Berlin is home to Europe’s largest Palestinian diaspora community and one of the world’s largest Israeli diaspora communities. Germany’s guilt about the Nazi Holocaust has led to a public disavowal of anti-Semitism and strong support for the Israeli state. Meanwhile, Palestinians in Berlin report experiencing increasing levels of racism and Islamophobia. In The Moral Triangle: Germans, Israelis, Palestinians (Duke University Press, 2020), Sa’ed Atshan and Katharina Galor draw on ethnographic fie...
Dec 17, 2021•57 min•Ep. 132
NB: This interview contains material about wartime experiences that may be upsetting to some listeners. When Alex Panasenko was born in 1933, his native Ukraine was devastated by Stalin’s program of mass starvation; millions were murdered and, soon after, millions more removed in Stalin’s Great Purge. In 1941, when Panasenko was eight years old, Hitler’s Wehrmacht invaded and he was deported with his family for slave labor. As the tide turned against the Nazis, Panasenko, now separated from his ...
Dec 16, 2021•53 min•Ep. 1120
Most of us think we know the story of Bambi—but do we? The Original Bambi: The Story of a Life in the Forest (Princeton UP, 2022) is an all-new, illustrated translation of a literary classic that presents the story as it was meant to be told. For decades, readers’ images of Bambi have been shaped by the 1942 Walt Disney film—an idealized look at a fawn who represents nature’s innocence—which was based on a 1928 English translation of a novel by the Austrian Jewish writer Felix Salten. This maste...
Dec 15, 2021•40 min•Ep. 20
Three Cities After Hitler: Redemptive Reconstruction Across Cold War Borders (U Pittsburgh Press, 2021) compares how three prewar German cities shared decades of postwar development under three competing post-Nazi regimes: Frankfurt in capitalist West Germany, Leipzig in communist East Germany, and Wrocław (formerly Breslau) in communist Poland. Each city was rebuilt according to two intertwined modern trends. First, certain local edifices were chosen to be resurrected as “sacred sites” to redee...
Dec 14, 2021•44 min•Ep. 140
How do terror and popularity merge under a dictatorship? How did the Gestapo deal with critics of Nazism? Based on hundreds of secret police case files, Enemies of the People explores the day-to-day reality of political policing under Hitler. Examining the Gestapo's policy of 'selective enforcement', J. Ryan Stackhouse challenges the abiding perception of the Gestapo as policing exclusively through terror. Instead, he reveals the complex system of enforcement that defined the relationship betwee...
Dec 07, 2021•1 hr 3 min•Ep. 118
The Enlightenment is often either praised as the wellspring of modern egalitarianism or condemned as the cradle of scientific racism. How should we make sense of this paradox? The Color of Equality: Race and Common Humanity in Enlightenment Thought (U Pennsylvania Press, 2021) is the first book to investigate both the inclusive language of common humanity and the hierarchical language of race in Enlightenment thought, seeking to understand how eighteenth-century thinkers themselves made sense of...
Dec 02, 2021•1 hr 13 min•Ep. 128
Before Billy Wilder became the screenwriter and director of iconic films like Sunset Boulevard and Some Like It Hot, he worked as a freelance reporter, first in Vienna and then in Weimar Berlin. Billy Wilder on Assignment: Dispatches from Weimar Berlin and Interwar Vienna (Princeton UP, 2021) brings together more than fifty articles, translated into English for the first time, that Wilder (then known as Billie) published in magazines and newspapers between September 1925 and November 1930. From ...
Dec 01, 2021•50 min•Ep. 29
This volume explores a core medieval myth, the tale of an Arthurian knight called Wigalois, and the ways it connects the Yiddish-speaking Jews and the German-speaking non-Jews of the Holy Roman Empire. The German Wigalois / Viduvilt adaptations grow from a multistage process: a German text adapted into Yiddish adapted into German, creating adaptations actively shaped by a minority culture within a majority culture. The Knight Without Boundaries: Yiddish and German Arthurian Wigalois Adaptations ...
Nov 26, 2021•57 min•Ep. 116
Nazis of Copley Square: The Forgotten Story of the Christian Front (Harvard UP, 2021) by Charles R. Gallagher, S.J., traces the machinations of far-right Catholic thinkers and activists in the US during the outbreak of the Second World War. The work highlights New York City and Boston as flashpoints of paramilitary Putsch plans and foreign espionage that radiated out from the Christian Front organization. The book strongly intervenes in numerous historiographies, complicating progressivist narra...
Nov 23, 2021•55 min•Ep. 115
Despite all the attention paid to the two world wars of the twentieth century, not a great deal of historical fiction focuses on the period that preceded them. Dana Mack’s debut novel, All Things That Deserve to Perish, is an exception. Through its depictions of Berlin high society, the Junkers from the agricultural estates of old Prussia, and interfaith marriages, the novel explores the fraught transition to a modern, commercial economy that simultaneously promoted and complicated relations bet...
