You probably already know the story of Snow White—as well as Little Red Riding Hood, Briar Rose, The Frog Prince, and so many others. These tales have a rich history of oral storytelling. They’ve travelled through culture, adapted and readapted in each retelling and reaching as far as the popular Disney movies that our kids watch over and over. Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm saw the power of this folklore and made it their life’s mission to compile and preserve it. But while we tend to think of Grimms’...
Nov 02, 2022•34 min•Ep 68•Transcript available on Metacast When Thomas Mann published The Magic Mountain in 1924, tuberculosis had a deadly hold on Europe and the United States, killing one in seven adults in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. If that wasn’t enough, Mann’s writing was interrupted by the First World War, so it took him twelve years to finish the book. Mann was a modern, experimental writer who wrote about the major issues of his time—not only the war and the pandemic, but also industrialization, class resentment, and rising national...
Nov 01, 2022•29 min•Ep 67•Transcript available on Metacast Nancy November's edited volume String Quartets in Beethoven's Europe (Academic Studies Press, 2022) is the first detailed study of string quartets in late-eighteenth- and early-nineteenth-century Europe. It brings together the work of nine scholars who explore little-studied aspects of this multi-faceted genre. Together, this book’s chapters deal with compositional responses to Beethoven’s string quartets and the prestige of the genre; varied compositional practices in string quartet writing, wi...
Oct 31, 2022•31 min•Ep 172•Transcript available on Metacast The Commodification Gap: Gentrification and Public Policy in London, Berlin and St. Petersburg (Wiley, 2022) provides an insightful institutionalist perspective on the field of gentrification studies. The book explores the relationship between the operation of gentrification and the institutions underpinning - but also influencing and restricting - it in three neighborhoods in London, Berlin and St. Petersburg. Matthias Bernt demonstrates how different institutional arrangements have resulted in...
Oct 28, 2022•56 min•Ep 4•Transcript available on Metacast When reading a crime novel, we usually learn the crime within the first few page turns; the trick is discovering the perpetrator. Perhaps this is what makes Franz Kafka’s 1914 book The Trial so haunting—the crime itself is never revealed. Kafka was born in the Austro-Hungarian Empire in 1883 and died in 1924, never experiencing the Nazis or Hitler’s totalitarian rise to power. Yet his book seems to prophesize the most dangerous aspects of unchecked bureaucracy, legal systems, and arbitrary power...
Oct 27, 2022•31 min•Ep 64•Transcript available on Metacast An alienated society divided into groups and classes suspicious of one another does not pose an especially great problem for an authoritarian regime that does not legitimize itself through fair elections. In contrast, democratic institutions presuppose a consensus about obeying common “rules of the game” and rely on a culture of trust and reciprocity. For democratic consolidation, citizens must respect and participate in shared democratic institutions. For instance, they should trust courts as t...
Oct 25, 2022•59 min•Ep 178•Transcript available on Metacast What do citizens do in response to threats to democracy? Citizenship in Hard Times: How Ordinary People Respond to Democratic Threat (Cambridge UP, 2022) examines the mass politics of civic obligation in the US, UK, and Germany. Exploring threats like foreign interference in elections and polarization, Sara Wallace Goodman shows that citizens respond to threats to democracy as partisans, interpreting civic obligation through a partisan lens that is shaped by their country's political institution...
Oct 24, 2022•57 min•Ep 626•Transcript available on Metacast Robert Hutchinson's After Nuremberg: American Clemency for Nazi War Criminals (Yale UP, 2022) is about the fleeting nature of American punishment for German war criminals convicted at the twelve Nuremberg trials of 1946–1949. Because of repeated American grants of clemency and parole, ninety-seven of the 142 Germans convicted at the Nuremberg trials, many of them major offenders, regained their freedom years, sometimes decades, ahead of schedule. High-ranking Nazi plunderers, kidnappers, slave l...
Oct 24, 2022•58 min•Ep 140•Transcript available on Metacast While German unification promised a new historical beginning, it also stirred discussions about contemporary Germany's Nazi past and ideas of citizenship and belonging in a changing Europe. Minority Discourses in Germany Since 1990 explores the intersections and divergences between Black German, Turkish German, and German Jewish experiences, with reflections on the evolving academic paradigms with which these are studied. Informed by comparative approaches, the volume investigates social and aes...
Oct 21, 2022•1 hr 3 min•Ep 141•Transcript available on Metacast Carl von Clausewitz wrote On War in 1832 after experiencing the Napoleonic wars. The eight books of this text contain Clausewitz’s theory of war. In it, he addresses the relationships between war and policy, tactics and strategy. A basic textbook in military academies, this book is read by both military strategists and political scientists. And it can be interpreted in two very different, but accurate ways. Gil-li Vardi is a military historian and visiting scholar at Stanford University where sh...
