Perpetrators of mass atrocities have used displacement to transport victims to killing sites or extermination camps to transfer victims to sites of forced labor and attrition, to ethnically homogenize regions by moving victims out of their homes and lands, and to destroy populations by depriving them of vital daily needs. Displacement has been treated as a corollary practice to crimes committed, not a central aspect of their perpetration. Destroy Them Gradually: Displacement as Atrocity (Rutgers...
Aug 13, 2024•1 hr 13 min•Ep. 211
In this episode, I speak with Marc Redfield, professor of Comparative Literature, English, and German Studies at Brown University about his most recent work, Shibboleth: Judges, Derrida, Celan, published in 2020 by Fordham University Press. In this short but intricate and dense work, Redfield investigates the “shibboleth”—the word, if it is one, and the concept—from its roots in the Book of Judges to the contemporary global regimes of technics that are defined by constantly proliferating technol...
Aug 10, 2024•1 hr 6 min•Ep. 98
With the passing of those who witnessed National Socialism and the Holocaust, the archive matters as never before. However, the material that remains for the work of remembering and commemorating this period of history is determined by both the bureaucratic excesses of the Nazi regime and the attempt to eradicate its victims without trace. Dora Osborne's book What Remains: The Post-Holocaust Archive in German Memory Culture (Camden House, 2020) argues that memory culture in the Berlin Republic i...
Aug 09, 2024•1 hr 2 min•Ep. 112
Who were the German scientists who worked on atomic bombs during World War II for Hitler's regime? How did they justify themselves afterwards? Examining the global influence of the German uranium project and postwar reactions to the scientists involved, Mark Walker explores the narratives surrounding 'Hitler's bomb'. The global impacts of this project were cataclysmic. Credible reports of German developments spurred the American Manhattan Project, the nuclear attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, a...
Aug 05, 2024•1 hr 1 min•Ep. 1465
Returning to the New Books Network is Doug Greene, here to discuss his book The New Reformism and the Revival of Karl Kautsky (Routledge, 2024). Split into three main parts, the book first surveys Kautsky’s own life and thought, starting with his early interest in socialist politics and turn towards Marxism, followed by a slow but steady turn away from revolution and towards reform, believing parliamentary procedures were the best road to social transformation. The second part looks at the works...
Aug 04, 2024•1 hr 26 min•Ep. 190
Beginning in late 1940, over three thousand Jewish girls and young women were forced from their family homes in Sosnowiec, Poland, and its surrounding towns to worksites in Germany. Believing that they were helping their families to survive, these young people were thrust into a world where they labored at textile work for twelve hours a day, lived in barracks with little food, and received only periodic news of events back home. By late 1943, their barracks had been transformed into concentrati...
Aug 04, 2024•56 min•Ep. 539
In the waning days and immediate aftermath of World War II, Nazi diplomats and spies based in Spain decided to stay rather than return to a defeated Germany. The decidedly pro-German dictatorship of General Francisco Franco gave them refuge and welcomed other officials and agents from the Third Reich who had escaped and made their way to Iberia. Amid fears of a revival of the Third Reich, Allied intelligence and diplomatic officers developed a repatriation program across Europe to return these i...
Jul 30, 2024•1 hr 12 min•Ep. 1464
In the final year of the Second World War, as bitter defensive fighting moved to German soil, a wave of intra-ethnic violence engulfed the country. In Violence in Defeat: The Wehrmacht on German Soil, 1944–1945 (Cambridge UP, 2021), Bastiaan Willems offers the first study into the impact and behaviour of the Wehrmacht on its own territory, focusing on the German units fighting in East Prussia and its capital Königsberg. He shows that the Wehrmacht's retreat into Germany, after three years of bru...
Jul 29, 2024•1 hr 29 min•Ep. 1463
Today I talked to Ewa Bacon about her book Saving Lives in Auschwitz: The Prisoners’ Hospital in Buna-Monowitz (Purdue UP, 2017). In a 1941 Nazi roundup of educated Poles, Stefan Budziaszek--newly graduated from medical school in Krakow--was incarcerated in the Krakow Montelupich Prison and transferred to the Auschwitz concentration camp in February 1942. German big businesses brutally exploited the cheap labor of prisoners in the camp, and workers were dying. In 1943, Stefan, now a functionary ...
Jul 29, 2024•1 hr 24 min•Ep. 1462
Dynamic Repetition: History and Messianism in Modern Jewish Thought (Brandeis UP, 2022) proposes a new understanding of modern Jewish theories of messianism across the disciplines of history, theology, and philosophy. The book explores how ideals of repetition, return, and the cyclical occasioned a new messianic impulse across an important swath of late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century German Jewish thought. To grasp the complexities of Jewish messianism in modernity, the book focuses on ...
