale University Press, 2017, Daniel Siemens, professor of European history at Newcastle University, writes a comprehensive hist...

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Eric D. Weitz, “Weimar Germany: Promise and Tragedy” (Princeton UP, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

What can the Weimar Republic teach us about how democracies fail? How could the same vibrancy that gave us cultural touchstones spawn Nazism? In his new book Weimar Germany: Promise and Tragedy (Pr...

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Michael Brenner, “A History of Jews in Germany Since 1945: Politics, Culture, and Society” (Indiana UP, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In A History of Jews in Germany Since 1945: Politics, Culture, and Society (Indiana University Press, 2018), edited by Michael Brenner, Professor of Jewish History and Culture at the University of ...

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Sue Prideaux, “I Am Dynamite!: A Life of Nietzsche” (Tim Duggan Books, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Like most philosophers, Friedrich Nietzsche is better known for his ideas than for the life he led. In I Am Dynamite!: A Life of Nietzsche (Tim Duggan Books, 2018), Sue Prideaux details the events ...

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Raz Segal, “Genocide in the Carpathians: War, Social Breakdown and Mass Violence, 1914-1945” (Stanford UP, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Telling the history of the Holocaust in Hungary has long meant telling the story of 1944. Raz Segal, in his new book Genocide in the Carpathians: War, Social Breakdown and Mass Violence, 1914-1945...

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Susan Carruthers, “The Good Occupation: American Soldiers and the Hazards of Peace” (Harvard UP, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In her new book, The Good Occupation: American Soldiers and the Hazards of Peace (Harvard University Press, 2016), Dr. Susan Carruthers, professor of American Studies at the University of Warwick, ...

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Bradley W. Hart, “Hitler’s American Friends: The Third Reich’s Supporters in the United States” (Thomas Dunne Books, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In his new book, Hitler’s American Friends: The Third Reich’s Supporters in the United States (Thomas Dunne Books, 2018), Bradley W. Hart, assistant professor at California State University, Fresno...

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Sara J. Brenneis, “Spaniards in Mauthausen: Representations of a Nazi Concentration Camp, 1940-2015” (U Toronto, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

To be quite honest, I had no idea there were any Spanish prisoners at Mauthausen. That’s perhaps an unusual way to begin a blog post. But it reflects a real gap in the literature about the Holoca...

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Larry E. Jones, “Hitler versus Hindenburg: The 1932 Presidential Elections and the End of the Weimar Republic” (Cambridge UP, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

The failure of democracy during the Weimar Republic is currently at the center of public discussion due to the global populist wave of the last few years. In his new book, Hitler versus Hindenburg:...

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Mary Fulbrook, “Reckonings: Legacies of Nazi Persecution and the Quest for Justice” (Oxford UP, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

What voices have been silenced in the history of the Holocaust? How did victims and perpetrators make sense of their experiences? How did the failed pursuit of post-war justice shape public memory?...

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Scott Spector, “Modernism Without Jews?: German Jewish Subjects and Histories” (Indiana UP, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Was there anything particularly Modern about Modern Jews? Was there something characteristically Jewish about Modernism? In this episode, we hear from Scott Spector, professor of History and German...

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S. Burrows and G. Roe, "Digitizing Enlightenment: Digital Humanities and the Transformation of 18th-Century Studies" (Liverpool UP, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Digitizing Enlightenment: Digital Humanities and the Transformation of 18th-Century Studies (Liverpool UP, 2020) explores how a set of inter-related digital projects are transforming our vision of ...

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Frederick Crews, "Freud: The Making of an Illusion" (Picador, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

The figure of Sigmund Freud has captivated the Western imagination like few others. One hundred and twenty-five years after the publication of Studies on Hysteria, the good doctor from Vienna conti...

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Joseph Ben Prestel, “Emotional Cities: Debates on Urban Change in Berlin and Cairo, 1860-1910” (Oxford UP, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Joseph Ben Prestel talks with us about Emotional Cities: Debates on Urban Change in Berlin and Cairo, 1860-1910 (Oxford University Press, 2017), blending together history of emotions, urban history...

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John K. Roth, "The Failures of Ethics: Confronting the Holocaust, Genocide, and Other Mass Atrocities" (Oxford UP, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In the Failures of Ethics: Confronting the Holocaust, Genocide and Other Mass Atrocities (Oxford University Press, 2018), John K. Roth concentrates on the multiple shortfalls and shortcomings of th...

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Benjamin Carter Hett, “The Death of Democracy: Hitler’s Rise to Power and the Downfall of the Weimar Republic” (Henry Holt, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

The downfall of the Weimar Republic in Germany has long fascinated historians, but this catastrophe gained increasing prominence as a touchstone for contemporary political commentators in recent ye...

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Daniela Vallega-Neu, "Heidegger's Poietic Writings: From Contributions to Philosophy to the Event" (Indiana UP, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Scholarship on the German philosopher Martin Heidegger has traditionally focused on his magnum opus Being and Time and related earlier work, his later essays and lectures often relegated to an ambi...

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Ludivine Broch, “Ordinary Workers, Vichy and the Holocaust: French Railwaymen and the Second World War” (Cambridge UP, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

This spring and summer, the workers of the Société nationale des chemins de fer français (SNCF) staged a series of rolling strikes, slowing and shutting down the country’s major lines of travel and...

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Simon Levis Sullam, “The Italian Executioners: The Genocide of the Jews of Italy” (Princeton UP, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In his new book, The Italian Executioners: The Genocide of the Jews of Italy (Princeton University Press, 2018), Simon Levis Sullam, associate professor of modern history at Ca’ Foscari University ...

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Simone Wesner, “Artists’ Voices in Cultural Policy: Careers, Myths and the Creative Profession after German Unification” (Palgrave MacMillan, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Why is the artist’s voice missing from cultural policy? In Artists’ Voices in Cultural Policy: Careers, Myths and the Creative Profession after German Unification (Palgrave Macmillan, 2018), Dr. Si...

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Mirjam Zadoff, “Werner Scholem: A German Life” (U Penn Press, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In Werner Scholem: A German Life (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2018), Mirjam Zadoff, Director of the Munich Documentation Centre for the History of National Socialism, presents a biography of ...

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Konrad Jarausch, “Broken Lives: How Ordinary Germans Experienced the 20th Century” (Princeton UP, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In his new book, Broken Lives: How Ordinary Germans Experienced the 20th Century (Princeton University Press, 2018), Konrad Jarausch, the Lurcy Professor of European Civilization at the University ...

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Gary Bruce, “Through the Lion Gate: A History of the Berlin Zoo” (Oxford UP, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In his new book, Through the Lion Gate: A History of the Berlin Zoo (Oxford University Press, 2017), Gary Bruce, professor of history at the University of Waterloo, provides the first English-langu...

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Jennifer A. Miller, “Turkish Guest Workers in Germany: Hidden Lives and Contested Borders, 1960s to 1980s” (U Toronto Press, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

During the 1960s, West Germany eagerly courted workers from Turkey to manage a labor shortage during the country’s Economic Miracle. This program caused one of the most consequential migrations in ...

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Pamela Potter, “Art of Suppression: Confronting the Nazi Past in Histories of the Visual and Performing Arts” (U California Press, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In her new book, Art of Suppression: Confronting the Nazi Past in Histories of the Visual and Performing Arts (University of California Press, 2016), Pamela M. Potter, Professor of Germany at the U...

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Lisa M. Todd, “Sexual Treason in Germany during the First World War” (Palgrave Macmillan, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

The First World War is usually associated with Trench Warfare, industrial mobilization, and the Lost Generation. In her recent book, Sexual Treason in Germany during the First World War (Palgrave M...

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Waitman Beorn, “The Holocaust in Eastern Europe: At the Epicenter of the Final Solution” (Bloomsbury Academic, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Most of the Jews and other victims the Nazis murdered in the Holocaust were from Eastern Europe, and the vast majority of the actual killing was done there. In his new book, The Holocaust in Easte...

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James Retallack, “Red Saxony: Election Battles and the Spectre of Democracy in Germany, 1860 to 1918” (Oxford UP, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

How can political modernization reinforce authoritarianism? What brought middle-class liberals and conservative monarchists to make common cause in late 19th- and early 20th-century Germany? How di...

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Frances Kneupper, “The Empire at the End of Time: Identity and Reform in Late Medieval German Prophecy” (Oxford UP, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

What sounds like the title of a Hollywood movie is actually a result of meticulous historical research. Frances Courtney Kneupper‘s new book The Empire at the End of Time: Identity and Reform in La...

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Albert Gurganus, “Kurt Eisner: A Modern Life” (Camden House, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Though Germany was convulsed by violent unrest in the weeks following the end of the First World War, one of the few places where a new republican government was established peacefully was Munich. ...

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Luisa Banki, “Post-Katastrophische Poetik: Zu W. G. Sebald und Walter Benjamin” (Wilhelm Fink, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

W. G. Sebald, one of the most prominent German-speaking authors of the late 20th century, has been discussed in German literary studies again and again. Nonetheless, many questions about him and hi...

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Rebecca Erbelding, “Rescue Board: The Untold Story of America’s Efforts to Save the Jews of Europe” (Doubleday, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In her new book, Rescue Board: The Untold Story of America’s Efforts to Save the Jews of Europe (Doubleday, 2018), Rebecca Erbelding examines the War Refugee Board created by FDR in 1944 near the c...

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Jonathan Boff, “Haig’s Enemy: Crown Prince Rupprecht and Germany’s War on the Western Front” (Oxford UP, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

There has been historiographical revolution in the literature of the war on the Western Front in the past thirty years. In Haig’s Enemy: Crown Prince Rupprecht and Germany’s War on the Western Fron...

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Stephan Resch, “Stefan Zweig und der Europa-Gedanke” (Königshausen & Neumann, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In Stefan Zweig und der Europa-Gedanke (Königshausen & Neumann, 2017), Stephan Resch analyzes the Austrian author’s relationship with Europe and the concept of pacifism. To date Stephan Zweig is a ...

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Kate Skinner, “The Fruits of Freedom in British Togoland: Literacy, Politics and Nationalism, 1914-2014” (Cambridge UP, 2015) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In her book, The Fruits of Freedom in British Togoland: Literacy, Politics and Nationalism, 1914-2014 (Cambridge University Press, 2015), Kate Skinner examines the history behind the failed project...

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Benjamin Bryce, “To Belong in Buenos Aires: Germans, Argentines, and the Rise of a Pluralist Society” (Stanford UP, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Benjamin Bryce, Assistant Professor of History at the University of Northern British Columbia, has written a history of belonging within a culturally plural Argentina. To Belong in Buenos Aires: Ge...

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Nathan Marcus, “Austrian Reconstruction and the Collapse of Global Finance, 1921-1931” (Harvard UP, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In Austrian Reconstruction and the Collapse of Global Finance, 1921–1931 (Harvard University Press, 2018), Nathan Marcus, analyzes the events that took place around the financial crisis in Austria ...

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Dan Bendarz, “East German Intellectuals and the Unification of Germany: An Ethnographic View” (Palgrave, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In his new book, East German Intellectuals and the Unification of Germany: An Ethnographic View (Palgrave 2017), Dan Bednarz, Assistant Professor at Bristol Community College, examines the impact o...

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Jannica Budde, “Turkish Women Writers in German Cities” (Königshausen and Neumann, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In Germany, beginning in the 1960s, a major population shift took place. The reason for it was the German guest worker program. Due to the German ‘economic miracle,’ the country was in growing need...

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Kevin Simpson, “Soccer under the Swastika: Stories of Survival and Resistance during the Holocaust” (Rowman and Littlefield, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Today we are joined by Kevin Simpson, the author of Soccer under the Swastika: Stories of Survival and Resistance during the Holocaust (Rowman and Littlefield Publishers, 2016). In Soccer under the...

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Marcel Schmid, “Autopoiesis and Literature: The Short History of an Endless Process” (transcript, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In his new book Autopoiesis and Literature: The Short History of an Endless Process (Autopoiesis und Literatur: Die kurze Geschichte eines endlosen Verfahrens [transcript, 2016]), Marcel Schmid, a ...

