The twentieth-century artist Bruno Schulz was born an Austrian, lived as a Pole, and died a Jew. First a citizen of the Habsburg monarchy, he would, without moving, become the subject of the West Ukrainian People’s Republic, the Second Polish Republic, the USSR, and, finally, the Third Reich. Yet to use his own metaphor, Schulz remained throughout a citizen of the Republic of Dreams. He was a master of twentieth-century imaginative fiction who mapped the anxious perplexities of his time; Isaac B...
May 10, 2023•33 min•Ep 96•Transcript available on Metacast In 2021, the world commemorates the 80th anniversary of the massacres of Jews at Babyn Yar. The present collection brings together for the first time the responses to the tragic events of September 1941 by Ukrainian Jewish and non-Jewish poets of the Soviet and post-Soviet periods, presented here in the original and in English translation by Ostap Kin and John Hennessy. Written between 1942 and 2017 by over twenty poets, these poems belong to different literary canons, traditions, and time frame...
Apr 29, 2023•51 min•Ep 20•Transcript available on Metacast In this podcast we discuss visibility, haunting and fascism with art historian and theorist Elizabeth Otto. Otto's book Haunted Bauhaus explores the marginalized histories of occult spirituality, gender fluidity and queer identity within the Bauhaus; offering fresh insight into one of the most canonized periods of European art history. The Bauhaus (1919–1933) is widely regarded as the twentieth century's most influential art, architecture, and design school, celebrated as the archetypal movement...
Apr 25, 2023•32 min•Ep 57•Transcript available on Metacast This week on International Horizons, we present RBI's director John Torpey's interview with David Gill, General Consul of Germany, in New York to celebrate the 2023 Otto and Frank Walter Memorial Lecture. The conversation goes explaining the term “Zeitenwende” and what that entails for Germans, its history and how the military approach of Germany came to a new era. David Gill also discusses the effects of the historical division East-West in Germany in modern day politics, the position of German...
Apr 24, 2023•42 min•Ep 118•Transcript available on Metacast Toward the end of World War II, Hitler's many health complications became even more pronounced, making an evil man yet more erratic and dangerous. While the subject of Hitler's health has been catalogued previously, never has it been done so this thoroughly or with this level of up-to-date medical expertise. Tom Hutton's Hitler's Maladies and Their Impact on World War II (Texas Tech UP, 2023) draws from a lifetime of medical research and clinical experience to understand how the dictator's parti...
Apr 23, 2023•49 min•Ep 154•Transcript available on Metacast Crispin Brooks and Kiril Feferman's edited volume Beyond the Pale: The Holocaust in the North Caucasus (U Rochester Press, 2020) is the first book devoted exclusively to the Holocaust in the North Caucasus, exploring mass killings, Jewish responses, collaboration, and memory in a region barely known in this context. When war between the Soviet Union and Germany broke out in 1941, thousands of refugees - many of whom were Jews - poured from war-stricken Ukraine, Crimea, and other parts of Russia ...
Apr 22, 2023•2 hr 50 min•Ep 396•Transcript available on Metacast Although Kant considered him the greatest critic of his work, and Fichte thought him the most impressive mind of the generation, Salomon Maimon (1753-1800) has fallen into relative obscurity. Apiqoros: The Last Essays of Salomon Maimon (Hebrew Union College Press, 2021) draws attention to works written during the final years of Maimon's life. These essays are of particular interest: they show that even though Maimon was a self-proclaimed apiqoros grappling with the implications of Kantian philos...
Apr 18, 2023•2 hr 35 min•Ep 393•Transcript available on Metacast Auschwitz is perhaps the best-known memorial site in the world. Epicenter of the Nazi extermination campaign of Europe’s Jewish population, the Auschwitz-Birkenau camp system also held over 400,000 inmates (Jews and Gentiles both) in unspeakable conditions. Famous survivors such as Elie Wiesel and Primo Levi are widely read by high-schoolers and undergraduates, but a synoptic overview of the human experience and emotions of the Auschwitz inmates has long been missing. Piotr M.A. Cywiński, the di...
