In her new book, West Germany and Israel: Foreign Relations, Domestic Politics and the Cold War (Cambridge University Press, 2019), Carole Fink examines the relationship between West Germany and Israel. By the late 1960s, West Germany and Israel were moving in almost opposite diplomatic directions in a political environment dominated by the Cold War. The Federal Republic launched ambitious policies to reconcile with its Iron Curtain neighbors, expand its influence in the Arab world, and promote ...
Apr 07, 2020•1 hr 2 min•Ep 85•Transcript available on Metacast The opposing powers had already suffered casualties on a scale previously unimaginable by October 1914. On both the Western and Eastern fronts elaborate war plans lay in ruins and had been discarded in favour of desperate improvisation. In the West this soon resulted in the remorseless world of the trenches; in the East all eyes were focused on the old, beleaguered Austro-Hungarian fortress of Przemysl. The great siege that unfolded at Przemysl was the longest of the Great War. In the defence of...
Apr 06, 2020•53 min•Ep 717•Transcript available on Metacast We've grown to understand in the past few weeks how worlds can change in just a few days. Peter Fritzsche's new book Hitler's First Hundred Days: When Germans Embraced the Third Reich (Basic Books, 2020) is an extraordinary examination of how, in just a few months, Germans got used to living around, among, and, mostly, in unity with, Nazis. Fritzsche's argument is sophisticated and nuanced. But it's the details of everyday life he provides that make this book stand out. Fritzsche uses diaries, n...
Apr 06, 2020•1 hr 5 min•Ep 113•Transcript available on Metacast Latvia's elegant capital, Riga, is one of Europe's best-kept secrets. Strategically located on the Eastern Baltic coast at the mouth of the River Daugava, Riga was founded in the early 13th century as a trading hub, a military outpost of the Holy Roman Empire, and a base for Roman Catholic prelates to convert both the pagan natives and the Orthodox Christians of Rus. Kevin O'Connor's new book, The House of Hemp and Butter: A History of Old Riga (Northern Illinois University Press, 2019) charts t...
Apr 01, 2020•1 hr 3 min•Ep 62•Transcript available on Metacast Paul Celan's poetry marks the end of European modernism: he is the last poet of the era where the poetic "I" could center a subjective vision of the world through language. Celan bears witness to the Holocaust as the irredeemable rupture in European civilization, but he does so in German, the language of the perpetrators who murdered his parents along with millions of others. How do you bear witness to suffering, murder and loss in the language of the murderers? How can poetry account for the in...
Mar 31, 2020•58 min•Ep 74•Transcript available on Metacast Paradox is a sophisticated kind of magic trick. A magician's purpose is to create the appearance of impossibility, to pull a rabbit from an empty hat. Yet paradox doesn't require tangibles, like rabbits or hats. Paradox works in the abstract, with words and concepts and symbols, to create the illusion of contradiction. There are no contradictions in reality, but there can appear to be. In Sleight of Mind: 75 Ingenious Paradoxes in Mathematics, Physics, and Philosophy (MIT Press, 2020), Matt Cook...
Mar 30, 2020•53 min•Ep 46•Transcript available on Metacast 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 ...
Mar 27, 2020•1 hr 15 min•Ep 81•Transcript available on Metacast Steven Seegel’s Map Men: Transnational Lives and Deaths of Geographers in the Making of East Central Europe (University of Chicago Press, 2018) is an insightful contribution to the history of map making which is written through and by individual geographers/cartographers/map men. The book focuses primarily on four countries: Germany, Hungary, Poland, and Ukraine. When guiding his reader through the entanglements of transnational endeavors of making maps, Seegel zeroes in on personal stories of f...
Mar 24, 2020•47 min•Ep 61•Transcript available on Metacast The former West German chancellor Helmut Schmidt grew up as a devout Anglophile, yet he clashed heavily and repeatedly with his British counterparts Wilson, Callaghan, and Thatcher during his time in office between 1974 and 1982. Helmut Schmidt and British-German Relations: A European Misunderstanding (Cambridge University Press, 2019) looks at Schmidt's personal experience to explore how and why Britain and Germany rarely saw eye to eye over European integration, uncovering the two countries' d...
Mar 19, 2020•38 min•Ep 707•Transcript available on Metacast In her new book, Women Doctors in Weimar and Nazi Germany: Maternalism, Eugenics and Professional Identity (University of Toronto Press, 2019), Melissa Kravetz examines how German women physicians gained a foothold in the medical profession during the Weimar and Nazi periods, Women Doctors in Weimar and Nazi Germany reveals the continuity in rhetoric, strategy, and tactics of female doctors who worked under both regimes. Additionally, she explains how and why women occupied particular fields wit...
Mar 17, 2020•1 hr•Ep 84•Transcript available on Metacast In A Specter Haunting Europe: The Myth of Judeo-Bolshevism (Harvard University Press, 2018), Paul Hanebrink, Professor of History and Jewish Studies at Rutgers University, traces the complex history of the myth of Judeo-Bolshevism. Hanebrink shows how Fascists, Conservatives and Nazis imagined Jewish Bolsheviks as enemies who crossed borders to subvert order from within and bring destructive ideas from abroad. This is a hundred years history that traces how this myth transformed through the Cold...