Oct 18, 2022•30 min•Ep 57•Transcript available on Metacast Immanuel Kant’s early work wasn’t much to write home about. But as his career developed, Kant published incredible works of philosophy that continue to challenge and influence our greatest thinkers. In 1785, he published the Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals and challenged the foundations of human value. Professor Richard Bourke untangles this complex work and discusses how Kant—whether we realize it or not—has permeated our culture. Richard Bourke is a professor of the History of Politica...
Oct 17, 2022•33 min•Ep 56•Transcript available on Metacast In 1951, following the Holocaust and Second World War, Hannah Arendt wrote The Origins of Totalitarianism. Arendt’s aim was in part to document and reflect on the atrocities that had occurred. But more importantly, she wanted to expose the elements of the human condition that enabled those atrocities to happen as well as the tools societies can use to fight totalitarian regimes. Amir Eshel is a professor of German Studies and Comparative Literature at Stanford University. He is the author of Poe...
Oct 11, 2022•30 min•Ep 52•Transcript available on Metacast Selling your soul to the devil in exchange for your deepest desire is a common theme in many western stories. The origins of this theme can be traced back to the German legend of Faust. The most well known version today is an epic poem, Faust, written by German poet Johann Wolfgang von Goethe. Part of the reason Faust continues to resonate with audiences is that everyone can relate to this feeling of striving against our own human limitations. John Hamilton is a professor of Comparative Literatu...
Oct 05, 2022•33 min•Ep 48•Transcript available on Metacast In The Metabolic Museum (Hatje Cantz, 2020), Clémentine Deliss, a curator, researcher, and former director of the Frankfurt Weltkulturen Museum, explores possible functions for anthropological museums in a postcolonial culture. Anthropological museums in Europe, as products of imperialism, have been compelled to legitimate themselves because the very basis of their exhibitions, the history of their collections, came about all too often through colonial appropriation and outright theft. In this b...
Oct 04, 2022•1 hr 14 min•Ep 121•Transcript available on Metacast Shadowland: The Story of Germany Told by Its Prisoners (Reaktion Books, 2022) is a history of modern Germany told not through the lives of its leaders, but its lawbreakers. As Nelson Mandela said, “a nation should not be judged by how it treats its highest citizens, but its lowest ones.” Shadowland tells the sometimes inspiring, often painful stories of Germany’s prisoners, and thereby shines new light on Germany itself. The story begins at the end of the Second World War, in a defeated country ...
Oct 03, 2022•45 min•Ep 138•Transcript available on Metacast In 1930, about 750,000 Jews called Romania home. At the end of World War II, approximately half of them survived. Only recently, after the fall of Communism, are details of the history of the Holocaust in Romania coming to light. In The Romanian Orthodox Church and the Holocaust (Indiana UP, 2017), Ion Popa explores this history by scrutinizing the role of the Romanian Orthodox Church from 1938 to the present day. Popa unveils and questions whitewashing myths that covered up the role of the chur...
Oct 03, 2022•2 hr 2 min•Ep 320•Transcript available on Metacast Royal Childhood and Child Kingship: Boy Kings in England, Scotland, France and Germany, c. 1050–1262 (Cambridge University Press, 2022) refines adult-focused perspectives on medieval rulership. Dr. Emily Joan Ward exposes the problematic nature of working from the assumption that kingship equated to adult power. Children's participation and political assent could be important facets of the day-to-day activities of rule, as this study shows through an examination of royal charters, oaths to young...
Sep 30, 2022•1 hr 6 min•Ep 10•Transcript available on Metacast German ambitions to transform Southwest Africa in the early part of the twentieth century were futile and resulted in the widespread death and suffering of indigenous populations. For years colonists wrestled ocean waters, desert landscapes, and widespread aridity as they tried to reach inland in their effort to turn outwardly barren lands into a profitable settler colony. In Environing Empire: Nature, Infrastructure and the Making of German Southwest Africa (Berghahn Books, 2022), Martin Kalb o...
Sep 21, 2022•54 min•Ep 139•Transcript available on Metacast Capitalism in Chaos: How the Business Elites of Europe Prospered in the Era of the Great War (Cornell UP, 2022) explores an often-overlooked consequence and paradox of the First World War—the prosperity of business elites and bankers in service of the war effort during the destruction of capital and wealth by belligerent armies. This study of business life amid war and massive geopolitical changes follows industrialists and policymakers in Central Europe as the region became crucially important ...
Sep 20, 2022•58 min•Ep 173•Transcript available on Metacast At the turn of the twentieth century, depictions of the colonized world were prevalent throughout the German metropole. Tobacco advertisements catered to the erotic gaze of imperial enthusiasts with images of Ovaherero girls, and youth magazines allowed children to escape into "exotic domains" where their imaginations could wander freely. While racist beliefs framed such narratives, the abundance of colonial imaginaries nevertheless compelled German citizens and settlers to contemplate the world...
