Rosa Luxemburg occupies a complex place in our history partly because there are several different Rosa's one can find scattered across the world; the feminist activist, revolutionary Marxist, economist, journalist, essayist literary and critic all have been picked up in coopted by different movements at different times. While this speaks to her versatility as a thinker, writer and person, it also reflects the fragmented way in which her writing has been collected, edited, translated and publishe...
Mar 09, 2021•56 min•Ep. 105
Although physicians during World War I, and scholars since, have addressed the idea of disorders such as shell shock as inchoate flights into sickness by men unwilling to cope with war's privations, they have given little attention to the agency many soldiers actually possessed to express dissent in a system that medicalized it. In Germany, these men were called "war tremblers," for their telltale symptom of uncontrollable shaking. Based on archival research that constitutes the largest study of...
Feb 23, 2021•1 hr 4 min•Ep. 103
In his pathbreaking graphic novel, Berlin (Drawn and Quarterly, 2018), Jason Lutes creates a multifaceted exploration of urban life during the Weimar Republic. The book contains a variety of mostly fictional characters, all of whom capture aspects of the political, cultural, and social life of Berlin during the final years of Germany’s first democratic experiment. Beautifully drawn, this work provides a compelling alternative to readers used to reading only textual accounts of the period. Much t...
Feb 11, 2021•1 hr 6 min•Ep. 102
In the 1980s and 1990s, Black German women began to play significant roles in challenging the discrimination in their own nation and abroad. Their grassroots organizing, writings, and political and cultural activities nurtured innovative traditions, ideas, and practices. These strategies facilitated new, often radical bonds between people from disparate backgrounds across the Black Diaspora. In Mobilizing Black Germany: Afro-German Women and the Making of a Transnational Movement (University of ...
Feb 03, 2021•56 min•Ep. 101
Steven Press is an Assistant Professor of History at Stanford University. His marvelous first book, Rogue Empires: Contracts and Conmen in Europe’s Scramble for Africa (Harvard University Press, 2017), is an incredibly well-documented monograph that follows a paper trail of questionable treaties to discover the rogues or confidence men whose actions touched off the Scramble for Africa in the 1880s. Dr. Press shows in captivating detail how private European businessmen and firms produced hundreds...
Feb 02, 2021•1 hr 3 min•Ep. 900
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 is also the author of the introduction to this collected volume. Today she talks about these fifteen essays written by both German and American experts of Reformation History and how they see the towering figure of Martin Luther looming over 500 years of German history and identity. In terms of theolo...
Jan 29, 2021•55 min•Ep. 898
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 Secularization (Yale University Press, 2020) takes its title from an intriguing remark by Theodor W. Adorno, in which he summarized the meaning of Walter Benjamin's image of a celebrated mechanical chess-playing Turk and its hidden religious animus: "Nothing of theological content will persist without being...
Jan 26, 2021•1 hr 28 min•Ep. 202
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 Spain in a position of influence in the history and culture of the Second World War. Featuring essays by international experts in the fields of history, literary studies, cultural studies, political science, sociology, and film studies, this book clarifies historical issues within Spain while also demons...
Jan 22, 2021•1 hr 5 min•Ep. 132
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 transnational approach to Polish-German relations and nineteenth-century colonial subjectivities. She investigates key cultural dynamics in the history of medicine, colonialism, and migration that bring Germany and Prussian Poland closer to the colonial and postcolonial worlds in Africa and Latin America. S...
Jan 20, 2021•52 min•Ep. 94
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 and its Legacies." It's a course I've taught several times. It's a good course, co-taught with Professor of Theology. But it's a course that would have been better if I had read this book the summer before I taught it. Laura HIlton and Avinoam Patt have collected a series of essays designed specificall...
Jan 18, 2021•1 hr 12 min•Ep. 113
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, practical and emotional, that Holocaust Studies poses. Advancing Holocaust Studies (Routledge, 2020), however, reads differently. Published in a world wracked by political and ideological conflict, the essays here struggle to reconcile the time, energy and devotion Holocaust scholars have poured into their s...
Jan 14, 2021•1 hr 12 min•Ep. 131
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, to talk about his penultimate book, The Convent of Wesel: The Event That Never Was and the Invention of Tradition first published n 2017 by Cambridge University Press and out 2020 in paperback. The Convent of Wesel was long believed to be a clandestine assembly of Protestant leaders in 1568 that helped...
Jan 04, 2021•51 min•Ep. 886
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, where territory changed hands in 1938 and again in 1945. During the intervening period and beyond, residents of the borderland were caught in a nearly continuous onslaught of ethnic cleansing - expulsion of Czech and Slovak "colonists," Jewish deportations during the Holocaust, and postwar population ...
Dec 31, 2020•58 min•Ep. 90
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 (Theresienstadt in German) was operated by the Nazis between November 1941 and May 1945 as a transit ghetto for Central and Western European Jews before their deportation for murder in the East. Rather than depict the world of the prisoners as an atomized state of exception, it argues that the prisoner societ...