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Sandra Ott, “Living with the Enemy: German Occupation, Collaboration and Justice in the West Pyrenees, 1940-1948” (Cambridge UP, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In her new book, Living with the Enemy: German Occupation, Collaboration and Justice in the West Pyrenees, 1940-1948 (Cambridge University Press, 2017), Sandra Ott, Associate Professor of Basque St...

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Katrin Paehler, “The Third Reich’s Intelligence Service: The Career of Walter Schellenberg” (Cambridge University Press, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Who was the spymaster of the Third Reich? How did Nazi ideology influence intelligence collection? Katrin Paehler answers these questions with the first analysis of Office VI of the Reich Security ...

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Hanna Engelmeier, “Man, the Ape: Anthropology and the Reception of Darwin in Germany, 1850-1900” (Bohlau, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

The relationship between humans and apes has been discussed for centuries. That discussion took a new turn with the publication and reception of Darwin’s On the Origin of Species by Means of Natura...

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Ruth von Bernuth, “How the Wise Men Got to Chelm: The Life and Times of a Yiddish Folk Tradition” (NYU Press, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In How the Wise Men Got to Chelm: The Life and Times of a Yiddish Folk Tradition (New York University Press, 2017), Ruth von Bernuth, Associate Professor in the Department of Germanic and Slavic La...

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Kerry Wallach, “Passing Illusions: Jewish Visibility in Weimar Germany” (U Michigan Press, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

What did it mean to be perceived as Jewish or non-Jewish in Weimar Germany? How, in an age of growing antisemitism, was Jewishness revealed, or made invisible? Kerry Wallach of Gettysburg College, ...

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Thomas Weber, “Becoming Hitler: The Making of a Nazi” (Basic Books, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Few would dispute that Hitler’s ideas led to war and genocide. Less clear however, is how and when those ideas developed. In his latest book, Becoming Hitler: The Making of a Nazi (Basic Books, 201...

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Till Nitschmann, “Theater of the Maimed” (Konigshausen and Neumann, 2015) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In his new book Theater of the Maimed: Fictional Characters between Deformation und Destruction in Theatrical Works of the Twentieth and early Twenty-First Centuries (Knigshausen and Neumann, 2015)...

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Erin Hochman, “Imagining a Greater Germany: Republican Nationalism and the Idea of Anschluss” (Cornell UP, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In her new book, Imagining a Greater Germany: Republican Nationalism and the Idea of Anschluss (Cornell University Press, 2016), Erin Hochman, Associate Professor of Modern German and European Hist...

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Laurie Marhoefer, “Sex and the Weimar Republic: German Homosexual Emancipation and the Rise of the Nazis” (U Toronto Press, 2015) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

The Weimar Republic was home to the first gay rights movement, led by well-known sexologist Magnus Hirschfeld. It also inspired many literary and cinematic representations of sexual liberation in l...

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Sergej Rickenbacher, “Wissen um Stimmung” (Wilhelm Fink Verlag, 2015) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In his new book, Wissen um Stimmung (Knowledge of Mood), Sergej Rickenbacher, a post-doc at the University of Aachen, examines two works of Robert Musil from the perspective of knowledge and atmosp...

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Yair Mintzker, “The Many Deaths of Jew Suss: The Notorious Trial and Execution of an Eighteenth-Century Court Jew” (Princeton UP, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Joseph Suss Oppenheimer became the “court Jew” of Carl Alexander, Duke of Wurttemberg in 1733. When Carl Alexander died, Oppenheimer was put on trial and condemned to death for his “misdeeds,” and ...

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Vivian Liska, “German-Jewish Thought and Its Afterlife: A Tenuous Legacy” (Indiana UP, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In German-Jewish Thought and Its Afterlife: A Tenuous Legacy (Indiana University Press, 2016), Vivian Liska, Professor of German Literature and Director of the Institute of Jewish Studies at the Un...

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Sterling Murray, “The Career of an Eighteenth-Century Kapellmeister: The Life and Music of Antonio Rosetti” (U Rochester Press, 2014) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Though he never enjoyed the fame of his contemporaries Mozart and Haydn, Antonio Rosetti was a successful composer whose works received a wide audience. In his book, The Career of an Eighteenth-Cen...

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Julia Kerscher, “Autodidacticism, Artistry, Media Practice” (Vandenhoeck and Ruprecht, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In her new book, Autodidacticism, Artistry, Media Practice (Autodidaktik, Artistik, Medienpraktik [Vandenhoeck and Ruprecht, 2016]), Julia Kerscher, postdoc at the University of Tubingen examines t...

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Nathan Stoltzfus, “Hitler’s Compromises: Coercion and Consensus in Nazi Germany” (Yale UP, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

How did the Nazi regime respond to protest? How did Hitler’s desire for popular authority shape the relationship between state and society? Nathan Stoltzfus challenges the idea that the Third Reich...

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Mark Edward Ruff, “The Battle for the Catholic Past in Germany, 1945-1980” (Cambridge UP, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Historical debates about the actions of the Roman Catholic Church in relationship to the Third Reich have never been restricted to academic presses and journals like so many other topics. Rather se...

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Jeffrey Shandler, “Holocaust Memory in the Digital Age: Survivors’ Stories and New Media Practices” (Stanford UP, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

How do technological advances and changing archival practices alter historical memory? In what ways have developments in the preservation and dissemination of historical material already impacted h...

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Mahon Murphy, “Colonial Captivity during the First World War: Internment and the Fall of the German Empire, 1914-1919” (Cambridge UP, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

The First World War was not limited the trenches on the Western Front. Nor was the system of internment camps it spawned. In his new book, Colonial Captivity during the First World War: Internment ...

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David Gerlach, “The Economy of Ethnic Cleansing: The Transformation of German-Czech Borderlands after World War II” (Cambridge UP, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In his new book, The Economy of Ethnic Cleansing: The Transformation of German-Czech Borderlands after World War II (Cambridge University Press, 2017), David Gerlach, Associate Professor of History...

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Roger Frie, “Not in My Family: German Memory and Responsibility After the Holocaust” (Oxford UP, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

What if you suddenly discovered a cherished member of your family was a Nazi? How would you make sense of the code of silence that had kept an uncomfortable reality at bay? How would you resolve th...

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Omer Bartov, “Anatomy of a Genocide: The Life and Death of a Town Called Buczacz” (Simon and Schuster, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

One of the most important developments in Holocaust Studies over the past couple decades has been one of scale. Rather than focus on decision making at the national or regional level, scholars are ...

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Noam Zadoff, “Gershom Scholem: From Berlin to Jerusalem and Back” (Brandeis UP, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Noam Zadoff begins his biography of Gershon Scholem, one of the 20th century’s greatest scholars and an equally perplexing intellectual, at the point where Scholem ends his own autobiography From B...

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Margarete Fuchs, “The Moving View: The Gaze in the Modern German Literature” (Rombach Verlag, 2014) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In her new book Der bewegende Blick: Literarische Blickinszenierungen der Moderne (Rombach Verlag, 2014)—The Moving View: The Gaze in the Modern German Literature—Margarete Fuchs, a postdoc at the ...

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Lena Wetenkamp, “Europe Narrated, Contextualized and Remembered” (Koenigshausen and Neumann, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Lena Wetenkamp‘s Europe Narrated, Contextualized and Remembered: The Discourse of ‘Europe’ in Contemporary German Literature (Europa erzhalt, verortet, erinnert: Europa-Diskurse in der deutschsprac...

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Wolfgang Seibel, “Persecution and Rescue: The Politics of the Final Solution in France, 1940-1944” (U Michigan Press, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In his recent book, Persecution and Rescue: The Politics of the Final Solution in France, 1940-1944 (University of Michigan Press, 2017). Wolfgang Seibel explores the factors that shaped the Holoca...

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Vanya E. Bellinger, “Marie von Clausewitz: The Woman Behind the Making of On War” (Oxford UP, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Marie von Clausewitz: The Woman Behind the Making of On War (Oxford University Press, 2016) is an important and fascinating book that not only tells the story of a remarkable woman’s life during th...

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Martin Kalb, “Coming of Age: Constructing and Controlling Youth in Munich, 1942-1973” (Berghahn Books, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In his new book, Coming of Age: Constructing and Controlling Youth in Munich, 1942-1973 (Berghan Books, 2016), Martin Kalb, Assistant Professor of History at Bridgewater College examines the constr...

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Tanja Angela Kunz , “Sehnsucht nach dem Guten” (Wilhelm Fink Verlag, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In her new book Longing for the Good. The Relationship between Literature and Ethics in the Work of Peter Handke (Wilhelm Fink Verlag, 2017), Tanja Angela Kunz, a postdoc at the Humboldt University...

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Robbert-Jan Adriaansen, “The Rhythm of Eternity: The German Youth Movement and the Experience of the Past, 1900-1933” (Berghahn Books, 2015) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

The German youth movement of the late Kaiserreich and ill-fated Weimar Republic has been a subject of controversy since its inception. The longing for community that drove the movement, and a sense...

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Steven P. Remy, “The Malmedy Massacre: The War Crimes Trial Controversy” (Harvard UP, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In his new book, The Malmedy Massacre: The War Crimes Trial Controversy (Harvard University Press, 2017), Steven Remy, professor of history at City University of New York, examines the Malmedy mass...

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Sareeta Amrute, “Encoding Race, Encoding Class: Indian IT Workers in Berlin” (Duke UP, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Associate professor of anthropology at the University of Washington Sareeta Amrute has written Encoding Race, Encoding Class: Indian IT Workers in Berlin (Duke University Press, 2016), a study of c...

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Lars Rensmann, “The Politics of Unreason: The Frankfurt School and the Origins of Modern Antisemitism” (SUNY Press, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In his new book, The Politics of Unreason: The Frankfurt School and the Origins of Modern Antisemitism (SUNY Press, 2017) , Lars Rensmann, Professor of European Politics and Society at the Universi...

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Christian Kirchmeier “Morality and Literature: A Historical Typology” (Wilhelm Fink Verlag, 2013) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In his new book Morality and Literature: A Historical Typology (Wilhelm Fink Verlag, 2013)—in German: Moral und Literatur. Eine historische Typologie—Christian Kirchmeier, post doc at the Universit...

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Guenter Lewy, “Perpetrators: The World of the Holocaust Killers” (Oxford UP, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

“Monsters exist, but they are too few in number to be truly dangerous.” Thus begins Guenter Lewy’s latest book, Perpetrators: The World of the Holocaust Killers (Oxford University Press, 2017), a ...

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Andrew S. Tompkins, “Better Active than Radioactive! Anti-Nuclear Protest in 1970s France and West Germany” (Oxford UP, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Hundreds of thousands of people took to the streets in western Europe over the 1970s. Observers feared Germany was becoming “ungovernable” and France was moving toward “civil war.” The source of th...

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Lawrence R. Douglas, “The Right Wrong Man: John Demjanjuk and the Last Great Nazi War Crimes Trial” (Princeton UP, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In his new book, The Right Wrong Man: John Demjanjuk and the Last Great Nazi War Crimes Trial (Princeton University Press 2016), Lawrence R. Douglas, the James J. Grosfeld Professor of Law, Jurispr...

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Andreas Gehrlach, “Thieves: Stealing in Literature, Philosophy, and Myth” (Wilhelm Fink Verlag, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In his new book Thieves: Stealing in Literature, Philosophy, and Myth (Wilhelm Fink Verlag, 2016)—in German: Diebe: Die heimliche Aneignung als Ursprungserzahlung in Literatur, Philosophie und Myth...

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Pamela Swett, “Selling under the Swastika: Advertising and Commercial Culture in Nazi Germany” (Stanford UP, 2013) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In her new book, Selling under the Swastika: Advertising and Commercial Culture in Nazi Germany (Stanford University Press, 2013), Pamela Swett, Professor of History at McMaster University is the f...

