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. Simone Wesner, a lecturer in arts management at Birkbeck, University of London, explores this question in the context of post-war and post-unification Germany. The book offers a wealth of detail on the German context, comparing two cultural policy regimes across Saxony, through a longitudinal study of a ...
Aug 03, 2018•45 min
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 an individual, a family chronicle, and the story of an entire era. This biography suggests that the ‘non-Jewish’ Communist Jew was not as irreconcilably opposed to the ‘Jewish’ Jew as has previously been thought. It is an extraordinary work that will be referenced for many years to come. Max Kaiser is ...
Jul 23, 2018•29 min
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 of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, examines the lives of ordinary Germans throughout the 20th century. Drawing on six dozen memoirs of Germans born in the 1920s he demonstrates how these individuals experienced, Third Reich, the Holocaust, the Cold War and finally reunification. Ultimately, Jarausch argue...
Jul 20, 2018•54 min
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-language history of the Berlin Zoo from its inception in 1844 until German reunification in 1990. Bruce demonstrates how the Berlin Zoo was a critical facet of Berlin’s social and cultural life. The zoo was also used by those in political power throughout German history to communicate messages to the larger...
Jul 09, 2018•1 hr
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 Cold War Germany. In her new book, Turkish Guest Workers in Germany: Hidden Lives and Contested Borders, 1960s to 1980s (University of Toronto Press, 2018), Jennifer A. Miller revises several assumptions about the men and women who arrived in West Germany from Turkey during this era. She traces the gue...
Jul 04, 2018•59 min
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 University of Wisconsin-Madison, carefully examines why historians and the general public have clung to a problematic narrative, which argued that the Nazi government had total control over the visual and performing arts. In order to address this narrative Potter details how historians after the fall of...
Jun 27, 2018•50 min
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 Macmillan, 2017), Lisa M. Todd reveals an obsession among elites, the state, and everyday people with sex in the midst of such disruptive warfare. She argues that the state, the churches, and even their neighbors viewed men and women who had sex outside of marriage as traitors to the nation. Critically ...
Jun 22, 2018•1 hr 2 min
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 Eastern Europe (Bloomsbury Academic, 2018), Waitman Beorn gives us a detailed overview of the Holocaust precisely here, in what he well called “the Epicenter of the Final Solution.” Waitman does an excellent job of describing Eastern European Jewry, the crooked path the Nazis took in deciding to attempt to o...
Jun 20, 2018•1 hr 38 min
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 did a political culture defined by anti-socialism and anti-semitism emerge? In his new book Red Saxony: Election Battles and the Spectre of Democracy in Germany, 1860 to 1918 (Oxford University Press, 2017), James Retallack uses a regional lens to rethink assumptions about Germany’s changing political cu...
Jun 12, 2018•1 hr 5 min
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 Late Medieval German Prophecy (Oxford University Press, 2016) analyzes apocalyptic prophecies of the late medieval Holy Roman Empire in terms of their genesis, perception, authorship and individual impacts in specific contexts. Kneupper furthermore illustrates the dynamics between the Church and Clergy a...
Jun 11, 2018•59 min
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. Central to this was Kurt Eisner, for whom this was among his proudest achievements. As Albert Earle Gurganus explains in Kurt Eisner: A Modern Life (Camden House, 2018), the success of this transition and the framework for the government he led in the months following the deposition of the Bavarian mon...
Jun 06, 2018•1 hr 2 min
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 his work remain open. In her dissertation Post-Catastrophic Poetics (Post-Katastrophische Poetik [Wilhelm Fink, 2016]), Luisa Banki, postdoc at the University of Wuppertal, challenges common assumptions about Sebald. By putting him in comparison with Walter Benjamin, she argues that Sebald’s narrator is ...
Jun 04, 2018•24 min
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 conclusion of World War II. At the center of the books narrative, she places the numerous efforts to save Jews from Nazi control areas. The book also highlights the young and dedicated individuals who made up the War Refugee Board and how their passion and zeal led to the rescue of tens of thousands of ...
May 31, 2018•1 hr 1 min
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 Front (Oxford University Press, 2018), Jonathan Boff, Senior Lecturer in History and War Studies at the University of Birmingham, brings that revolution further along by presenting to an anglophone audience the figure of Crown Prince Rupprecht of Bavaria. Rupprecht, who was for the entirety of the war the ...
May 28, 2018•1 hr 4 min
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 contentious figure, especially when it comes to his political activism. In the opinion of many, he did not go far enough in his political work, while others criticize his autobiographical work as euphemistic. Reason enough for Stephan Resch, Senior Lecturer for German Studies at the University of Auckl...