Mar 16, 2020•37 min•Ep 182•Transcript available on Metacast How did Catholic mysticism shape politics and religion in 20th-century Germany? What do seers, stigmatics, and Marian apparitions reveal about broader cultural trends? Michael O’Sullivan’s award winning new book examines how longing for the divine paradoxically drove secularism. In Disruptive Power: Catholic Women, Miracles, and Politics in Modern Germany, 1918-1965 (University of Toronto Press, 2018), O’Sullivan shares the stories of women who found agency in religious institutions as conduits ...
Mar 13, 2020•1 hr 18 min•Ep 83•Transcript available on Metacast Who or what originated and/or caused the Great War from breaking out in July 1914? Was it Serbia with its expansionist and aggressive designs on Austria-Hungary? Was it Austria-Hungary itself, unnecessarily plunging itself and the rest of Europe in a futile effort to keep together its tottering Monarchy? Was it Tsarist Russia? Attempting to both expand its influence in the Balkans at the expense of both Austria and Germany and at the very same time, seeking to bolster its own tottering monarchy ...
Mar 12, 2020•1 hr 8 min•Ep 13•Transcript available on Metacast In his new book Betrayal in Berlin: The True Story of the Cold War's Most Audacious Espionage Operation (Custom House, 2019), Steve Vogel tells the astonishing true story of the Berlin Tunnel, one of the West’s greatest espionage operations of the Cold War—and the dangerous Soviet mole who betrayed it. Its code name was “Operation Gold,” a wildly audacious CIA plan to construct a clandestine tunnel into East Berlin to tap into critical KGB and Soviet military telecommunication lines. The tunnel,...
Mar 11, 2020•1 hr 2 min•Ep 80•Transcript available on Metacast It's possible to organize a 20th-century German history course around the date 9 November. In 1918, Phillipp Schedemann proclaimed the creation of a new German Republic. In 1989, 9 November saw the opening of the Berlin Wall. In between, in 1938, Krystallnacht began on the night of 9 November. Krystallnacht, as most students of the Holocaust know, was a short, intense period of state-sponsored terror against those Germans identified as Jewish. It marked a dramatic escalation in the persecution o...
Mar 05, 2020•1 hr 1 min•Ep 122•Transcript available on Metacast Learning, innovation and adaptation are not concepts that we necessarily associate with the British Army of the First World War. Yet the need to learn from mistakes, to exploit new opportunities and to adapt to complex and novel situations are always necessary. Learning to Fight: Military Innovation and Change in the British Army, 1914-1918 (Cambridge University Press, 2017), by Dr. Aimée Fox, Lecturer in Defence Studies at King's College London, grapples with this most intriguing of topic, part...
Mar 05, 2020•34 min•Ep 699•Transcript available on Metacast For some time, the German philosopher Martin Heidegger has been treated with a certain level of skepticism because of his engagement with the Nazi party, a skepticism that has resurfaced with the publication of the Black Notebooks, private journals he kept throughout the last several decades of his life. In his new book Time and Trauma: Thinking Through Heidegger in the Thirties (Rowman and Littlefield, 2020), Richard Polt starts by taking a close look at his Being and Time (1927), followed b...
Mar 04, 2020•58 min•Ep 155•Transcript available on Metacast While armies have seized enemy records and rare texts as booty throughout history, it was only during World War II that an unlikely band of librarians, archivists, and scholars traveled abroad to collect books and documents to aid the military cause. Galvanized by the events of war into acquiring and preserving the written word, as well as providing critical information for intelligence purposes, these American civilians set off on missions to gather foreign publications and information across E...
Mar 04, 2020•35 min•Ep 697•Transcript available on Metacast How does the world of book reviews work? In Inside the Critics’ Circle: Book Reviewing in Uncertain Times (Princeton University Press, 2020), Phillipa Chong, assistant professor in sociology at McMaster University, provides a unique sociological analysis of how critics confront the different types of uncertainty associated with their practice. The book explores how reviewers get matched to books, the ethics and etiquette of negative reviews and ‘punching up’, along with professional identities a...
Feb 25, 2020•42 min•Ep 154•Transcript available on Metacast Alex J. Kay (senior lecture of History at Potsdam University in Berlin) and David Stahel (senior lecturer in History at the University of New South Wales in Canberra) have edited a groundbreaking series of articles on German mass killing and violence during World War II. Four years in the making, this collection of articles spans the breadth of research on these topics and includes some non-English speaking scholars for the first time in a work of this magnitude. Mass Violence in Nazi-Occupied E...