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Nicholas O’Shaughnessy, “Marketing the Third Reich: Persuasion, Packaging, and Propaganda” (Routledge, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

One of the defining characteristics of the Nazi regime that ruled Germany from 1933 until 1945 was its attention to presentation as a means of winning support. In Marketing the Third Reich: Persuas...

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Theodore Vial, “Modern Religion, Modern Race” (Oxford UP, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

The categories religion and race share a common genealogy. The modern understanding of these terms emerges within the European enlightenment but grasping their gradual production requires us to inv...

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Christian Ingrao, “Believe and Destroy: Intellectuals in the SS War Machine” (Polity Press, 2015) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

How did a generation of Germany’s best and brightest become radicalized? What convinced young intellectuals to join the SS and perpetrate genocide in pursuit of a racial utopia? Find out in our con...

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Marion Deshmukh, “Max Liebermann: Modern Art and Modern Germany” (Routledge, 2015) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In her new book, Max Liebermann: Modern Art and Modern Germany (Routledge 2015), Marion Deshmukh, the Robert T. Hawkes Professor of History Emeritus at George Mason University, examines the life an...

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Rachel Seelig, “Strangers in Berlin: Modern Jewish Literature between East and West, 1919-1933” (U. Michigan Press, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In Strangers in Berlin: Modern Jewish Literature between East and West, 1919-1933 (University of Michigan Press, 2016), Rachel Seelig, Visiting Scholar in the Department of Germanic Languages and L...

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Scott Moranda, “The People’s Own Landscape: Nature, Tourism and Dictatorship in East Germany” (U. Michigan Press, 2014) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

The new German Democratic Republic, known as East Germany, faced many challenges when it was founded in 1949. Not least of which was convincing its citizens that they should be loyal to the new sta...

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Alice Weinreb, “Modern Hungers: Food and Power in Twentieth-Century Germany” (Oxford UP, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Food is a hot topic these days, and not just among the folks posting pictures of their dinner on Instagram. A growing number of scholars in many fields study food’s production, distribution, consum...

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Albert Wu, “From Christ to Confucius: German Missionaries, Chinese Christians, and the Globalization of Christianity, 1860-1950” (Yale UP, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Where Europeans have gone, so, too, have their ideas about religion. We know that this was no one-way street, that Christian missionaries have both changed and been changed by their interaction wit...

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Eric Kurlander, “Hitler’s Monsters: A Supernatural History of the Third Reich” (Yale UP, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

The idea that there is some unholy connection between Nazism and occultism has a lengthy history. It long predates 1933, when the National Socialist party took power in Germany. But what’s behind t...

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Amir Engel, “Gershom Scholem: An Intellectual Biography” (U. Chicago Press, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In Gershom Scholem: An Intellectual Biography (University of Chicago Press, 2017) , Amir Engel, a lecturer in the German Department at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, positions Gershom Scholem’...

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Leonard Barkan, “Berlin for Jews: A Twenty-First Century Companion” (U. Chicago Press, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In Berlin for Jews: A Twenty-First Century Companion (University of Chicago Press, 2016), Leonard Barkan, the class of 1943 University Professor at Princeton, examines the complex histories of Jewi...

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Tania Munz, “The Dancing Bees: Karl von Frisch and the Discovery of the Honeybee Language” (U of Chicago Press, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Tania Munz‘s new book is a dual biography: both of Austrian-born experimental physiologist Karl von Frisch, and of the honeybees he worked with as experimental, communicating creatures. The Dancing...

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James Q. Whitman, “Hitler’s American Model: The United States and the Making of Nazi Race Law” (Princeton UP, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

James Q. Whitman, Ford Foundation Professor of Comparative and Foreign Law at Yale Law School, began researching the book that became Hitler’s American Model: The United States and the Making of Na...

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Richard Weikart, “Hitler’s Religion: The Twisted Beliefs that Drove the Third Reich” (Regnery History, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Trying to figure out what Hitler “really” thought about anything is difficult because he was–among many other things–a clever, opportunistic politician and a very prolix one at that. Over the cours...

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Norman Ohler, “Blitzed: Drugs in the Third Reich” (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Norman Ohler’s Blitzed: Drugs in the Third Reich (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2017) explores the drug culture of Nazi Germany. Far from being a nation of physical and mental purity portrayed by Goeb...

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Eve Rosenhaft and Robbie Aitken, “Black Germany: The Making and Unmaking of a Diaspora Community, 1884-1960” (Cambridge UP, 2015) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

“There were black Germans?” My students are always surprised to learn that there were and are a community of African immigrants and Afro-Germans that dates back to the nineteenth century (and some...

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Stephen Brockmann, “The Writers’ State: Constructing East German Literature, 1945-1959” (Camden House, 2015) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Stephen Brockmann’s The Writers’ State: Constructing East German Literature, 1945-1959 (Camden House, 2015) introduces readers to a specific atmosphere–political, cultural, and historical–that acco...

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Benjamin Martin, “The Nazi-Fascist New Order for European Culture” (Harvard UP, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Benjamin Martin’s The Nazi-Fascist New Order for European Culture (Harvard University Press, 2016) examines the attempt by Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy to forge a European cultural empire out of ...

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Colin Holmes, “Searching for Lord Haw-Haw: The Political Lives of William Joyce” (Routledge, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

During the Second World War millions of Britons tuned in nightly to hear the broadcasts of Lord Haw-Haw coming from Nazi Germany. Though the label was broadly applied to a number of English-speakin...

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Fred Amram, “We’re in America Now: A Survivor’s Stories” (Holy Cow! Press, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In this lively memoir, We’re In America Now: A Survivor’s Stories (Holy Cow! Press, 2016), Fred Amram offers a series of stories documenting his childhood in 1930s Germany through his coming-of-age...

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Carsten Schapkow, “Role Model and Countermodel: The Golden Age of Iberian Jewry and German Jewish Culture during the Era of Emancipation” (Lexington Books, 2015) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Why were German Jews so fascinated by Iberian Sephardic history? In Role Model and Countermodel: The Golden Age of Iberian Jewry and German Jewish Culture during the Era of Emancipation (Lexington ...

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Greg Eghigian, “The Corrigible and the Incorrigible: Science, Medicine, and the Convict in Twentieth-Century Germany” (U. of Michigan Press, 2015) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

When I first read Foucault’s Discipline and Punish as an undergrad, I remember wondering, “What does this look like, though? How might the disciplining of the body play out in different places?” Gr...

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Lauren Faulkner Rossi, “Wehrmacht Priests: Catholicism and the Nazi War of Annihilation” (Harvard UP, 2015) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

I teach at a Catholic university and last semester co-taught (with a theologian) a class titled The Holocaust and its Legacies. Once my students became comfortable with me, they began to pepper me ...

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John Freed, “Frederick Barbarossa: The Prince and the Myth” (Yale UP, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

For all of his importance as a medieval ruler, there are surprisingly few biographies in English of the German emperor Frederick Barbarossa (c. 1122-1190). John Freed fills this gap with his new bo...

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Sven-Erik Rose, “Jewish Philosophical Politics in Germany, 1789-1848” (Brandeis UP, 2014) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In Jewish Philosophical Politics in Germany, 1789-1848 (Brandeis University Press, 2014), Sven-Erik Rose, Associate Professor of German at the University of California, Davis, explores how Jewish i...

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Stefan Ihrig, “Justifying Genocide: Germany and the Armenians from Bismarck to Hitler” (Harvard UP, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

At least twice in past interview descriptions I’ve used the famous phrase attributed to Hitler: “Who, after all, speaks today of the annihilation of the Armenians?” To be honest, I couldn’t have to...

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Robert Holub, “Nietzsche’s Jewish Problem: Between Anti-Semitism and Anti-Judaism” (Princeton UP, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In Nietzsche’s Jewish Problem: Between Anti-Semitism and Anti-Judaism (Princeton University Press, 2016), Robert Holub, Ohio Eminent Scholar and Professor of German at Ohio State University, evalua...

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John M. Efron, “German Jewry and the Allure of the Sephardic” (Princeton UP, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In German Jewry and the Allure of the Sephardic (Princeton University Press, 2016), John M. Efron, Koret Professor of Jewish History at the University of California, Berkeley, examines the special ...

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Suzanne Brown-Fleming, “Nazi Persecution and Postwar Repercussions” (Rowman and Littlefield, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Suzanne Brown-Fleming suggests that most people think the archives of the International Tracing Service is largely a list of names and addresses. I was one of these people until I read her excellen...

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Alan McDougall, “The People’s Game: Football, State and Society in East Germany” (Cambridge UP, 2014) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In The People’s Game: Football, State and Society (Cambridge University Press, 2014), Alan McDougall looks at football from the top-down and bottom-up: as a tool of the state, as forming regional ...

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Stefan Ihrig, “Ataturk in the Nazi Imagination” (Harvard UP, 2014) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In Ataturk in the Nazi Imagination (Harvard University Press, 2014), historian Stefan Ihrig examines the history of Mustafa Kemal and Republican Turkey through the interpretive lens of Nazi politic...

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Timothy Snyder, “Black Earth: The Holocaust as History and Warning” (Tim Duggan Books, 2015) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

It’s rare when an academic historian breaks through and becomes a central part of the contemporary cultural conversation. Timothy Snyder does just this with his book Black Earth: The Holocaust as ...

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Kim Wunschmann, “Before Auschwitz: Jewish Prisoners in the Prewar Concentration Camps” (Harvard University Press 2015) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In Before Auschwitz: Jewish Prisoners in the Prewar Concentration Camps (Harvard University Press, 2015), Kim Wunschmann, DAAD Lecturer in Modern European History and a Member of the Centre for Ger...

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Nick Hopwood, “Haeckel’s Embryos: Images, Evolution, and Fraud” (University of Chicago Press, 2015) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Nick Hopwood‘s Haeckel’s Embryos: Images, Evolution, and Fraud (University of Chicago Press, 2015) blends textual and visual analysis to answer the question of how images succeed or fail. Hopwood ...

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Nicholas Stargardt, “The German War: A Nation Under Arms, 1939-1945” (Basic Books, 2015) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In all of the thousands upon thousands of books written about Nazi Germany, it’s easy to lose track of some basic questions. What did Germans think they were fighting for? Why did they support the ...

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Paolo Astorri, "Lutheran Theology and Contract Law in Early Modern Germany (ca. 1520-1720)" (Verlag Ferdinand Schoningh, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In Lutheran Theology and Contract Law in Early Modern Germany (ca. 1520-1720) (Verlag Ferdinand Schoningh, 2019), Paolo Astorri shows how the Protestant Reformation influence European law. Martin L...

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Shelly Cline, “Women at Work: The SS Aufseherin and the Gendered Perpetration of the Holocaust” (Ph. D. Diss, U of Kansas, 2014) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Is it ok–practically and ethically–to feel sympathetic toward the guards of concentration camps? Today’s interview marks the conclusion of my summer-long series of podcasts on the concentration ca...

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N. Chare and D. Williams, "Testimonies of Resistance: Representations of the Auschwitz-Birkenau Sonderkommando" (Berghahn Books, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

The Sonderkommando--the "special squad" of enslaved Jewish laborers who were forced to work in the gas chambers and crematoria of Auschwitz-Birkenau--comprise one of the most fascinating and troubl...

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Kelly J. Whitmer, “The Halle Orphanage as Scientific Community: Observation, Eclecticism, and Pietism in the Early Enlightenment” (U of Chicago Press, 2015) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Kelly J. Whitmer‘s new book offers a history of science set in the Halle Orphanage, a building that was founded in the middle of the 1690s in the Prussian city of Halle by a group of German Luthera...

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Andrew Demshuk, "Bowling for Communism: Urban Ingenuity at the End of East Germany" (Cornell UP, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Bowling for Communism: Urban Ingenuity at the End of East Germany (Cornell University Press, 2020) illuminates how civic life functioned in Leipzig, East Germany's second-largest city, on the eve o...