Jul 27, 2024•1 hr 3 min•Ep. 532
The war on the Eastern front remains relatively less well explored as compared to the western front of World War II. Yet some of the most titanic battles in modern military history occurred on the steppes of eastern Europe. Stalingrad and Moscow are names known to most but less well-known are the vast battles that occurred in Byelorussia. By June 1944, Stalin and his generals had launched Operation Bagration involving more than two million soldiers marching across fronts hundreds of miles wide. ...
Jul 24, 2024•45 min•Ep. 240
In Vanishing Vienna: Modernism, Philosemitism, and Jews in a Postwar City (U Pennsylvania Press, 2024) historian Frances Tanzer traces the reconstruction of Viennese culture from the 1938 German annexation through the early 1960s. The book reveals continuity in Vienna's cultural history across this period and a framework for interpreting Viennese culture that relies on antisemitism, philosemitism, and a related discourse of Jewish presence and absence. This observation demands a new chronology o...
Jul 20, 2024•1 hr 8 min•Ep. 163
What we see through our windshields reflects ideas about our national identity, consumerism, and infrastructure. For better or worse, windshields have become a major frame for viewing the nonhuman world. The view from the road is one of the main ways in which we experience our environments. These vistas are the result of deliberate historical forces, and humans have shaped them as they simultaneously sought to be transformed by them. In Consuming Landscapes: What We See When We Drive and Why It ...
Jul 17, 2024•1 hr 16 min•Ep. 162
Since the mid-1700s, poets and scholars have been deeply entangled in the project of reinventing prophecy. Moving between literary and biblical studies, Yosefa Raz's book The Poetics of Prophecy: Modern Afterlives of a Biblical Tradition (Cambridge UP, 2023) reveals how Romantic poetry is linked to modern biblical scholarship's development. On the one hand, scholars, intellectuals, and artists discovered models of strong prophecy in biblical texts, shoring up aesthetic and nationalist ideals, wh...
Jul 16, 2024•1 hr 16 min•Ep. 160
Stefanie Coché's Psychiatric Institutions and Society: the Practice of Psychiatric Commital in the “Third Reich,” the Democratic Republic of Germany, and the Federal Republic of Germany, 1941-1963 (London: Routledge, 2024; translated by Alex Skinner) probes how the serious and sometimes fatal decision was made to admit individuals to asylums during Germany’s age of extremes. The book shows that - even during the Nazi killing of the sick - relatives played an even more important role in most admi...
Jul 16, 2024•54 min•Ep. 161
When Hitler marched into Austria in March 1938, he was given a rapturous reception. Millions lined the streets and filled the squares of Vienna. Tobias Portschy, a self-appointed regional Nazi chief, considered what to give the Fuhrer for his birthday, and devised a particular gift from the Austrian people: the elimination of Jewish life in the Burgenland, picturesque farming country about 70 km south-east of Vienna. Eichmann took note of the brutal methodology. The Holocaust had begun. Burgenla...
Jul 12, 2024•1 hr 14 min•Ep. 528
Karine Varley's book Vichy's Double Bind: French Collaboration between Hitler and Mussolini during the Second World War (Cambridge UP, 2023) advances a significant new interpretation of French collaboration during the Second World War. Arguing that the path to collaboration involved not merely Nazi Germany but Fascist Italy, it suggests that the Vichy French government was caught in a double bind. On the one hand, many of the threats to France's territory, colonial empire and power came from Rom...
Jul 09, 2024•1 hr 19 min•Ep. 1455
From ancient times to the modern world, the idea of the Faustian bargain—the exchange of one’s soul in return for untold riches and power—has exerted a magnetic pull upon our collective imaginations. In Devil's Contract: A History of the Faustian Bargain (Melville House, 2024), Dr. Ed Simon takes us on a historical tour of the Faustian bargain, from the Bible to blues, and illustrates how the instinct for sacrificing our principles in exchange for power models all kinds of social ills, from colo...
Jul 09, 2024•51 min•Ep. 1450
American Aurora: Environment and Apocalypse in the Life of Johannes Kelpius (Oxford UP, 2024) explores the impact of climate change on early modern radical religious groups during the height of the Little Ice Age in the seventeenth century. Focusing on the life and legacy of Johannes Kelpius (1667-1707), an enormously influential but comprehensively misunderstood theologian who settled outside of Philadelphia from 1604 to 1707, Timothy Grieve-Carlson explores the Hermetic and alchemical dimensio...
Jul 06, 2024•1 hr 5 min•Ep. 218
What exactly is capitalism? How has the meaning of capitalism changed over time? And what’s at stake in our understanding or misunderstanding of it? In Capitalism: The Story Behind the Word (Princeton UP, 2022), Michael Sonenscher examines the history behind the concept and pieces together the range of subjects bound up with the word. Sonenscher shows that many of our received ideas fail to pick up the work that the idea of capitalism is doing for us, without us even realizing it. “Capitalism” w...