Sep 20, 2022•1 hr•Ep 137•Transcript available on Metacast By most accounts, the twentieth century was not kind to utopian thought. The violence of two world wars, Cold War anxieties, and a widespread sense of crisis after the 1973 global oil shock appeared to doom dreams of a better world. The eventual victory of capitalism and, seemingly, liberal democracy relieved some fears but exchanged them for complacency and cynicism. Not, however, in West Germany. In Sustainable Utopias: The Art and Politics of Hope in Germany (Harvard UP, 2022), Jennifer Allen...
Sep 14, 2022•1 hr 15 min•Ep 136•Transcript available on Metacast Hannah Arendt said that she had one life-long “best friend.” That was Rachel Varnhagen, a Jewish woman who lived in Enlightenment-era Berlin around 1800 and died 73 years before Arendt was born, in 1906. Arendt wrote her first book, a startlingly original literary biography of Varnhagen who founded one of the most celebrated yet short-lived salons in Enlightenment era Prussia. I spoke with Courtney Blair Hodrick, a doctoral candidate completing a book-long study of Arendt, and Professor Amir Esh...
Sep 12, 2022•1 hr 29 min•Ep 126•Transcript available on Metacast Earlier this month, U.S. President Joe Biden signed the CHIPS and Science Act, a bill purportedly meant to revive U.S. dominance in research and development. “We used to rank number one in the world in research and development; now we rank number nine,” Biden said at the signing ceremony. “China was number eight decades ago; now they are number two.” And a recent study from Japan’s science ministry reported that China now leads the world not just in quantity of scientific research, but in qualit...
Sep 08, 2022•47 min•Ep 99•Transcript available on Metacast Scottish philosopher David Hume thought that rationalism didn’t work at all. German philosopher Immanuel Kant thought rationalism didn’t work by itself. Critique of Pure Reason, the first in a three-part project, is Kant’s attempt to join the beliefs of Hume with the beliefs of the rationalists. In his system, thoughts, experience, physics, morality, political and religious questions all exist in relation to one another. It wasn’t a takedown of reason; it was an investigation. Professor Michael ...
Sep 07, 2022•25 min•Ep 28•Transcript available on Metacast From one of the world's leading economists, a grand narrative of the century that made us richer than ever, yet left us unsatisfied Before 1870, humanity lived in dire poverty, with a slow crawl of invention offset by a growing population. Then came a great shift: invention sprinted forward, doubling our technological capabilities each generation and utterly transforming the economy again and again. Our ancestors would have presumed we would have used such powers to build utopia. But it was not ...
Sep 05, 2022•1 hr•Ep 39•Transcript available on Metacast When the Germans requested an armistice in October 1918, it was a shock to the Allied political and military leadership. They had been expecting, and planning for, the war to continue into 1919, the year they hoped to achieve a complete military victory over the Central Powers. In Coalition Strategy and the End of the First World War: The Supreme War Council and War Planning, 1917-1918" (Cambridge UP, 2019), Meighen McCrae illuminates how, throughout this planning process, the Supreme War Counci...
Sep 01, 2022•1 hr 12 min•Ep 122•Transcript available on Metacast 'Theory' - a magical glow has emanated from this word since the sixties. Theory was more than just a succession of ideas: it was an article of faith, a claim to truth, a lifestyle. It spread among its adherents in cheap paperbacks and triggered heated debates in seminar rooms and cafés. The Frankfurt School, Structuralism, Post-Structuralism, Adorno, Derrida, Foucault: these and others were the exotic schools and thinkers whose ideas were being devoured by young minds. But where did the fascinat...
Sep 01, 2022•1 hr 3 min•Ep 147•Transcript available on Metacast Play is an essential part of childhood. But according to German philosopher Johann Friedrich von Schiller’s treatise “On the Aesthetic Education of Man,” play was a key part of adulthood, too. In fact, in this collection of letters, Schiller claimed that the only way we could achieve utopia was by making play a central aspect of society. Professor Doris Sommer is a professor of Romance Languages and Literatures and African American Studies at Harvard University and Director of the Cultural Agent...
Aug 31, 2022•27 min•Ep 23•Transcript available on Metacast The Brexit debate has been so all-consuming and filled with so much misinformation that many Brits and others can overlook some the challenges facing the European Union itself. Looked at in broad terms, it has been an astonishingly successful political project, having delivered 70 years of peace and prosperity. But what lies ahead? What issues does it need to tackle to maintain that kind of success? Luuk van Middelaar is a Dutch historian, Professor of EU law at Leiden University. He has worked ...
Aug 30, 2022•48 min•Ep 28•Transcript available on Metacast The 1929 encounter between Ernst Cassirer and Martin Heidegger in Davos, Switzerland is considered one of the most important intellectual debates of the twentieth century and a founding moment of continental philosophy. At the same time, many commentators have questioned the philosophical profundity and coherence of the actual debate. In Cassirer and Heidegger in Davos: The Philosophical Arguments (Cambridge UP, 2022), the first comprehensive philosophical analysis of the Davos debate, Simon Tru...
Aug 22, 2022•1 hr 1 min•Ep 154•Transcript available on Metacast 