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Dan Stone, “The Liberation of the Camps: The End of the Holocaust and its Aftermath” (Yale UP, 2015) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Every year I ask my students to tell me when the Holocaust ended. Most of them are surprised to hear me say that it has not yet. Today’s podcast is the fourth of a summer long series of podcasts a...

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D. Bilak and T. Nummedal, "Furnace and Fugue. A Digital Edition of Michael Maier’s 'Atalanta fugiens' (1618)" (U Virginia Press, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In 1618, on the eve of the Thirty Years’ War, the German alchemist and physician Michael Maier published Atalanta fugiens, an intriguing and complex musical alchemical emblem book designed to engag...

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Nikolaus Wachsmann, “KL: A History of the Nazi Concentration Camps” (FSG, 2015) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Today’s podcast is the second in our summer series of interviews about the concentration camps in and around Nazi Germany. Earlier this summer I talked with Geoff Megargee about the US Holocaust Mu...

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Martyn Rady, "The Habsburgs: To Rule the World" (Basic Books, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In The Habsburgs: To Rule the World (Basic Books, 2020), Martyn Rady, Masaryk Professor of Central European History at University College London, tells the epic story of a dynasty and the world it ...

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Sarah Helm, “Ravensbruck: Life and Death in Hitler’s Concentration Camp for Women” (Nan A. Talese, 2015) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Today’s podcast is the second in our summer series of interviews about the concentration camps in and around Nazi Germany. Earlier this summer I talked with Geoff Megargee about the US Holocaust M...

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Adam Knowles, "Heidegger’s Fascist Affinities: A Politics of Silence" (Stanford UP, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

The German philosopher Martin Heidegger’s influence over the last several decades of philosophy is undeniable, but his place in the canon has been called into question in recent years in the wake o...

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Geoff Megargee, ed., “The USHMM Encyclopedia of Camps and Ghettos,” Vols. 1 and 2 (Indiana UP, 2009 and 2012) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Every semester when I get to the point in World Civ when we’re talking about Nazi Germany, I ask my students to guess how many camps and ghettos there were. I get guesses anywhere from a few, to a ...

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Rhodri Jeffreys Jones, "The Nazi Spy Ring in America: Hitler’s Agents, the FBI and the Case that Stirred the Nation" (Georgetown UP, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In his new book, The Nazi Spy Ring in America: Hitler’s Agents, the FBI & the Case that Stirred the Nation (Georgetown University Press, 2020), Rhodri Jeffreys Jones tells the dramatic story of the...

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Anton Weiss-Wendt, “The Nazi Genocide of the Roma” (Berghahn, 2015) and “Racial Science in Hitler’s New Europe” (U of Nebraska Press, 2013) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Normally I don’t try and talk about two books in the same interview. But, in discussing the interview, Anton Weiss-Wendt suggested that it made sense to pair The Nazi Genocide of the Roma (Berghah...

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Jeremy Black, "The Holocaust: History and Memory" (Indiana UP, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

The event that is commonly labeled as the ‘Holocaust’, was one of the most horrific of the Twentieth Century. It is also one of the most popularly discussed events of both the past and the current ...

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J. Laurence Hare, “Excavating Nations: Archaeology, Museums, and the German-Danish Borderlands” (U of Toronto Press, 2015) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

A recent book review I read began with the line “borderlands are back.” It’s certainly true that more and more historians have used borderland regions as the stage for some excellent work on the co...

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Stephen C. Kepher, "COSSAC: Lt. Gen. Sir Frederick Morgan and the Genesis of Operation OVERLORD" (Naval Institute Press, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

D-Day, June 6, 1944, looms large in both popular and historical imaginations as the sin qua non, or single defining moment, of the Second World War. Though there were other d-days launched across m...

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Emily Kuriloff, “Contemporary Psychoanalysis and the Third Reich” (Routledge, 2013) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In her new book, Contemporary Psychoanalysis and the Third Reich: History, Memory, Tradition (Routledge, 2013), Emily Kuriloff details a dimension of psychoanalytic history that has never been so e...

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Roman Deininger, "Markus Söder: The Shadow Chancellor" (Droemer Knauer, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Next year, Germany goes to the polls. For the first time in 15 years, Angela Merkel will not be a candidate for chancellor. Although a leadership election is underway inside Merkel’s Christian Demo...

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Juergen Matthaus et al., “War, Pacification and Mass Murder, 1939: The Einsatzgruppen in Poland” (Rowman and Littlefield, 2014) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Historians have spent the last two decades detailing and explaining the actions of the Einsatzgruppen in the Soviet Union. We now know much more than we used to about the escalation of violence in...

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Justin Q. Olmstead, "The United States' Entry into the First World War: The Role of British and German Diplomacy" (Boydell Press, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

The complicated situation which led to the American entry into the First World War in 1917 is often explained from the perspective of public opinion, US domestic politics, or financial and economic...

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Michael Leggiere, “Blucher: Scourge of Napoleon” (U Oklahoma Press, 2014) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

I have really enjoyed Michael Leggiere‘s earlier work, including the excellent Napoleon and Berlin : The Franco-Prussian War in North Germany, 1813 (2002), like this work, part of the Campaigns and...

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Julia Sneeringer, "A Social History of Early Rock ‘n’ Roll in Germany: Hamburg from Burlesque to The Beatles, 1956-69" (Bloomsbury, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

The Beatles’ sojourn in the St. Pauli district of Hamburg during the early 1960s is part of music legend. As Julia Sneeringer reveals in A Social History of Early Rock ‘n’ Roll in Germany: Hamburg ...

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Thomas Kemple, “Intellectual Work and the Spirit of Capitalism: Weber’s Calling” (Palgrave Macmillan, 2014) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Thomas Kemple‘s new book is an extraordinarily thoughtful invitation to approach Max Weber (1864-1920) as a performer, and to experience Weber’s work by attending to his spoken and written voice. I...

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Despina Stratigakos, "Hitler’s Northern Utopia: Building the New Order in Occupied Norway" (Princeton UP, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In her new book Hitler’s Northern Utopia: Building the New Order in Occupied Norway (Princeton University Press, 2020), Despina Stratigakos investigates the Nazi occupation of Norway. Between 1940 ...

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Michael Gorra, “The Bells in Their Silence: Travels through Germany” (Princeton UP, 2006) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Despite being Germany’s most famous literary lion, in 1786 Johann Wolfgang von Goethe had to jump on a mail coach incognito to begin his travels to Italy (of course, he asked permission first from ...

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T. P. Kaplan and W. Gruner, "Resisting Persecution: Jews and Their Petitions during the Holocaust" (Berghahn, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In 20 years of studying the Holocaust, it didn’t occurr to me that German officials might, when petitioned by German Jews or by Germans advocating for German Jews, change their minds. But it turns ...

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Udi Greenberg, “The Weimar Century: German Emigres and the Ideological Foundation of the Cold War” (Princeton UP, 2015) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

American policymakers and scholars alike have looked to the rapid transformation of Germany, specifically West Germany, from a defeated Nazi state into a thriving democracy as one of the most succe...

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Helmut Walser Smith, "Germany: A Nation in its Time" (Liveright, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In his groundbreaking 500-year history entitled Germany: A Nation in its Time (Liveright, 2020), Helmut Walser Smith challenges traditional perceptions of Germany’s conflicted past, revealing a nat...

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Alon Confino, “A World Without Jews: The Nazi Imagination from Persecution to Genocide” (Yale UP, 2014) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Alon Confino‘s A World Without Jews: The Nazi Imagination from Persecution to Genocide (Yale University Press, 2014) begins with a vivid and devastating scene in the small German town of FÃ¼rth on ...

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Victoria de Grazia, "The Perfect Fascist: A Story of Love, Power, and Morality in Mussolini’s Italy" (Harvard UP, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In her new book, The Perfect Fascist: A Story of Love, Power, and Morality in Mussolini’s Italy (Belknap Press), Dr. Victoria de Grazia takes the story of Attilio Teruzzi and explores the social hi...

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Martin Shuster, “Autonomy after Auschwitz: Adorno, German Idealism and Modernity” (U of Chicago Press, 2014) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

The work of Theodore Adorno is well established as a crucial resource for understanding the complexities of contemporary capitalism, playing a foundational role in Critical Theory. Dialectic of Enl...

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Molly Loberg, "The Struggle for the Streets of Berlin: Politics, Consumption, and Urban Space, 1914-1945" (Cambridge UP, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Who owns the street? This is the question that animates The Struggle for the Streets of Berlin: Politics, Consumption, and Urban Space, 1914-1945 (Cambridge University Press) by Molly Loberg. Inter...

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Anne Knowles, Mastering Iron (U of Chicago Press, 2013) and Geographies of the Holocaust (Indiana UP, 2014) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Last month on New Books in Geography, historian Susan Schulten discussed the development of thematic maps in the nineteenth century. Such maps focused on a particular topic such as disease, immigra...

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Marion Kaplan, "Hitler’s Jewish Refugees: Hope and Anxiety in Portugal" (Yale UP, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Marion Kaplan's riveting book, Hitler’s Jewish Refugees: Hope and Anxiety in Portugal (Yale University Press) describes the dramatic experiences of Jewish refugees as they fled Hitler’s regime and ...

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Sean Forner, “German Intellectuals and the Challenge of Democratic Renewal: Culture and Politics after 1945” (Cambridge University Press, 2014) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

The Federal Republic of Germany is often held up today as one of the world’s great democracies, where the commitment to such ideals as transparency, careful deliberation, social and political equal...

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Richard Breitman, "The Journal of Holocaust and Genocide Studies"(Oxford Academic/USHMM) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

The?Journal of Holocaust and Genocide Studies is turning twenty-five. One of the first academic journals focused on the study of the Holocaust and Genocide Studies,?it has been one of a few journal...

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Thomas Kuehne, “Belonging and Genocide: Hitler’s Community, 1918-1945” (Yale UP, 2013) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

As a teenager, I heard or read or saw (in films or on television) story after story about the Gestapo, the Nazi secret police. Despite the occasional ‘corrective’ offered by Hogan’s Heroes, the imp...

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A Very Square Peg: A Podcast Series about Polymath Robert Eisler. Episode 9: Vanity of Vanities from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In this episode, I look at Eisler’s last days in England, where he found that the Oxford readership he had been promised before being sent to Dachau was taken by someone else, a paper shortage had ...

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Michelle Moyd, “Violent Intermediaries: African Soldiers, Conquest, and Everyday Colonialism in German East Africa” (Ohio UP, 2014) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In her imaginative and scrupulous book, Violent Intermediaries: African Soldiers, Conquest, and Everyday Colonialism in German East Africa (Ohio University Press, 2014), historian Michelle Moyd wri...

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A Very Square Peg: A Podcast Series about Polymath Robert Eisler. Episode 8: A Very Difficult Man to Kill from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Following the annexation of Austria by Nazi Germany in March of 1938, Robert Eisler wrote to Oxford asking about being appointed to the Wilde Readership in Comparative and Natural Religion, thereby...

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Todd H. Weir, “Secularism and Religion in Nineteenth-Century Germany” (Cambridge UP, 2014) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

If you look up the word “secular” in just about about any English-language dictionary, you’ll find that the word denotes, among other things, something that is not religious. This “not-religious-ne...

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Ari Linden, "Karl Kraus and The Discourse of Modernity" (Northwestern UP, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In Karl Kraus and The Discourse of Modernity (Northwestern University Press, 2020), Ari Linden analyzes Karl Kraus’s oeuvre while engaging in the conversation about modernism and modernity, which i...

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Edward Ross Dickinson, “Sex, Freedom and Power in Imperial Germany 1880-1914” (Cambridge UP, 2014) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In this interview with historian Edward Ross Dickinson we talk about sex. Well, actually we talk about the talk about sex. Since Michel Foucault’s epochal work History of Sexuality (1976) how moder...

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Roger Moorhouse, "Poland 1939: The Outbreak of World War II" (Basic Books, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Historian and academic Roger Moorhouse, revisits the opening campaign of World War II, the German invasion of Poland in September 1939., in his new book Poland 1939: The Outbreak of World War II (B...