Feb 11, 2020•42 min•Ep 110•Transcript available on Metacast If you’re a grad student facing the ugly reality of finding a tenure-track job, you could easily be forgiven for thinking about a career change. However, if you’ve spent the last several years working on a PhD, or if you’re a faculty member whose career has basically consisted of higher ed, switching isn’t so easy. PhD holders are mostly trained to work as professors, and making easy connections to other careers is no mean feat. Because the people you know were generally trained to do the same s...
Jan 30, 2020•38 min•Ep 103•Transcript available on Metacast Holocaust research tends to concentrate on certain geographic regions. We know much about the Holocaust in Poland, Germany and Western Europe. We are learning more and more about the 'Holocaust by Bullets' in the territories of the Soviet Union. This is obviously a good thing. But that emphasis leaves us knowing much less about other regions in Europe. In particular we know less about those areas annexed or subordinated to Germany before the outbreak of war in September of 1939. Wolf Gruner has ...
Jan 23, 2020•1 hr 3 min•Ep 109•Transcript available on Metacast How did the Iron Curtain shape the Federal Republic of Germany? How did the internal border become a proving ground for rival ideologies? West Germany and the Iron Curtain: Environment, Economy, and Culture in the Borderlands (Oxford University Press 2019) explores these battles in the most sensitive geographic spaces of the Federal Republic. Join us for a conversation with Astrid M. Eckert illuminating how the border reflected Cold War debates back to society in ways that continue to shape Germ...
Jan 22, 2020•1 hr 3 min•Ep 82•Transcript available on Metacast In the years following Hitler’s rise to power, German Jews faced increasingly restrictive antisemitic laws, and many responded by fleeing to more tolerant countries. Cities of Refuge: German Jews in London and New York, 1935-1945 (SUNY Press, 2019), compares the experiences of Jewish refugees who immigrated to London and New York City by analyzing letters, diaries, newspapers, organizational documents, and oral histories. Lori Gemeiner-Bihler examines institutions, neighborhoods, employment, lan...
Jan 16, 2020•1 hr 9 min•Ep 179•Transcript available on Metacast In Thomas Mann's War: Literature, Politics, and the World Republic of Letters (Cornell University Press, 2019), Tobias Boes traces how the acclaimed and bestselling author became one of America's most prominent anti-fascists and the spokesperson for a German cultural ideal that Nazism had perverted. Thomas Mann, winner of the 1929 Nobel Prize in literature and author of such world-renowned novels as Buddenbrooks and The Magic Mountain, began his self-imposed exile in the United States in 1938, h...
Jan 14, 2020•2 hr 30 min•Ep 679•Transcript available on Metacast Given the overwhelming amount of books printed in the past ten years on various (usually rather obscure) aspects of Sir Winston Churchill’s glorious career, it is of great interest that so little has been written about his activity during the Phoney War phase of the Second World War (1 September 1939-10 May 1940). It is this dearth of scholarship on Churchill and the Phoney War, that Australian scholar Dr. Graham T. Clews, author of a previous study on Churchill and the Dardanelle campaign, aims...
Jan 13, 2020•1 hr 1 min•Ep 677•Transcript available on Metacast In pre-emancipation Europe, most Jews followed Jewish law most of the time, but by the turn of the twentieth century, a new secular Jewish identity had begun to take shape. How did Jews go from lives organized by synagogues, shul, and mikvehs to lives that were conducted in Hillel houses, JCCs, Katz's, and even Chabad? To what extent did their new lives remain explicitly Jewish? In Homes Away from Home: Jewish Belonging in 20th-Century Paris, Berlin, and St. Petersburg (Stanford University Press...
Jan 09, 2020•1 hr 10 min•Ep 178•Transcript available on Metacast Every generation returns to the titanic heroes and villains of the 20th century. And every generation produces a new set of biographies--often immense--in an effort to understand the role of that eras main figures. In the past three years, three important new books have reassessed Hitler's life, beliefs and actions. Two of the authors, Volker Ulrich and Peter Longerich, are historians of Germany who are German. The third, our guest for today's interview, is British. In his new book Hitler: A Glo...
Jan 08, 2020•29 min•Ep 107•Transcript available on Metacast The eminent scholar of Neo-Kantianism, Frederick Beiser, has struck again, this time bringing his considerable analytical powers and erudition to the task of intellectual biography. For those of you aware of the distinguished philosophical career of Hermann Cohen (1859 - 1918) and the absence of an intellectual biography in English, Beiser’s scholarship is a long time coming. Though Cohen scholarship has experienced a mini-renaissance in the last thirty years in the English speaking world, knowl...
Jan 06, 2020•55 min•Ep 175•Transcript available on Metacast During Europe’s 2015 refugee crisis, more than a hundred thousand asylum seekers from the western Balkans sought refuge in Germany. This was nothing new, however; immigrants from the Balkans have streamed into West Germany in massive numbers throughout the long postwar era. In his book Memory, Politics, and Yugoslav Migrations to Postwar Germany (Indiana University Press, 2018), Christopher A. Molnar tells the story of how Germans received the many thousands of Yugoslavs who migrated as politica...
Jan 03, 2020•1 hr 10 min•Ep 81•Transcript available on Metacast 