Jun 30, 2024•51 min•Ep. 217
Contemporary Europe seems to be divided between progressive cosmopolitans sympathetic to the European Union and the ideals of the Enlightenment, and counter-enlightened conservative nationalists extolling the virtues of homelands threatened by globalised elites and mass migration. Europe Against Revolution: Conservatism, Enlightenment, and the Making of the Past (Cambridge UP, 2023) seeks to uncover the roots of historically informed ideas of Europe, while at the same time underlining the fundam...
Jun 24, 2024•57 min•Ep. 215
Germany and China: How Entanglement Undermines Freedom, Prosperity and Security (Bloomsbury, 2024) is a groundbreaking book, of which the findings have significant implications both for German-China relations and also in understanding the rising influence of autocratic China on liberal democracies globally. In today's interview, Associate Professor Andreas Fulda and I spoke about Germany's entanglement with China, and the extent of Germany's dependancies on China in terms of economics, technolog...
Jun 22, 2024•1 hr•Ep. 223
Red Secularism: Socialism and Secularist Culture in Germany 1890 to 1933 (Cambridge UP, 2023) is the first substantive investigation into one of the key sources of radicalism in modern German, the subculture that arose at the intersection of secularism and socialism in the late nineteenth-century. It explores the organizations that promoted their humanistic-monistic worldview through popular science and asks how this worldview shaped the biographies of ambitious self-educated workers and early f...
Jun 16, 2024•37 min•Ep. 160
Lessons of history are often referred to in public discourse, but seldom in scholarly discussions. Klas-Göran Karlsson's book Lessons of History: The Holocaust and Soviet Terror as Borderline Events (Academic Studies Press, 2024) seeks to change this by introducing an innovative scholarly, analytical model of historical lessons, starting from the basic three-fold perspective that you simultaneously are history, share history, and make history. Not any history is useful for extracting or using le...
Jun 15, 2024•1 hr 13 min•Ep. 209
Joseph A. Skloot joins Jana Byars to talk about his new book, First Impressions: Sefer hasimdim and Early Modern Hebrew Printing (Brandeis UP, 2023). First Impressions uncovers the history of creative adaptation and transformation through a close analysis of the creation of the Sefer Hasidim book. In 1538, a partnership of Jewish silk makers in the city of Bologna published a book entitled Sefer Hasidim, a compendium of rituals, stories, and religious instruction that primarily originated in med...
Jun 08, 2024•56 min•Ep. 71
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 argues that it was in fact their first strategic success in the east. The mismanaged Soviet Counteroffensive became a phyrric victory as both sides struggled with strategic leadership and supply. German generals, caught between Stalin's hammer and Hitler's anvil, found loopholes in increasingly irrational ...
Jun 07, 2024•1 hr 15 min•Ep. 81
In the 1920s, before the establishment of the state of Israel, a group of German Jews settled in a garden city on the outskirts of Jerusalem. During World War II, their quiet community, nicknamed Grunewald on the Orient, emerged as both an immigrant safe haven and a lively expatriate hotspot, welcoming many famous residents including poet-playwright Else Lasker-Schüler, historian Gershom Scholem, and philosopher Martin Buber. It was an idyllic setting, if fraught with unique tensions on the frin...
Jun 04, 2024•26 min•Ep. 121
When Franz Kafka died in 1924, his loyal friend Max Brod could not bring himself to fulfill Kafka’s last instruction: to burn his remaining manuscripts. Instead, Brod devoted his life to championing Kafka’s work, rescuing his legacy from both obscurity and physical destruction. Nearly a century later, an international legal battle erupted to determine which country could claim ownership: the Jewish state, where Kafka dreamed of living, or Germany, where Kafka’s three sisters perished in the Holo...
Jun 03, 2024•41 min•Ep. 302
Eric Kandel was born in Vienna in 1929. In 1938 he and his family fled to Brooklyn, where he attended the Yeshiva of Flatbush. He studied history and literature at Harvard, and received an MD from NYU. He is a professor of biochemistry at Columbia University, and won the 2000 Nobel Prize in Medicine for his research on memory. In addition to his science textbooks, Kandel has written several books for a general readership, including In Search of Memory: The Emergence of a New Science of Mind (200...
Jun 02, 2024•1 hr 14 min•Ep. 67
"The Polish Police, commonly called the Blue or uniformed police in order to avoid using the term “Polish,” has played a most lamentable role in the extermination of the Jews of Poland. The uniformed police has been an enthusiastic executor of all German directives regarding the Jews." -Emanuel Ringelblum, Warsaw, 1943. Shortly after the occupation of Poland in the fall of 1939, the Germans created the Blue Police, consisting mainly of prewar Polish police officers. Within a short time, this pol...
May 27, 2024•1 hr 6 min•Ep. 515