Nov 22, 2021•42 min•Ep. 130
Charlie Louth’s illuminating recent book, Rilke: The Life of the Work (Oxford University Press, 2021) examines why Rilke’s poems have exercised such preternatural attraction for now several generations of readers. The early 20th century German-language poet captured the experience of European culture irrevocably lurching into modernity, where an entire continent was forced to trade in its untenable and ultimately fantastically unrealistic Romantic worldview for the sober realization that humans ...
Nov 19, 2021•1 hr 5 min•Ep. 119
The Second Battle of El-Alamein, alongside Stalingrad and Midway, is taught in schools the world over as one of the turning points of the Second World War—or, depending on who you talk to, the turning point. But what led to that battle? How did Rommel’s army push so far across North Africa? And why, perchance, did he push one time too many? What were those in Egypt and the Middle East—and not just their British overseers, thinking about the coming invasion. War of Shadows: Codebreakers, Spies, a...
Nov 11, 2021•45 min•Ep. 56
When East Germany collapsed in 1989-1990, outside observers were shocked to learn the extent of environmental devastation that existed there. The communist dictatorship, however, had sought to confront environmental issues since at least the 1960s. Through an analysis of official and oppositional sources, Saving Nature Under Socialism: Transnational Environmentalism in East Germany, 1968-1990 (Cambridge UP, 2021) complicates attitudes toward the environment in East Germany by tracing both domest...
Nov 09, 2021•55 min•Ep. 134
Today we talk to Vincent Evener of United Theological Seminary about his new book, Enemies of the Cross: Suffering, Truth, and Mysticism in the Early Reformation (Oxford UP, 2020). Enemies of the Cross examines how suffering and truth were aligned in the divisive debates of the early Reformation. Vincent Evener explores how Martin Luther, along with his first intra-Reformation critics, offered "true" suffering as a crucible that would allow believers to distinguish the truth or falsehood of doct...
Nov 08, 2021•1 hr 2 min•Ep. 1096
Jan Rybak's Everyday Zionism in East-Central Europe: Nation-Building in War and Revolution, 1914-1920 (Oxford UP, 2021) examines Zionist activism in East-Central Europe during the years of war, occupation, revolution, the collapse of empires, and the formation of nation states in the years 1914 to 1920. Against the backdrop of the Great War—its brutal aftermath and consequent violence—the day-to-day encounters between Zionist activists and the Jewish communities in the region gave the movement c...
Nov 02, 2021•1 hr 21 min•Ep. 248
During the mid-19th century, the works of Arthur Schopenhauer and Richard Wagner sparked an impulse toward German cultural renewal and social change that drew on religious myth, metaphysics, and spiritualism. The only problem was that their works were deeply antisemitic and entangled with claims that Jews were incapable of creating compassionate art. By looking at the works of Jewish composers and writers who contributed to a lively and robust biblical theatre in fin de siècle Vienna, Caroline A...
Oct 26, 2021•52 min•Ep. 114
Kant, Applied is based on an in-depth filmed conversation between Howard Burton and Onora O’Neill, Emeritus Professor of Philosophy at the University of Cambridge and a crossbench member of the House of Lords. After intriguing insights into Onora O’Neill’s path to becoming a Kant scholar, this wide-ranging conversation explores how Kant’s philosophy is relevant for many thorny issues in our contemporary social world, from human rights to patient consent to corporate transparency and more. Howard...
Oct 15, 2021•1 hr 32 min•Ep. 70
The rapprochement between Germany and Israel in the aftermath of the Holocaust is one of the most striking political developments of the twentieth century. German Chancellor Angela Merkel recently referred to it as a 'miracle'. But how did this 'miracle' come about? In this book, Lorena De Vita traces the contradictions and dilemmas that shaped the making of German-Israeli relations at the outset of the global Cold War. Examining well known events like the Suez Crisis, the Eichmann Trial, and th...
Oct 07, 2021•1 hr 18 min•Ep. 5
Revenants of the German Empire: Colonial Germans, Imperialism, and the League of Nations (Oxford UP, 2019) reveals the various ways in which Colonial Germans attempted to cope with the loss of the German colonies after the Treaty of Versailles in 1919. These Kolonialdeutsche (Colonial Germans) had invested substantial time and money in German imperialism. German men and women from the former African colonies exploited any opportunities they could to recover, renovate and market their understandi...
Oct 06, 2021•1 hr 1 min•Ep. 113
What claims could Jewish veterans make on the Nazi state by virtue of their having fought for Germany? How often did Germans treat Jewish veterans differently from Jewish men without military experience during the Weimar and Nazi periods? How did perceptions of masculinity and of Germanness intersect to shape attitudes and behaviors of Jewish veterans? Michael Geheran's wonderful new book Comrades Betrayed: Jewish World War I Veterans under Hitler (Cornell UP, 2020) tries to understand how Jewis...