Apr 16, 2023•1 hr 1 min•Ep 189•Transcript available on Metacast Today I talked to Heidi Langbein-Allen about Save the Last Bullet: Memoir of a Boy Soldier in Hitler's Army (Pen & Sword Military, 2022). Willi Langbein was just thirteen when the Nazis took him away from his parents under the pretense of protecting him. Their real reason was to turn him into cannon-fodder for use against Hitler’s enemies. Deployed to the collapsing Eastern Front in the last days of the war, Willi, now aged fourteen, and his schoolmates were ordered to stave off the relentless R...
Apr 16, 2023•54 min•Ep 151•Transcript available on Metacast South of the Norman city of Caen, Verrières Ridge was seen a key stepping-stone for the British Second Army if it was to break out of the Normandy bridgehead in late July 1944. Imposing in height and containing perfect terrain for armored operations, the Germans viewed it as the lynchpin to their defenses south of the city of Caen and east of the Orne river. Following the failure of British Operation Goodwood on 18-20 July and the containment of the Canadian Operation Atlantic, further Allied at...
Apr 15, 2023•59 min•Ep 150•Transcript available on Metacast While Immanuel Kant’s account of human reason is well known and celebrated, his account of human animality (Thierheit) is virtually unknown. Animality and reason, as pillars of Kant’s vision of human nature, are original and ineradicable. And yet, the relation between them is fraught: at times tense and violent, at other times complementary, even harmonious. Kant on the Human Animal (Northwestern UP, 2022) offers the first systematic analysis of this central but neglected dimension of Kant’s phi...
Apr 12, 2023•43 min•Ep 179•Transcript available on Metacast How did the Serengeti become an internationally renowned African conservation site and one of the most iconic destinations for a safari? In Our Gigantic Zoo: A German Quest to Save the Serengeti (Oxford UP, 2020), Thomas M. Lekan illuminates the controversial origins of this national park by examining how Europe's greatest wildlife conservationist, former Frankfurt Zoo director and Oscar-winning documentarian Bernhard Grzimek, popularized it as a global destination. In the 1950s, Grzimek and his...
Apr 11, 2023•1 hr 18 min•Ep 145•Transcript available on Metacast To the Soviet Union, the sacrifices that enabled the country to defeat Nazi Germany in World War II are sacrosanct. The foundation of the Soviets’ hard-won victory was laid during the battle for the city of Stalingrad, resting on the banks of the river Volga. To Russians it was a pivotal landmark of their nation’s losses, with more than two million civilians and combatants either killed, wounded, or captured during the bitter fighting from September 1942 to February 1943. Both sides endured terr...
Apr 09, 2023•1 hr 4 min•Ep 147•Transcript available on Metacast During World War II, the Germans put the Jews in Nazi-occupied Poland into ghettos which restricted their movement and, most crucially for their survival, access to food. The Germans saw the Jews as 'useless eaters, ' and denied them sufficient food for survival. The hunger which resulted from this intentional starvation impacted every aspect of Jewish life inside the ghettos. The Atrocity of Hunger: Starvation in the Warsaw, Lodz and Krakow Ghettos during World War II (Cambridge UP, 2023) focus...
Apr 07, 2023•45 min•Ep 390•Transcript available on Metacast When Pope Pius XII died in 1958, his papers were sealed in the Vatican Secret Archives, leaving unanswered questions about what he knew and did during World War II. Those questions have only grown and festered, making Pius XII one of the most controversial popes in Church history, especially now as the Vatican prepares to canonize him. In 2020, Pius XII’s archives were finally opened, and David I. Kertzer—widely recognized as one of the world’s leading Vatican scholars—has been mining this new m...