Dec 30, 2020•57 min•Ep. 129
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 blindness and paralysis), waves of apocalyptic rumors crashed over the land. A messianic faith healer rose to extraordinary fame, prayer groups performed exorcisms, and enormous crowds traveled to witness apparitions of the Virgin Mary. Most strikingly, scores of people accused their neighbors of witchcraft an...
Dec 29, 2020•58 min•Ep. 100
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 can be found in its original subtitle: "A Critical History." Avoiding the traps of euro-'Whig' or eurosceptical histories, Patel rethinks the development of the European Communities and the European Union from first principles. He concludes that they were just one model among many postwar associations bu...
Dec 15, 2020•41 min•Ep. 34
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 this effort was Ernst Fraenkel, who as an attorney sought to use the law as a means of opposing Nazi oppression. In Legal Sabotage: Ernst Fraenkel in Hitler’s Germany (Cambridge University Press, 2020), Douglas G. Morris describes the ways in which Frankel stood up to the Nazis and what understandings he ...
Dec 14, 2020•1 hr 1 min•Ep. 192
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 continues to stir controversy in institutions, academic circles, and nuclear households across the world. Perhaps Freud’s sharpest and most adamant critic, Frederick Crews has been debating Freud’s legacy for over thirty years. His latest work, Freud: The Making of an Illusion (Picador, 2018) challenges us ...
Nov 25, 2020•1 hr 2 min•Ep. 141
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 the Enlightenment. The featured projects are some of the best known, well-funded and longest established research initiatives in the emerging area of ‘digital humanities’, a field that has, particularly since 2010, been attracting a rising tide of interest from professional academics, the media, fundin...
Nov 24, 2020•1 hr 19 min•Ep. 96
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 thought, decision, and action that tempt and incite humans to inflict incalculable harm upon other humans. Absent the overriding of moral sensibilities, if not the collapse or collaboration of ethical traditions, the Holocaust, genocide, and other mass atrocities could not have happened. Roth does not po...
Nov 19, 2020•1 hr 8 min•Ep. 127
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 ambiguous later period that many consider philosophically insubstantial, or simply too esoteric and obscure to merit any serious engagement. Luckily, that is starting to change, especially with the publication of the Black Notebooks, as well as a number of manuscripts, essays and lectures from this period....
Nov 18, 2020•1 hr 5 min•Ep. 94
The pig played a fundamental role in the German Democratic Republic's attempts to create and sustain a modern, industrial food system built on communist principles. By the mid-1980s, East Germany produced more pork per capita than West Germany and the UK, while also suffering myriad unintended consequences of this centrally planned practice: manure pollution, animal disease, and rolling food shortages. In Communist Pigs: An Animal History of East Germany's Rise and Fall (University of Washington...
Nov 03, 2020•58 min•Ep. 79
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 Luther and his successors led European Christianity away from medieval ideas of penance and the careful accounting that went with it toward theology of grace. Human salvation was thence justified by faith alone, and holy scripture the supreme authority. For the law, this meant that love (charity) and no...
Nov 02, 2020•45 min•Ep. 832
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 troubling topics within Holocaust history. As eyewitnesses to and unwilling abettors of the murder of their fellow Jews, they are the object of fierce condemnation even today. Yet it was a group of these seemingly compromised men who carried out the revolt of October 7, 1944, one of the most celebrated acts ...
Nov 02, 2020•51 min•Ep. 203
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 of the 1989 revolution by exploring acts of urban ingenuity amid catastrophic urban decay. Andrew Demshuk profiles the creative activism of local communist officials who, with the help of scores of volunteers, constructed a palatial bowling alley without Berlin's knowledge or approval. In a city mired i...
Oct 26, 2020•57 min•Ep. 98
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 engage the ear, eye, and intellect. The book unfolds as a series of fifty emblems, each of which contains an accompanying "fugue" music scored for three voices. Historians of alchemy have long understood this virtuoso work as an ambitious demonstration of the art’s literary potential and of the possibilitie...
Oct 21, 2020•59 min•Ep. 824
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 built -- and then lost -- over nearly a millennium. From modest origins in what is to-day southern Germany and Switzerland, the Habsburgs gained control first of Austria in the 12th century and then the Holy Roman Empire in the fifteenth century. Then, in just a few decades, their possessions rapidly e...
Oct 20, 2020•1 hr•Ep. 823
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 of the publication of his private journals kept throughout his life, including during his involvement with the Nazi Party. This has led to a renewal of an intense series of debates about the relationship between Heidegger’s thought and his politics, and the broader implications this relationship may hav...
Oct 19, 2020•1 hr 28 min•Ep. 88
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 Nazi spy ring in America. In the mid-1930s just as the United States was embarking on a policy of neutrality, Nazi Germany launched a program of espionage against the unwary nation. The Nazi Spy Ring in America tells the story of Hitler's attempts to interfere in American affairs by spreading anti-Sem...
Oct 13, 2020•57 min•Ep. 97
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 century. And like many popular events it is filled with mis-understandings and mis-interpretations. Here to explicate and clarify this most important of events is master-historian and polymath, Professor of History Emeritus at Exeter University, Jeremy Black, CMG in his book, The Holocaust: History and...
Oct 08, 2020•34 min•Ep. 815