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Thomas Kohut, “A German Generation: An Experiential History of the Twentieth Century” (Yale UP, 2012), from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Germans belonging to the generation born at the turn of the twentieth century endured staggering losses, many of which became difficult to mourn or even acknowledge: their parents in World War I, f...

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A Very Square Peg: A Podcast Series about Polymath Robert Eisler. Episode 7: The Christ Vision from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Robert Whitehead of London, a self-described “Business Man” who was “no Churchman and not a Jesus worshipper, much as I admire him,” wrote to Robert Eisler on New Year’s Eve of 1929, asking “if it ...

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Anson Rabinbach and Sander Gilman, “The Third Reich Sourcebook” (U California Press, 2013) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Primary source readers represent an unusual historical genre. Unlike editions, their aim is not to enable the reader to hear, as clearly as possible, the voice of a single historical personage or i...

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Erik Grimmer-Solem, "Learning Empire: Globalization and the German Quest for World Status, 1875-1919"(Cambridge UP, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In his new book, Learning Empire: Globalization and the German Quest for World Status, 1875-1919 (Cambridge University Press) Erik Grimmer-Solem examines the process of German globalization that be...

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David B. Dennis, “Inhumanities: Nazi Interpretations of Western Culture” (Cambridge UP, 2012) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

I occasionally teach Western Civilization and you may have taken it in college. We all know the drill: Greeks-Romans-Dark Ages-Middle Ages-Renaissance-Reformation-Scientific Revolution-Enlightenmen...

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A Very Square Peg: A Podcast Series about Polymath Robert Eisler. Episode 6: Negative Interest from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Warning: Economics. In this episode, we begin with Eisler’s testimony before the skeptical Senators of the Committee on Banking and Currency in Washington, D.C. on January 20, 1934, in which he pro...

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Andrew Demshuk, “The Lost German East: Forced Migration and the Politics of Memory, 1945-1970” (Cambridge UP, 2012) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

At the close of the Second World War, the Allies expelled several million Germans from the eastern portion of the former Reich. Thanks to the work of many historians, we know quite a bit about Alli...

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Francine Hirsch, "Soviet Judgement at Nuremberg" (Oxford UP, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

How did an authoritarian regime help lay the cornerstones of human rights and international law? Soviet Judgement at Nuremberg: A New History of the International Military Tribunal? (Oxford Univers...

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Michael Bryant, “Eyewitness to Genocide: The Operation Reinhard Death Camp Trials, 1955-1966” (University of Tennessee Press, 2014) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

My marginal comment, recorded at the end of the chapter on the Belzec trial in Michael Bryant‘s fine new book Eyewitness to Genocide: The Operation Reinhard Death Camp Trials, 1955-1966 (University...

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Sabine Hildebrandt, "The Anatomy of Murder: Ethical Transgressions and Anatomical Science during the Third Reich" (Berghahn, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Of the many medical specializations to transform themselves during the rise of National Socialism, anatomy has received relatively little attention from historians. While politics and racial laws d...

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Ari Joskowicz, “The Modernity of Others: Jewish Anti-Catholicism in Germany and France” (Stanford UP, 2014) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In 1873, the German scientist Rudolf Virchow declared in Parliament that liberals were locked in a Kulturkampf, a “culture war” with the forces of Catholicism, which he viewed as the chief hindranc...

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Luca Scholz, "Borders and Freedom of Movement in the Holy Roman Empire" (Oxford UP, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Today we speak with Luca Scholz, a Lecturer in Digital Humanities at the University of Manchester. Dr. Scholz has varied interests: wide-ranging data analysis, the collection of that data, broad tr...

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Wendy Lower, “Hitler’s Furies: German Women in the Nazi Killing Fields” (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2013) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

It seems quite reasonable to wonder if there’s anything more to learn about the Holocaust. Scholars from a variety of disciplines have been researching and writing about the subject for decades. A ...

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Robert Gerwarth, "November 1918: The German Revolution" (Oxford UP, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Was Weimar doomed from the outset? In November 1918: The German Revolution (Oxford University Press, 2020), Robert Gerwarth argues that this is the wrong question to ask. Forget 1929 and 1933, the ...

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Filip Slaveski, “The Soviet Occupation of Germany” (Cambridge UP, 2013) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

For over three years, from June 1941 to late 1944, the German Army and related Nazi forces (the SS, occupation troops, administrative organizations) conducted a Vernichtungskrieg–a war of annihilat...

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Stephan Talty, "The Good Assassin" (HMH, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

History that reads like a thriller; The Good Assassin: How A Mossad Agent and a Band of Survivors Hunted Down The Butcher of Latvia (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2020) by Stephan Talty is the untold ...

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Barry Rubin and Wolfgang G. Schwanitz, “Nazis, Islamists, and the Making of the Modern Middle East” (Yale UP, 2014) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

This book tells a remarkable and–to me at least–little known but very important story. In Nazis, Islamists, and the Making of the Modern Middle East(Yale UP, 2014), Barry Rubin and Wolfgang G. Schw...

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Hope M. Harrison, "After the Berlin Wall: Memory and the Making of the New Germany, 1989 to the Present" (Cambridge UP, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In her new book, After the Berlin Wall: Memory and the Making of the New Germany, 1989 to the Present (Cambridge University Press, 2019), Hope M. Harrison examines the history and meaning of the Be...

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Richard Weikart, “Hitler’s Ethic: The Nazi Pursuit of Evolutionary Progress” (Palgrave MacMillan, 2011) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

For many years now, historians have wondered whether Hitler had any sort of consistent ideology. His writings are rambling and confusing. His speeches are full of plain lies. His “table talk” refle...

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A Very Square Peg: A Podcast Series about Polymath Robert Eisler. Episode 4: Women’s Coats and Beach Cabanas from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In this episode, we examine the rivalry/friendship between Eisler and the great scholar of Jewish mysticism Gershom Scholem and reassess Eisler’s infamous meeting with Scholem and Walter Benjamin i...

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Nitzan Lebovic, “The Philosophy of Life and Death: Ludwig Klages and the Rise of a Nazi Biopolitics” (Palgrave, 2013) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Thomas Mann referred to Ludwig Klages (1872-1956) as a “criminal philosopher,” a “Pan-Germanist,” “an irrationalist,” a “Tarzan philosopher,” “a cultural pessimist… the voice of the world’s downfal...

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Theodor Adorno, "The Authoritarian Personality" (Verso, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

70 years ago, the philosopher Theodore Adorno and a team of scholars released a massive book titled The Authoritarian Personality (Verso, 2019), which attempted to map the psychological and emotion...

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H. Glenn Penny, “Kindred by Choice: Germans and American Indians since 1800” (UNC Press, 2013) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

If you have spent a bit of time in Germany or with German friends, you may have noticed the deep interest and affinity many Germans have for American Indians. What are the origins of this striking ...

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Oded Y. Steinberg, "Anglo-German Thought in the Victorian Era" (U Penn Press, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Oded Y. Steinberg (DPhil Oxford) is a fellow at the Center for the Study of Conversion and Inter-Religious Encounters,?Ben-Gurion University of the Negev. Next year (2020-21), Steinberg will begin ...

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Robert J. Richards, “Was Hitler a Darwinian?: Disputed Questions in the History of Evolutionary Theory” (University of Chicago Press, 2013) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In his new collection of wonderfully engaging and provocative set of essays on Darwin and Darwinians, Robert J. Richards explores the history of biology and so much more. The eight essays collected...

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Richard Carswell, "The Fall of France in the Second World War: History and Memory" (Palgrave Macmillan, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

This fascinating book by Richard Carswell looks at how the fall of France in the Second World War has been recorded by historians and remembered within French society. The Fall of France in the Sec...

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Gabriel Finkelstein, “Emil du Bois-Reymond: Neuroscience, Self, and Society in Nineteenth-Century Germany” (MIT Press, 2013) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

“A good wife and a healthy child are better for one’s temper than frogs.” For Gabriel Finkelstein, Emil du Bois-Reymond was “the most important forgotten intellectual of the nineteenth century.” M...

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A Very Square Peg: A Podcast Series about Polymath Robert Eisler. Episode 3: Eisler vs. the Flat Earth from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In this episode, we talk with Michael Gubser about the pioneering art historian Alois Riegl, one of Eisler’s teachers in Vienna and a major influence on his thought. Then we look at Eisler’s first ...

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Waitman Beorn, “Marching into Darkness: The Wehrmacht and the Holocaust in Belarus” (Harvard UP, 2013) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

The question of Wehrmacht complicity in the Holocaust is an old one. What might be called the “received view” until recently was that while a small number of German army units took part in anti-Jew...

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Gabriel Finder, "Justice behind the Iron Curtain: Nazis on Trial in Communist Poland" (U Toronto Press, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

When Americans think about trials of Holocaust perpetrators, they generally think of the Nuremberg Trials or the trial of Adolf Eichmann or perhaps of the Frankfort trials of perpetrators from Ausc...

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Todd H. Weir, “Monism: Science, Philosophy, Religion, and the History of a Worldview” (Palgrave, 2012) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

I always learn something when I interview authors, but in this chat with Todd H. Weir I learned something startling: I’m a monist. What is more, you may be a monist too and not even know it. Do yo...

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Minou Arjomand, "Staged: Show Trials, Political Theater, and the Aesthetics of Judgment" (Columbia UP, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In Staged: Show Trials, Political Theater, and the Aesthetics of Judgment (Columbia University Press, 2020), Minou Arjomand provides a startling account of the many intersections between theatre an...

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John Roth and Peter Hayes, “The Oxford Handbook of Holocaust Studies” (Oxford UP, 2010) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

We’ve talked before on the show about how hard it is to enter into the field of Holocaust Studies. Just six weeks ago, for instance, I talked with Dan Stone about his thoughtful work analyzing and ...

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A Very Square Peg: A Podcast Series about Polymath Robert Eisler. Episode 2: Value Theory from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In this episode (# 2), we discuss Eisler’s early years as a member of the Jewish bourgeoisie in turn-of-the-century Vienna with historian Steven Beller. We also hear from the closest living relativ...

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Karrin Hanshew, “Terror and Democracy in West Germany” (Cambridge UP, 2012) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In West Germany in September and October of 1977, a group of self-described urban guerrillas of the Red Army Faction (RAF) kidnapped industrialist Hanns Martin Schleyer. In exchange for Schleyer, t...

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John K. Roth, "Sources of Holocaust Insight: Learning and Teaching about the Genocide" (Cascade Books, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

At Newman I co-teach a class titled "The Holocaust and its Legacies." I teach the course with a Professor of Theology and it's designed to help students understand the ways in which the Holocaust s...

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Arnie Bernstein, “Swastika Nation: Fritz Kuhn and the Rise and Fall of the German-American Bund” (St. Martin’s Press, 2013) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Occasionally you hear shrill news reports about American Nazis. Judging by the pictures of them, they are almost always skin-headed morons who can’t put two words together (other than “Sieg Heil” o...

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Why Did the Allies Win World War One? from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

The Great War was perhaps the greatest single upheaval of the 20th century. While World War II saw more lives lost, in terms of the shock to European/Western civilization, the Great War was a more ...

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Jeff Bowersox, “Raising Germans in the Age of Empire: Youth and Colonial Culture, 1871-1914” (Oxford UP, 2013) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Germany embarked on the age of imperialism a bit later than other global powers, and the German experience of empire was much shorter-lived than that of Britain or France or Portugal. Nonetheless, ...

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Dan Stone, “Histories of the Holocaust” (Oxford UP, 2010) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

I don’t think it’s possible anymore for someone, even an academic with a specialty in the field, let alone an interested amateur, to read even a fraction of the literature written about the Holocau...

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Javier Samper Vendrell, "The Seduction of Youth: Print Culture and Homosexual Rights in the Weimar Republic" (U Toronto Press, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

The Weimar Republic is well-known for its gay rights movement and recent scholarship has demonstrated some of its contradictory elements. In his recent book entitled The Seduction of Youth: Print C...