Apr 06, 2023•28 min•Ep 92•Transcript available on Metacast Dr. Ari Joskowicz, Associate Professor of Jewish Studies and History at Vanderbilt University, is the author of Rain of Ash: Roma, Jews, and the Holocaust (Princeton University Press, 2023). Jews and Roma died side by side in the Holocaust, yet the world has not recognized their destruction equally. In postwar decades, the Jewish experience of genocide increasingly occupied the attention of legal experts, scholars, curators, and politicians, while the genocide of Europe’s Roma went largely ignor...
Apr 02, 2023•1 hr 6 min•Ep 188•Transcript available on Metacast Endless Flight: The Life of Joseph Roth (Granta Books, 2022) travels with Roth from his childhood in the town of Brody on the eastern edge of the Austro-Hungarian Empire to an unsettled life spent roaming Europe between the wars, including spells in Vienna, Paris and Berlin. His decline mirrored the collapse of civilized Europe: in his last peripatetic decade, he opposed Nazism in exile from Germany, his wife succumbed to schizophrenia and he died an alcoholic on the eve of WWII. Exploring the r...
Mar 26, 2023•59 min•Ep 213•Transcript available on Metacast They were a small group of conspirators who risked their lives by plotting relentlessly to obstruct and destroy the Third Reich from within. The Gestapo nicknamed this shadowy confederation of traitors the “Black Orchestra.” This is their tension-filled story. As the “Final Solution” unfolds, a loose network of German military officers, diplomats, politicians, and civilians are doing everything in their power to undermine the Third Reich from the inside: reporting troop movements to the Allies, ...
Mar 19, 2023•1 hr 9 min•Ep 140•Transcript available on Metacast Birds of Prey: Hitler's Luftwaffe, Ordinary Soldiers, and the Holocaust in Poland (Ibidem Press, 2021) is a microhistory of the Nazi occupation of Białowieźa Forest, Poland’s national park. The narrative stretches from Göring’s palatial lifestyle to the common soldier on the ground killing Jews, partisans, and civilians. Based entirely on previously unpublished sources, the book is the synthesis of six areas of research: Hitler’s Luftwaffe, the hunt and environmental history, military geography,...
Mar 13, 2023•1 hr 6 min•Ep 137•Transcript available on Metacast Today I talked to historian Chris Web about two books detailing the workings of the Nazi extermination camps: Chris Webb, The Sobibor Death Camp: History, Biographies, Remembrance (Ibidem Verlag, 2017) Chris Webb and Michael Chocholaty, The Treblinka Death Camp: History, Biographies, Remembrance (Ibidem Verlag, 2021) You can hear Webb discuss his work on the Belzec Death Camp here. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https...
Mar 08, 2023•1 hr 6 min•Ep 380•Transcript available on Metacast In Communism’s Public Sphere: Culture as Politics in Cold War Poland and East Germany (Cornell University Press, 2022), historian Kyrill Kunakhovich explores communist Poland and East Germany as laboratories of a transnational “cultural public sphere.” Under regimes that banned free speech, political expression shifted to spaces of art: theaters, galleries, concert halls, and youth clubs. Kyrill Kunakhovich shows how these venues turned into sites of dialogue and contestation. While officials us...
Mar 01, 2023•1 hr 9 min•Ep 185•Transcript available on Metacast On first glance, Soviet hippies would seem to have little in common with right-wing student protestors in West Germany in 1968. Yet as Juliane Fürst and Anna von der Goltz point out, both groups were non-conformists in their respective milieus, and both groups sought to carve out space for individual freedom and expression amid political forces that privileged sacrifices for the common good. Juliane Fürst is the author of Flowers through Concrete: Adventures in Soviet Hippieland. Anna von der Go...