Sep 22, 2021•1 hr 14 min•Ep. 147
The Berlin Ethnological Museum is one of the world's largest and most important anthropological museums, housing more than a half million objects collected from around the globe. In Humboldt's Shadow tells the story of the German scientists and adventurers who, inspired by Alexander von Humboldt's inclusive vision of the world, traveled the earth in pursuit of a total history of humanity. It also details the fate of their museum, which they hoped would be a scientists' workshop, a place where a ...
Sep 06, 2021•50 min•Ep. 119
The fall of the Berlin Wall is typically understood as the culmination of political-economic trends that fatally weakened the East German state. Meanwhile, comparatively little attention has been paid to the cultural dimension of these dramatic events, particularly the role played by Western mass media and consumer culture. With a focus on the 1970s and 1980s, Don't Need No Thought Control: Western Culture in East Germany and the Fall of the Berlin Wall (Berghahn Books, 2020) explores the dynami...
Sep 02, 2021•1 hr 34 min•Ep. 111
Baylor University musicologist and the author of Hearing Beethoven Robin Wallace chats with Howard about the magic of Beethoven, weaving personal sentiments with professional insights to explore his unparalleled musical legacy. Howard Burton is the founder of Ideas Roadshow, Ideas on Film and host of the Ideas Roadshow Podcast. He can be reached at [email protected]. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbo...
Sep 01, 2021•1 hr 54 min•Ep. 103
Thomas O. Haakenson's book Grotesque Visions: The Science of Berlin Dada (Bloomsbury, 2021) focuses on the radical avant-garde interventions of Salomo Friedländer (aka Mynona), Til Brugman, and Hannah Höch as they challenged the questionable practices and evidentiary claims of late-19th- and early-20th-century science. Demonstrating the often excessive measures that pathologists, anthropologists, sexologists, and medical professionals went to present their research in a seemingly unambiguous way...
Aug 31, 2021•58 min•Ep. 110
When we think about the process of European unification, our conversations inevitably ponder questions of economic cooperation and international politics. Salvatore Pappalardo offers a new and engaging perspective, arguing that the idea of European unity is also the product of a modern literary imagination. This book examines the idea of Europe in the modernist literature of primarily Robert Musil, Italo Svevo, and James Joyce (but also of Theodor Däubler and Srecko Kosovel), all authors who had...
Aug 24, 2021•51 min•Ep. 109
In the wake of the First World War and Russian Revolutions, Central Europeans in 1919 faced a world of possibilities, threats, and extreme contrasts. Dramatic events since the end of the world war seemed poised to transform the world, but the form of that transformation was unclear and violently contested in the streets and societies of Munich and Budapest in 1919. The political perceptions of contemporaries, framed by gender stereotypes and antisemitism, reveal the sense of living history, of '...
Aug 11, 2021•1 hr 2 min•Ep. 120
German Ambassador Ulrich von Brockdorff-Rantzau believed that Germany and the Soviet Union were locked together in a Schicksalgemienshaft, or “community of fate.” The interaction of these two nations, Brockdorff-Rantzau thought, would decide the course of history, in Europe and beyond. Anyone familiar with the history of German-Soviet relations in the twentieth century might be inclined to agree with the ambassador’s assessment; though they might find his use of the word “community,” with all it...
Aug 10, 2021•57 min•Ep. 102
Most often our engagement with the Holocaust is a process of wrestling with the absence of presence and the presence of absence. This is right and important and necessary. But Elizabeth Anthony's new book The Compromise of Return: Viennese Jews after the Holocaust (Wayne State UP, 2021) reminds us that the story of the Holocaust is also the story of return, of resurfacing, of presence itself. Anthony studies the return of Viennese Jews to Vienna after the end of the Second World War. She starts ...
Aug 08, 2021•1 hr 6 min•Ep. 145
As projects like Manhattan's High Line, Chicago's 606, China's eco-cities, and Ethiopia's tree-planting efforts show, cities around the world are devoting serious resources to urban greening. Formerly neglected urban spaces and new high-end developments draw huge crowds thanks to the considerable efforts of city governments. But why are greening projects so widely taken up, and what good do they do? In How Green Became Good: Urbanized Nature and the Making of Cities and Citizens (U Chicago Press...
Jul 29, 2021•52 min•Ep. 193
Once described as a “German oddity”†, Ordoliberalism was one of a number of new liberalisms that emerged from the political maelstrom of the interwar period. But, unlike the other neoliberal splinters, Ordoliberalism – founded at the University of Freiburg by economist Walter Eucken and jurist Franz Böhm – was quickly tested in the real world. The West Germany rebuilt out of the ashes of war was founded on its principles: rules-based economics, independent agencies protected from politics and th...
Jul 21, 2021•56 min•Ep. 49