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Guido Steinberg, “German Jihad: On the Internationalisation of Islamist Terrorism” (Columbia UP, 2013) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

I have read quite a few books on terrorism but always from an English language perspective. This has meant that I was missing the alternative stories from other nations. Guido Steinberg has done me...

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Brian Greene, "Until the End of Time: Mind, Matter, and Our Search for Meaning in an Evolving Universe" (Random House, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Brian Greene is a Professor of Mathematics and Physics at Columbia University in the City of New York, where he is the Director of the Institute for Strings, Cosmology, and Astroparticle Physics, a...

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Robert Gerwarth, “Hitler’s Hangman: The Life of Heydrich” (Yale UP, 2012) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Few history books sell better than biographies of Nazi leaders. They attract anyone even tangentially interested in World War Two or Nazi Germany. It’s not surprising, then, that there are dozens ...

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Eric Lee, "The Night of the Bayonets: The Texel Uprising and Hitler's Revenge, April–May 1945" (Greenhill Books, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Eric Lee's new book The Night of the Bayonets: The Texel Uprising and Hitler's Revenge, April–May 1945 (Greenhill Books, 2020) tells the story of the events leading up to the little-known revolt of...

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Alisha Rankin, “Panaceia’s Daughters: Noblewomen as Healers in Early Modern Germany” (U. Chicago Press, 2013) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Dorothea was a widow who treated Martin Luther, the Duke of Saxony, and throngs of poor peasants with her medicinal waters. Anna was the powerful wife of the Elector of Saxony who favored testing m...

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Brian Crim, "Planet Auschwitz: Holocaust Representation in Science Fiction and Horror Film and Television" (Rutgers UP, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In his new book, Planet Auschwitz: Holocaust Representation in Science Fiction and Horror Film and Television (Rutgers University Press, 2020), Brian Crim explores the diverse ways in which the Hol...

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Anne-Marie O’Connor, “The Lady in Gold: The Extraordinary Tale of Gustav Klimt’s Masterpiece, Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer” (Knopf, 2012) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Reporter Anne-Marie O’Connor uses the iconic gold portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer to engage us in the exciting cultural life of fin-de-siecle Vienna, where wealthy Jewish patrons supported the work o...

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Björn Krondorfer, "The Holocaust and Masculinities: Critical Inquiries into the Presence and Absence of Men" (SUNY Press, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In recent decades, scholarship has turned to the role of gender in the Holocaust, but rarely has it critically investigated the experiences of men as gendered beings. Beyond the clear observation t...

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Christopher Browning, “Remembering Survival: Inside a Nazi Slave Labor Camp” (W. W. Norton, 2010) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Christopher Browning is one of the giants in the field of Holocaust Studies. He has contributed vitally to at least two of the basic debates in the field: the intentionalist/functionalist discussio...

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Matthew Miller, "The German Epic in the Cold War: Peter Weiss, Uwe Johnson, and Alexander Kluge" (Northwestern UP, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In his new book, The German Epic in the Cold War: Peter Weiss, Uwe Johnson, and Alexander Kluge (Northwestern University Press, 2018), Matthew Miller explores the literary evolution of the modern e...

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Joy Wiltenburg, “Crime & Culture in Early Modern Germany” (University of Virginia Press, 2012) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Many people complain about sensationalism in the press. If a man slaughters his entire family, a jilted lover kills her erstwhile boyfriend, or a high school student murders several of his classmat...

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Leslie M. Harris, "Slavery and the University: Histories and Legacies" (U Georgia Press, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Slavery and the University: Histories and Legacies (University of Georgia Press, 2019), edited by Leslie M. Harris, James T. Campbell, and Alfred L. Brophy, is the first edited collection of schola...

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R. M. Douglas, “Orderly and Humane: The Expulsion of the Germans after the Second World War” (Yale UP, 2012) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

I imagine everyone who listens to this podcast knows about the Nazi effort to remake Central and Eastern Europe by expelling and murdering massive numbers of Slavs, Jews, and Gypsies. The results, ...

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David Kettler and Thomas Wheatland, "Learning From Franz L. Neumann" (Anthem Press, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Franz Neumann was a member of a generation that saw the end of the Kaiserreich and the beginnings of a democratic republic carried by the labor movement. In Neumann's case, this involved a practica...

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Donald Bloxham, “The Final Solution: A Genocide” (Oxford UP, 2009) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

The end of the Cold War dramatically changed research into the Holocaust. The gradual opening up of archives across Eastern Europe allowed a flood of local and regional studies that transformed our...

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Gavriel Rosenfeld, "The Fourth Reich: The Specter of Nazism from World War II to the Present" (Cambridge UP, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In his new book, The Fourth Reich: The Specter of Nazism from World War II to the Present (Cambridge University Press, 2019), Gavriel D. Rosenfeld reveals, for the first time, these postwar nightma...

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Mary Fulbrook, “A Small Near Town Auschwitz: Ordinary Nazis and the Holocaust” (Oxford UP, 2012) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

The question of how “ordinary Germans” managed to commit genocide is a classic (and troubling) one in modern historiography. It’s been well studied and so it’s hard to say anything new about it. Bu...

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Carole Fink, "West Germany and Israel: Foreign Relations, Domestic Politics and the Cold War" (Cambridge UP, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In her new book, West Germany and Israel: Foreign Relations, Domestic Politics and the Cold War (Cambridge University Press, 2019), Carole Fink examines the relationship between West Germany and Is...

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Marek Jan Chodakiewicz, “The Massacre in Jedwabne, July 10, 1941: Before, During, After” (Columbia UP, 2005) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

On July 10, 1941, Poles in the town of Jedwabne together with some number of German functionaries herded nearly 500 Jews into a barn and burnt them alive. In 2000, the sociologist Jan Gross publish...

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Alexander Watson, "The Fortress: The Siege of Przemysl and the Making of Europe's Bloodlands" (Basic Books, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

The opposing powers had already suffered casualties on a scale previously unimaginable by October 1914. On both the Western and Eastern fronts elaborate war plans lay in ruins and had been discarde...

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Astrid Eckert, “The Struggle for the Files: The Western Allies and the Return of German Archives after the Second World War” (Cambridge UP, 2012) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

At the end of World War II, the Western Allies seized pretty much every official German document they could find and moved the lot out of Germany and often overseas. They had, effectively, taken th...

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Peter Fritzsche, "Hitler's First Hundred Days: When Germans Embraced the Third Reich" (Basic Books, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

We've grown to understand in the past few weeks how worlds can change in just a few days. Peter Fritzsche's new book Hitler's First Hundred Days: When Germans Embraced the Third Reich (Basic Books,...

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Ben Shepherd, “Terror in the Balkans: German Armies and Partisan Warfare” (Harvard UP, 2012) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

With Terror in the Balkans: German Armies and Partisan Warfare (Harvard University Press, 2012), Ben Shepherd, a Reader at Glasgow Caledonian University, offers us insight into the complex and harr...

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Kevin O'Connor, "The House of Hemp and Butter: A History of Old Riga" (NIUP, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Latvia's elegant capital, Riga, is one of Europe's best-kept secrets. Strategically located on the Eastern Baltic coast at the mouth of the River Daugava, Riga was founded in the early 13th century...

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Denise Phillips, “Acolytes of Nature: Defining Natural Science in Germany, 1770-1850” (University of Chicago Press, 2012) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Denise Phillip’s meticulously researched and carefully argued new book deeply excavates a period in which many of the basic components that we take for granted as characterizing modern science were...

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Great Books: Amir Eshel on Paul Celan's Poetry from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Paul Celan's poetry marks the end of European modernism: he is the last poet of the era where the poetic "I" could center a subjective vision of the world through language. Celan bears witness to t...

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Richard Bessel, “Germany 1945: From War to Peace” (Harper, 2009) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

One chilling statistic relating to 1945 is that more German soldiers died in that January than in any other month of the war: 450,000. It was not just the military that suffered: refugees poured we...

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Matt Cook, "Sleight of Mind: 75 Ingenious Paradoxes in Mathematics, Physics, and Philosophy" (MIT Press, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Paradox is a sophisticated kind of magic trick. A magician's purpose is to create the appearance of impossibility, to pull a rabbit from an empty hat. Yet paradox doesn't require tangibles, like ra...

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Monica Black, “Death in Berlin: From Weimar to Divided Germany” (Cambridge UP, 2011) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Over 2.5 million Germans died as a result of World War I, or about 4% of the German population at the time. Somewhere between 7 and 9 million Germans died as a result of World War II, or between 8%...

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David Stahel, "Retreat from Moscow: A New History of Germany's Winter Campaign, 1941-1942" (FSG, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Germany’s winter campaign of 1941–1942 is commonly seen as the Wehrmacht's first defeat. In Retreat from Moscow: A New History of Germany's Winter Campaign, 1941-1942 (FSG, 2019), David Stahel argu...

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Jorg Muth, “Command Culture: Officer Education in the U.S. Army and the German Armed Forces, 1901-1940” (UNT Press, 2011) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

This week we’re continuing our focus on the Second World War, as our guest author, Jorg Muth, chats about his recent book Command Culture: Officer Education in the U.S. Army and the German Armed Fo...

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Steven Seegel, "Map Men: Transnational Lives and Deaths of Geographers in the Making of East Central Europe" (U Chicago Press, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Steven Seegel’s Map Men: Transnational Lives and Deaths of Geographers in the Making of East Central Europe (University of Chicago Press, 2018) is an insightful contribution to the history of map m...

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David Stahel, “Operation Barbarossa and Germany’s Defeat in the East” (Cambridge UP, 2009) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

This week’s podcast is an interview with David Stahel. I will be talking to him about his 2009 work, Operation Barbarossa and Germany’s Defeat in the East (Cambridge University Press, 2009). One of...

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Mathias Haeussler, "Helmut Schmidt and British-German Relations: A European Misunderstanding" (Cambridge UP, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

The former West German chancellor Helmut Schmidt grew up as a devout Anglophile, yet he clashed heavily and repeatedly with his British counterparts Wilson, Callaghan, and Thatcher during his time ...

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Gerald Steinacher, “Nazis on the Run: How Hitler’s Henchmen Fled Justice” (Oxford UP, 2011) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

When I was a kid I loved movies about Nazis who had escaped justice after the war. There was “The Marathon Man” (“Oh, don’t worry. I’m not going into that cavity. That nerve’s already dying.”). The...

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Melissa Kravetz, "Women Doctors in Weimar and Nazi Germany: Maternalism, Eugenics and Professional Identity" (U Toronto Press, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In her new book, Women Doctors in Weimar and Nazi Germany: Maternalism, Eugenics and Professional Identity (University of Toronto Press, 2019), Melissa Kravetz examines how German women physicians ...

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David Ciarlo, “Advertising Empire: Race and Visual Culture in Imperial Germany” (Harvard UP, 2011) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

If you’re a native-born American, you’re probably familiar with Aunt Jemima (pancake syrup), Uncle Ben (precooked rice), and Rastus (oatmeal)–commercial icons all. They were co-oped in whole or par...

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Paul Hanebrink, "A Specter Haunting Europe: The Myth of Judeo-Bolshevism" (Harvard UP, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In A Specter Haunting Europe: The Myth of Judeo-Bolshevism (Harvard University Press, 2018), Paul Hanebrink, Professor of History and Jewish Studies at Rutgers University, traces the complex histor...

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Annette Timm, “The Politics of Fertility in Twentieth-Century Berlin” (Cambridge UP, 2010) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Many of us know that Nazi regime tried to control Germans’ fertility: some people should reproduce more, according to the National Socialists, and some should reproduce less or not at all. Policies...

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Michael O’Sullivan, "Disruptive Power: Catholic Women, Miracles, and Politics in Modern Germany, 1918-1965" (U Toronto Press, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

How did Catholic mysticism shape politics and religion in 20th-century Germany? What do seers, stigmatics, and Marian apparitions reveal about broader cultural trends? Michael O’Sullivan’s award wi...