Feb 28, 2023•1 hr 7 min•Ep 226•Transcript available on Metacast This is a continuation of a discussion with Jack Comforty about his book (with Martha Aladjem Bloomfield) The Stolen Narrative of the Bulgarian Jews and the Holocaust (Rowman and Littlefield, 2021). The first part of the discussion is here. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/german-studies
Feb 24, 2023•1 hr 21 min•Ep 370•Transcript available on Metacast Peter Hayes's book Why? Explaining the Holocaust (Norton, 2017) explores one of the most tragic events in human history by addressing eight of the most commonly asked questions about the Holocaust: Why the Jews? Why the Germans? Why murder? Why this swift and sweeping? Why didn't more Jews fight back more often? Why did survival rates diverge? Why such limited help from outside? What legacies, what lessons? An internationally acclaimed scholar, Hayes brings a wealth of research and experience to...
Feb 23, 2023•1 hr 4 min•Ep 177•Transcript available on Metacast Sara Pugach's African Students in East Germany, 1949-1975 (U Michigan Press, 2022)explores the largely unexamined history of Africans who lived, studied, and worked in the German Democratic Republic. African students started coming to the East in 1951 as invited guests who were offered scholarships by the East German government to prepare them for primarily technical and scientific careers once they returned home to their own countries. Drawn from previously unexplored archives in Germany, Ghana...
Feb 17, 2023•1 hr 8 min•Ep 144•Transcript available on Metacast Our People: Discovering Lithuania's Hidden Holocaust (Rowman & Littlefield, 2020) traces the quest for the truth about the Holocaust in Lithuania by two ostensible enemies: Rūta a descendant of the perpetrators, Efraim a descendant of the victims. Rūta Vanagaite, a successful Lithuanian writer, was motivated by her recent discoveries that some of her relatives had played a role in the mass murder of Jews and that Lithuanian officials had tried to hide the complicity of local collaborators. Efrai...
Feb 15, 2023•54 min•Ep 367•Transcript available on Metacast In this podcast episode, Greg Marchildon interviews Mark Celinscak, the author of Kingdom of Night: Witnesses to the Holocaust published by the University of Toronto Press in 2022. Although liberated by British troops, Bergen-Belsen concentration camp was observed by a large number of Canadians who left a sizeable written and photographic record. In addition, war artists such Alex Colville who would become known as Canada’s “painter laureate” sketched and painted the horrific conditions of the p...
Feb 13, 2023•30 min•Ep 18•Transcript available on Metacast The Stolen Narrative of the Bulgarian Jews and the Holocaust (Lexington Books, 2021) collects narratives of Bulgarian Jews who survived the Holocaust. Through the analysis of eye-witness testimonies, archival documents, photographs, and researchers' investigations, the authors weave a complex tapestry of voices that were previously underrepresented, ignored, and denied. Taken together, the collected memories offer an alternative perspective that counters official accounts and corroborates war cr...
Feb 13, 2023•1 hr 26 min•Ep 363•Transcript available on Metacast In the early days of World War II, as Nazi Germany brutally invaded and occupied neighboring countries around Europe, hundreds of Norwegian police officers were commanded to carry out the orders of the Nazi occupiers of their homeland - Norway. They refused. Even under threat of death, they refused. Their refusal led to their imprisonment and their removal from Norway, ultimately to KZ-Stutthof in eastern Poland, where an elaborate network of concentration and death camps had been created mainly...
Feb 12, 2023•2 hr 32 min•Ep 1301•Transcript available on Metacast In Gadamer’s Hermeneutics: Between Phenomenology and Dialectic (Northwestern University Press, 2022), Robert J. Dostal provides a comprehensive and critical account of Hans-Georg Gadamer’s hermeneutical philosophy, arguing that Gadamer’s enterprise is rooted in the thesis that “being that can be understood is language.” He defends Gadamer against charges of linguistic idealism and emphasizes language’s relationship to understanding, though he criticizes Gadamer for too often ignoring the role of...
Feb 07, 2023•45 min•Ep 173•Transcript available on Metacast 