May 24, 2018•40 min
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 that sought the reunification of Togoland. At the end of the nineteenth century, the Germans colonized the small territory of Togo in West Africa. During the first world war, the British and French invaded Togo and split it between them, introducing a new border that was criticized by the African inha...
May 15, 2018•1 hr 2 min
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: Germans, Argentines, and the Rise of a Pluralist Society (Stanford University Press, 2018) describes a period from the 1880s to the 1930s, when a massive wave of immigration transformed Argentine society and the country’s cultural landscape. By 1914, almost half the residents of Buenos Aires were foreign...
May 11, 2018•58 min
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 after World War I. When Austria was the first interwar country in Europe to suffer a hyperinflation the League of Nations stepped in to offer financial support and advice. But a total collapse of the financial system in 1931 couldn’t be avoided. Nathan Marcus offers a new perspective on the already wel...
May 08, 2018•58 min
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 of German unification on East German intellectuals. Through a series of interviews conducted first during unification and then followed up a quarter-century later Bednarz highlights how East German intellectuals dealt with the loss of their nation, and the demise of socialism and the impact this had on ...
May 03, 2018•1 hr
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 of cheap labor, and it found it in places like Turkey. Although it was assumed that these ‘guests’ would later on move back to their home countries, they unexpectedly often stayed in Germany, founded families and became Germans. In her new book Women Between Strange Cities (Interkulturelle Stadtnomadi...
Apr 25, 2018•21 min
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 Swastika, Simpson recovers a largely forgotten history of the sports during Holocaust. Through a close reading of wartime memoirs, oral histories, newspapers, and records from camps across Europe including Thereseinstadt and Auschwitz, Simpson illustrates the politicization of sports by the Nazi regim...
Apr 12, 2018•59 min
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 visiting postdoc at the German Department of Brown University, analyzes the concept of “autopoiesis.” By reading Heinrich von Kleist as well as Franz Kafka’s The Trial, he focuses on particular dimensions of the concept: beginning, addressing, interrupting, repeating, translating and shifting of knowle...
Apr 12, 2018•27 min
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 Studies at the University of Nevada, Reno examines German occupation of the Pyrenees. Particularly, Dr. Ott examines cases of collaboration and later justice and demonstrates how collaboration was often motivated out of base desires. She tells the story of this unique region through nine case studies of ...
Apr 09, 2018•56 min
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 Main Office in her new book The Third Reich’s Intelligence Service: The Career of Walter Schellenberg (Cambridge University Press, 2017). Tracing the development of a distinctly and catastrophically ideological approach to intelligence gathering through an institutional biography of the SS security ser...
Apr 06, 2018•1 hr 12 min
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 Natural Selection (1859). In her book, Man, the Ape: Anthropology and the Reception of Darwin in Germany, 1850-1900 (Bohlau, 2016) (Der Mensch, der Affe: Anthropologie und Darwin-Rezeption in Deutschland 1850-1900), Hanna Engelmeier analyzes several historical positions concerning the human-ape-relationship....
Apr 02, 2018•22 min
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 Languages and Literatures and Director of the Carolina Center for Jewish Studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, presents the first in-depth study of Chelm literature and its relationship to its literary precursors. The Chelm stories surrounding the ‘wise men’ (fools) of this town con...
Apr 02, 2018•32 min
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, explores these questions in her new book, Passing Illusions: Jewish Visibility in Weimar Germany (University of Michigan Press, 2017). Wallach examines an array of cultural texts including film, artwork, periodicals, and fiction in order to determine the different circumstances in which individuals sou...
Mar 29, 2018•41 min
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) (Theater der Versehrten: Kunstfiguren zwischen Deformation und Destruktion in Theatertexten des 20. und fruhen 21. Jahrhunderts), Till Nitschmann, a postdoc at the Leibniz University of Hannover, analyzes key German theatrical texts. By finding recurring themes in diverse texts, he develops a model cl...
Mar 23, 2018•15 min
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 History at Southern Methodist University offers a new perspective on state and national building in Germany and Austria during the interwar period. Hochman argues persuasively that nationalism and the goal of redrawing Germany’s borders was not only a goal of the radical right. She looks at how supporters ...
Mar 21, 2018•57 min
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 legendary 1920s Berlin. In her ambitious book, Sex and the Weimar Republic: German Homosexual Emancipation and the Rise of the Nazis (University of Toronto Press, 2015), Laurie Marhoefer revises several assumptions about the sexual politics of Germany during the 1920s and 1930s. She examines how the sex...
Mar 19, 2018•59 min