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Ronald Reng, “A Life Too Short: The Tragedy of Robert Enke” (Yellow Jersey Press, 2011) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

On November 10, 2009, Robert Enke stepped in front of an express train at a crossing in the German village of Eilvese. At age 32, Robert left behind a young family: he and his wife, Teresa, had jus...

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The Origins of World War One from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Who or what originated and/or caused the Great War from breaking out in July 1914? Was it Serbia with its expansionist and aggressive designs on Austria-Hungary? Was it Austria-Hungary itself, unne...

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Timothy Nunan, “Carl Schmitt, ‘Writings on War'” (Polity Press, 2011) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Carl Schmitt (1888-1985) was the author of numerous influential books and essays on political theory, law, and other subjects. In Carl Schmitt: Writings on War (Polity Press, 2011), Rhodes Scholar ...

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Steve Vogel, "Betrayal in Berlin: The True Story of the Cold War's Most Audacious Espionage Operation" (Custom House, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In his new book Betrayal in Berlin: The True Story of the Cold War's Most Audacious Espionage Operation (Custom House, 2019), Steve Vogel tells the astonishing true story of the Berlin Tunnel, one ...

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Edith Sheffer, “Burned Bridge: How East and West Germans Made the Iron Curtain” (Oxford UP, 2011) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

If Edith Sheffer‘s excellent Burned Bridge: How East and West Germans Made the Iron Curtain (Oxford UP, 2011) has a single lesson, it’s that dividing a country is not as easy as you might think. Yo...

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Steven Ross and Wolf Gruner, "New Perspectives on Krystallnacht" (Purdue UP, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

It's possible to organize a 20th-century German history course around the date 9 November. In 1918, Phillipp Schedemann proclaimed the creation of a new German Republic. In 1989, 9 November saw the...

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Kay Schiller and Christopher Young, “The 1972 Munich Olympics and the Making of Modern Germany” (University of California Press, 2010) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

This past summer Germany hosted the 2011 FIFA Women’s World Cup. The 32 matches drew more than 800,000 fans, while the total number of foreign tourists visiting Germany increased by nine per cent o...

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Aimee Fox, "Learning to Fight: Military Innovation and Change in the British Army, 1914-1918" (Cambridge UP, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Learning, innovation and adaptation are not concepts that we necessarily associate with the British Army of the First World War. Yet the need to learn from mistakes, to exploit new opportunities an...

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Elizabeth Heineman, “Before Porn Was Legal: The Erotica Empire of Beate Uhse” (University of Chicago Press, 2011) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

When I was in college in the 1980s, I liked to listen to Iggy Pop (aka James Newell Osterberg, Jr.). I was always mystified, however, by his song “Five Foot One,” with its odd and catchy refrain “I...

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Richard Polt, "Time and Trauma: Thinking Through Heidegger in the Thirties" (Rowman and Littlefield, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

For some time, the German philosopher Martin Heidegger has been treated with a certain level of skepticism because of his engagement with the Nazi party, a skepticism that has resurfaced with the p...

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Konrad H. Jarausch, “Reluctant Accomplice: A Wehrmacht Soldier’s Letters from the Eastern Front” (Princeton University Press, 2011) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Konrad H. Jarausch, whose varied and important works on German history have been required reading for scholars for several decades, has published Reluctant Accomplice: A Wehrmacht Soldier’s Letters...

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Kathy Peiss, "The Information Hunters" (Oxford UP, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

While armies have seized enemy records and rare texts as booty throughout history, it was only during World War II that an unlikely band of librarians, archivists, and scholars traveled abroad to c...

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Christopher Krebs, “A Most Dangerous Book: Tacitus’s Germania from the Roman Empire to the Third Reich” (Norton, 2011) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Being a historian is a bit of a slog: years in graduate school, more years in dusty libraries and archives, and even more years teaching students who sometimes don’t seem interested in learning wha...

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Phillipa Chong, “Inside the Critics’ Circle: Book Reviewing in Uncertain Times” (Princeton UP, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

How does the world of book reviews work? In Inside the Critics’ Circle: Book Reviewing in Uncertain Times (Princeton University Press, 2020), Phillipa Chong, assistant professor in sociology at McM...

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Matthias Strohn, “The German Army and the Defense of the Reich: Military Doctrine and the Conduct of the Defensive Battle, 1918-1939” (Cambridge UP, 2011) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Matthias Strohn‘s The German Army and the Defense of the Reich: Military Doctrine and the Conduct of the Defensive Battle, 1918-1939 (Cambridge University Press, 2011) is an important challenge to ...

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Alex J. Kay and David Stahel, "Mass Violence in Nazi-Occupied Europe" (Indiana UP, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Alex J. Kay (senior lecture of History at Potsdam University in Berlin) and David Stahel (senior lecturer in History at the University of New South Wales in Canberra) have edited a groundbreaking s...

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Jonathan Steinberg, “Bismarck: A Life” (Oxford UP, 2011) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

What is the role of personality in shaping history? Shortly before the beginning of the First World War, the German sociologist Max Weber puzzled over this question. He was sure that there was a ki...

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K. Linder et al., "Going Alt-Ac: A Guide to Alternative Academic Careers" (Stylus Publishing, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

If you’re a grad student facing the ugly reality of finding a tenure-track job, you could easily be forgiven for thinking about a career change. However, if you’ve spent the last several years work...

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Robert Citino, “Death of the Wehrmacht: The German Campaigns of 1942” (UP of Kansas, 2007) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Robert Citino is one of a handful of scholars working in German military history whose books I would describe as reliably rewarding. Even when one quibbles with some of the details of his argument,...

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Wulf Gruner, "The Holocaust in Bohemia and Moravia: Czech Initiatives, German Policies, Jewish Responses" (Berghahn Books, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Holocaust research tends to concentrate on certain geographic regions. We know much about the Holocaust in Poland, Germany and Western Europe. We are learning more and more about the 'Holocaust by ...

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Erik Jensen, “Body by Weimar: Athletes, Gender, and German Modernity” (Oxford UP, 2010) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Here’s a simple–or should we say simplistic?–line of political reasoning: communities are made of people; people can either be sick or healthy; communities, therefore, are sick or healthy depending...

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Astrid M. Eckert, "West Germany and the Iron Curtain: Environment, Economy, and Culture in the Borderlands" (Oxford UP, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

How did the Iron Curtain shape the Federal Republic of Germany? How did the internal border become a proving ground for rival ideologies? West Germany and the Iron Curtain: Environment, Economy, an...

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Hans Kundnani, “Utopia or Auschwitz: Germany’s 1968 Generation and the Holocaust” (Columbia UP, 2010) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

It’s pretty common in American political discourse to call someone a “fascist.” Everyone knows, however, that this is just name-calling: supposed fascists are never really fascists–they are just pe...

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Lori Gemeiner-Bihler, "Cities of Refuge: German Jews in London and New York, 1935-1945" (SUNY Press, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In the years following Hitler’s rise to power, German Jews faced increasingly restrictive antisemitic laws, and many responded by fleeing to more tolerant countries. Cities of Refuge: German Jews i...

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Catherine Epstein, “Model Nazi: Arthur Greiser and the Occupation of Western Poland” (Oxford UP, 2010) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

The term “totalitarian” is useful as it well describes the aspirations of polities such as Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union (at least under Stalin). Yet it can also be misleading, for it suggests ...

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Tobias Boes, "Thomas Mann's War: Literature, Politics, and the World Republic of Letters" (Cornell UP, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In Thomas Mann's War: Literature, Politics, and the World Republic of Letters (Cornell University Press, 2019), Tobias Boes traces how the acclaimed and bestselling author became one of America's m...

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Thomas Weber, “Hitler’s First War: Adolf Hitler, the Men of the List Regiment, and the First World War” (Oxford UP, 2010) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Here’s something interesting. If you search Google Books for “Hitler,” you’ll get 3,090,000 results. What’s that mean? Well, it means that more scholarly attention has probably been paid to Hitler ...

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Graham T. Clews, "Churchill’s Phoney War: A Study in Folly and Frustration" (Naval Institute Press, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Given the overwhelming amount of books printed in the past ten years on various (usually rather obscure) aspects of Sir Winston Churchill’s glorious career, it is of great interest that so little h...

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Joe Maiolo, “Cry Havoc: How the Arms Race Drove the World to War, 1931-1941” (Basic Books, 2010) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In Cry Havoc: How the Arms Race Drove the World to War, 1931-1941 (Basic Books, 2010), Joe Maiolo proposes (I want to write “demonstrates,” but please read the book and judge for yourself) two rema...

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Sarah Wobick-Segev, "Homes Away from Home: Jewish Belonging in 20th-Century Paris, Berlin, and St. Petersburg" (Stanford UP, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In pre-emancipation Europe, most Jews followed Jewish law most of the time, but by the turn of the twentieth century, a new secular Jewish identity had begun to take shape. How did Jews go from liv...

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Valerie Hebert, “Hitler’s Generals on Trial: The Last War Crimes Tribunal at Nuremberg” (University Press of Kansas, 2010) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Clausewitz famously said war was the “continuation of politics by other means.” Had he been unfortunate enough to witness the way the Wehrmacht fought on the Eastern Front in World War II, he might...

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Brendan Simms, "Hitler: A Global Biography" (Basic Books, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Every generation returns to the titanic heroes and villains of the 20th century. And every generation produces a new set of biographies--often immense--in an effort to understand the role of that e...

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Gary Bruce, “The Firm: The Inside Story of the Stasi” (Oxford UP, 2010) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

I have a good friend who grew up in East Germany in the bad old days. The East German authorities suspected that her family would try to immigrate to the West (which they did), so they naturally to...

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Frederick Beiser, "Hermann Cohen: An Intellectual Biography" (Oxford UP, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

The eminent scholar of Neo-Kantianism, Frederick Beiser, has struck again, this time bringing his considerable analytical powers and erudition to the task of intellectual biography. For those of yo...

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Andrew Donson, “Youth in the Fatherless Land: War Pedagogy, Nationalism, and Authority in Germany, 1914-1918” (Harvard UP, 2010) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

I was a little kid during the Vietnam War. It was on the news all the time, and besides my uncle was fighting there. I followed it closely, or as closely as a little kid can. I never thought for a ...

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Christopher A. Molnar, "Memory, Politics, and Yugoslav Migrations to Postwar Germany" (Indiana UP, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

During Europe’s 2015 refugee crisis, more than a hundred thousand asylum seekers from the western Balkans sought refuge in Germany. This was nothing new, however; immigrants from the Balkans have s...

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Hilary Earl, “The Nuremberg SS-Einsatzgruppen Trial, 1945-1958: Atrocity, Law, and History” (Cambridge UP, 2010) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Hitler caused the Holocaust, that much we know (no Hitler, no Holocaust). But did he directly order it and, if so, how and when? This is one of the many interesting questions posed by Hilary Earl i...

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The Treaty of Versailles One Hundred Years On from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

The Versailles Treaty of 1919, celebrates its one-hundred anniversary this year. And, yet unlike the more recent centenaries, such as that of the outbreak of the Great War or the Russian Revolution...

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Alan E. Steinweis, “Kristallnacht 1938” (Harvard UP, 2009) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

One of the most fundamental–and vexing–questions in all of modern history is whether cultures make governments or governments make cultures. Tocqueville, who was right about almost everything, thou...

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April Eisman, "Bernhard Heisig and the Fight for Modern Art in East Germany" (Camden House, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In her book, Bernhard Heisig and the Fight for Modern Art in East Germany (Camden House, 2018), April Eisman examines one of East Germany's most successful artists as a point of entry into the vibr...

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Michaela Hoenicke, “Know Your Enemy: American Debate on Nazism, 1933-1945” (Cambridge UP, 2009) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

To Americans, Hitler et al. were a confusing bunch. The National Socialists were Germans, and Germans had a reputation for refinement, industry, and order. After all, many Americans were of German ...

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Thomas Kühne, "The Rise and Fall of Comradeship: Hitler’s Soldiers, Male Bonding and Mass Violence in the Twentieth Century" (Cambridge UP, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In The Rise and Fall of Comradeship: Hitler’s Soldiers, Male Bonding and Mass Violence in the Twentieth Century (Cambridge University Press, 2017), Professor Thomas Kühne writes an innovative accou...

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Stevan Allen, “Roaming Ghostland: The Final Days of East Germany” (Xlibris, 2010) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

We like to think of countries as permanent fixtures. They aren’t. They come and go. In 1989, a place called the Deutsche Demokratische Republik, or East Germany, was going. It was never really an “...

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Jelena Suboti?, "Yellow Star, Red Star: Holocaust Remembrance after Communism" (Cornell UP, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In her new book Yellow Star, Red Star: Holocaust Remembrance after Communism (Cornell University Press, 2019) Jelena Suboti? asks why Holocaust memory continues to be so deeply troubled?ignored, ap...

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Peter Fritzsche, “Life and Death in the Third Reich” (Harvard UP, 2008) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Germans and Nazis. They were different things, right? I mean some Germans were members of the Party and believed all it said and some were not and believed none of what it said. True enough, but ac...

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Chet Van Duzer, "Martin Waldseemüller’s 'Carta marina' of 1516: Study and Transcription of the Long Legends" (Springer, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Chet Van Duzer's new book Martin Waldseemüller’s 'Carta marina' of 1516: Study and Transcription of the Long Legends (Springer, 2019), presents the first detailed study of one of the most important...

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Alexander Watson, “Enduring the Great War: Combat, Morale and Collapse in the German and British Armies, 1914-1918” (Cambridge UP, 2008) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

It’s a question I’ve long asked myself: Why and how did common soldiers fight for so long in the First World War? The conditions were awful, death was all around, and there was no real hope of a “b...

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Alberto Cairo, "How Charts Lie: Getting Smarter about Visual Information" (Norton, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

We’ve all heard that a picture is worth a thousand words, but what if we don’t understand what we’re looking at? Social media has made charts, infographics, and diagrams ubiquitous?and easier to sh...

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Giles MacDonogh, “After the Reich: The Brutal History of the Allied Occupation” (Basic Books, 2007) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Many years ago I had the opportunity to spend a summer in Germany, more specifically in a tiny town on the Rhine near Koblenz. The family I stayed with looked for all the world like typical Rhinela...

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Robert Gellately, “Lenin, Stalin, and Hitler: The Age of Social Catastrophe” (Knopf, 2007) from 2008-04-18T19:33:10

Today we’re pleased to feature an interview with Robert Gellately of Florida State University. Professor Gellately is a distinguished and widely read historian of Germany, with a particular focus o...

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Robert Gellately, “Lenin, Stalin, and Hitler: The Age of Social Catastrophe” (Knopf, 2007) from 2008-04-18T19:33:10

Today we’re pleased to feature an interview with Robert Gellately of Florida State University. Professor Gellately is a distinguished and widely read historian of Germany, with a particular focus o...

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Podcasts by New Books in German Studies

All episodes

On Hans Blumenberg's "The Legitimacy of the Modern Age" from 2022-12-09T13:00

On Sigmund Freud's "Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality" from 2022-11-18T09:00

On Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel's "Elements of the Philosophy of Right" from 2022-11-11T09:00

On "Grimms' Fairytales" from 2022-11-02T08:00

On Thomas Mann's "The Magic Mountain" from 2022-11-01T08:00

On Franz Kafka's "The Trial" from 2022-10-27T08:00

On Immanuel Kant's "Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals" from 2022-10-17T08:00

On Hannah Arendt's "Origins of Totalitarianism" from 2022-10-11T08:00

On Johann Wolfgang von Goethe's "Faust" from 2022-10-05T08:00

On Immanuel Kant's "Critique of Pure Reason" from 2022-09-07T08:00

On Johann Friedrich von Schiller’s "Letters on the Aesthetic Education of Man" from 2022-08-31T08:00

On Johann Friedrich von Schiller’s "Letters on the Aesthetic Education of Man" from 2022-08-31T08:00

Kiran Klaus Patel, "Project Europe: A History" (Cambridge UP, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Claudia Moscovici, "Holocaust Memories: A Survey of Holocaust Memoirs, Histories, Novels, and Films" (Hamilton, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Tony Michels, “Fire in their Hearts: Yiddish Socialists in New York” (Harvard UP, 2005) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Douglas Morris, "Legal Sabotage: Ernst Fraenkel in Hitler's Germany" (Cambridge UP, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Philipp Stelzel, "History after Hitler: A Transatlantic Enterprise" (U Penn Press, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Samuel Kassow, “Who Will Write Our History? Emanuel Ringelblum, the Warsaw Ghetto, and the Oyneg Shabes Archive” (Indiana UP, 2007) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Kaius Tuori, "Empire of Law: Nazi Germany, Exile Scholars and the Battle for the Future of Europe" (Cambridge UP, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Laura K. T. Stokes, "Fanny Hensel: A Research and Information Guide" (Routledge, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Mark Mazower, “Hitler’s Empire: Nazi Rule in Occupied Europe” (Penguin, 2008) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

C. Browning, P. Hayes, R. Hilberg, "German Railroads, Jewish Souls" (Berghahn Books, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Robert Gellately, “Lenin, Stalin, and Hitler: The Age of Social Catastrophe” (Knopf, 2007) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Appeasement Eighty Years On from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Daniel Reynolds, "Postcards from Auschwitz: Holocaust Tourism and the Meaning of Remembrance" (NYU Press, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Han F. Vermeulen, "Before Boas: The Genesis of Ethnography and Ethnology in the German Enlightenment" (U Nebraska Press, 2015) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Paul Mendes-Flohr, "Martin Buber: A Life of Faith and Dissent" (Yale UP, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Iain MacGregor, "Checkpoint Charlie: The Cold War, The Berlin Wall, and the Most Dangerous Place On Earth" (Scribner, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Carlo Bonomi, "The Cut and the Building of Psychoanalysis, Vol. I," (Routledge, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Susan Neiman, “Learning from the Germans: Race and the Memory of Evil” (FSG, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Kathryn Conrad on University Press Publishing from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Amy Carney, "Marriage and Fatherhood in the Nazi SS" (Toronto UP, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

J. Neuhaus, "Geeky Pedagogy: A Guide for Intellectuals, Introverts, and Nerds Who Want to Be Effective Teachers" (West Virginia UP, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Ricky W. Law, "Transnational Nazism: Ideology and Culture in German Japanese Relations, 1919-1936" (Cambridge UP, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Yael Almog, "Secularism and Hermeneutics" (U Pennsylvania Press, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Brittany Lehman, "Teaching Migrant Children in West Germany and Europe, 1945-1992" (Palgrave Macmillan, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Christopher E. Mauriello, "Forced Confrontations: The Politics of Dead Bodies in Germany at the End of World War II" (Lexington Books, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Mark Roseman, "Lives Reclaimed: A Story of Rescue and Resistance in Nazi Germany" (Metropolitan Books, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Jasper Heinzen, "Making Prussians, Raising Germans: A Cultural History of Prussian State-Building after Civil War, 1866-1935" (Cambridge UP, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Alex J. Kay, "The Making of an SS Killer: the Life of Colonel Alfred Filbert, 1905-1990" (Cambridge UP, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Chiara Russo Krauss, "Wundt, Avenarius and Scientific Psychology: A Debate at the Turn of the Twentieth Century" (Palgrave MacMillan, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Evgeny Finkel, "Ordinary Jews: Choice and Survival during the Holocaust" (Princeton UP, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Danny Orbach, "Plots Against Hitler" (Eamon Dolan/HMH, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Stephen Alan Bourque, "Beyond the Beach: The Allied War Against France" (Naval Institute Press, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Andrew Wright Hurley, "Ludwig Leichhardt’s Ghosts: The Strange Career of a Traveling Myth" (Camden House, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Elizabeth Otto, "Haunted Bauhaus: Occult Spirituality, Gender Fluidity, Queer Identities, and Radical Politics" (MIT Press, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Katharina Karcher, "Sisters in Arms: Militant Feminisms in the Federal Republic of Germany since 1968" (Berghahn, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Elizabeth R. Baer, "The Genocidal Gaze: From German Southwest Africa to the Third Reich" (Wayne State UP, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Carina L. Johnson, "Archeologies of Confession: Writing the German Reformation, 1517-2017" (Berghahn, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Reinhart Kössler, "Namibia and Germany: Negotiating the Past" (U Namibia Press, 2015) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Peter E. Gordon, "Migrants in the Profane: Critical Theory and the Question of Secularization" (Yale UP, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Caroline Boggis-Rolfe, "The Baltic Story: A Thousand Year History of Its Lands, Sea, and Peoples" (Amberley, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Sara J. Brenneis and Gina Herrmann, "Spain, the Second World War, and the Holocaust: History and Representation" (U Toronto Press, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Tiffany Florvil and Vanessa Plumly, "Rethinking Black German Studies: Approaches, Interventions, and Histories" (Peter Lang, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Lenny A. Ureña Valerio, "Colonial Fantasies, Imperial Realities: Race Science and the Making of Polishness on the Fringes of the German Empire, 1840-1920" (Ohio UP, 2019 from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Tim Bouverie, "Appeasement: Chamberlain, Hitler, Churchill and the Road to War" (Tim Duggan Books, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

L. Hilton and A. Patt, "Understanding and Teaching the Holocaust" (U Wisconsin Press, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Tobias Straumann, "1931: Debt, Crisis, and the Rise of Hitler" (Oxford UP, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Carol Rittner and John K. Roth, "Advancing Holocaust Studies" (Routledge, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Kristen Ghodsee, "Red Hangover: Legacies of Twentieth-Century Communism" (Duke UP, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Jesse Spohnholz, "The Convent of Wesel: The Event that Never was and the Invention of Tradition" (Cambridge UP, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Jeffrey T. Zalar, "Reading and Rebellion in Catholic Germany, 1770-1914" (Cambridge UP, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Leslie Waters, "Borders on the Move: Territorial Change and Forced Migration in the Hungarian-Slovak Borderlands, 1938-1948" (U Rochester Press, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Kara Ritzheimer, "'Trash,' Censorship, and National Identity in Early Twentieth-Century Germany" (Cambridge UP, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Anna Hájková, "The Last Ghetto: An Everyday History of Theresienstadt" (Oxford UP, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Heidi Tworek, "News from Germany: The Competition to Control World Communications, 1900-1945" (Harvard UP, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Monika Black, "A Demon-Haunted Land: Witches, Wonder Doctors, and the Ghosts of the Past in Post–WWII Germany" (Metropolitan, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

E. Douglas Bomberger, "Making Music American: 1917 and the Transformation of Culture" (Oxford UP, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Cathal J. Nolan, "The Allure of Battle: A History of How Wars Have Been Won and Lost" (Oxford UP, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Heike Bauer, "The Hirschfeld Archives: Violence, Death, and Modern Queer Culture" (Temple UP, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Jeremy Black, "The World at War, 1914-1945" (Rowman and Littlefield, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Stephen Fritz, "The First Soldier: Hitler as a Military Leader" (Yale UP, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Clayton Whisnant, "Queer Identities and Politics in Germany: A History, 1880-1945" (Harrington Park Press, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Henning Pieper, "Fegelein’s Horsemen and Genocidal Warfare: The SS Cavalry Brigade in the Soviet Union" (Palgrave Macmillan, 2015) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Christian Goeschel, "Mussolini and Hitler: The Forging of the Fascist Alliance" (Yale UP, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Discussion of Massive Online Peer Review and Open Access Publishing from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Jennifer Ronyak, "Intimacy, Performance, and the Lied in the Early Nineteenth Century" (Indiana UP, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Geraldine Heng, "The Invention of Race in the European Middle Ages" (Cambridge UP, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393