New Books in German Studies

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Episodes

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Episodes

Michaela Hoenicke, “Know Your Enemy: American Debate on Nazism, 1933-1945” (Cambridge UP, 2009)

To Americans, Hitler et al. were a confusing bunch. The National Socialists were Germans, and Germans had a reputation for refinement, industry, and order. After all, many Americans were of German descent, and they surely thought of themselves as refined, industrious, and orderly. The Nazis, however, seemed un-German in important ways: they were, apparently, racist thugs bent on destroying democracy, conquering Europe, and murdering millions of innocents in the name of “purity.” If the Nazis wer...

Nov 29, 2009•1 hr 17 min•Transcript available on Metacast

Stevan Allen, “Roaming Ghostland: The Final Days of East Germany” (Xlibris, 2010)

We like to think of countries as permanent fixtures. They aren’t. They come and go. In 1989, a place called the Deutsche Demokratische Republik, or East Germany, was going. It was never really an “ordinary” place. In the West but also the East; sovereign but not sovereign; German but not German; poor but rich. I could go on. It was the unnatural product of the Cold War, so when the Cold War ended it ended as well. But it didn’t just blink out of existence. Not at all. For a brief period–roughly ...

Oct 30, 2009•1 hr 10 min•Transcript available on Metacast

Peter Fritzsche, “Life and Death in the Third Reich” (Harvard UP, 2008)

Germans and Nazis. They were different things, right? I mean some Germans were members of the Party and believed all it said and some were not and believed none of what it said. True enough, but actually the relationship between the identity “German” and “Nazi” was a bit more complicated than “this” and “that.” The two were mixed, as Peter Fritzsche shows in his fascinating new book Life and Death in the Third Reich (Harvard UP, 2008). Peter looks at the artifacts left to us by ordinary Germans ...

Sep 25, 2009•1 hr 6 min•Transcript available on Metacast

Alexander Watson, “Enduring the Great War: Combat, Morale and Collapse in the German and British Armies, 1914-1918” (Cambridge UP, 2008)

It’s a question I’ve long asked myself: Why and how did common soldiers fight for so long in the First World War? The conditions were awful, death was all around, and there was no real hope of a “breakthrough” that might bring victory. It was simply one long hard slog to nowhere. Why not just give up? Thanks to Alexander Watson’s insightful Enduring the Great War. Combat, Morale and Collapse in the German and British Armies, 1914-1918 (Cambridge, 2008) I now have a better understanding of what a...

Aug 06, 2009•1 hr 4 min•Transcript available on Metacast

Giles MacDonogh, “After the Reich: The Brutal History of the Allied Occupation” (Basic Books, 2007)

Many years ago I had the opportunity to spend a summer in Germany, more specifically in a tiny town on the Rhine near Koblenz. The family I stayed with looked for all the world like typical Rhinelanders. They even had their own small Weingut where they made a nice Riesling. But they were not originally from the Rhinegau at all. They were from East Prussia, a place where there are no longer any Germans and a place that no longer really exists. They commemorated their erstwhile Heimat by keeping a...

Jun 20, 2009•1 hr 8 min•Transcript available on Metacast

Tony Michels, “Fire in their Hearts: Yiddish Socialists in New York” (Harvard UP, 2005)

I always assumed that the Jews who emigrated from Eastern Europe to New York and created the massive Jewish American labor movement brought their leftist politics with them from the Old Country. But now I know different thanks to Tony Michels’ terrific Fire in their Hearts. Yiddish Socialists in New York (Harvard University Press, 2005). As Tony explains, most of the Yiddish-speaking immigrants who arrived in New York were apolitical, or rather feared politics having come from a regime that puni...

Apr 10, 2009•1 hr 5 min•Transcript available on Metacast

Samuel Kassow, “Who Will Write Our History? Emanuel Ringelblum, the Warsaw Ghetto, and the Oyneg Shabes Archive” (Indiana UP, 2007)

Scholars argue about whether the Holocaust was unprecedented. It’s a difficult question. On the one hand, slaughters litter the pages of history. On the other hand, none of them seem quite as calculated, systematic and horribly efficient as the Nazi murder of the Jews and other “Untermenchen.” One thing, however, is certain: the Holocaust is doubtless the best documented instance of mass murder in world history. The perpetrators were meticulous record keepers, and at the conclusion of the war ma...

Jan 30, 2009•52 min•Transcript available on Metacast

Mark Mazower, “Hitler’s Empire: Nazi Rule in Occupied Europe” (Penguin, 2008)

It’s curious how historical images become stereotyped over time. One hears the word “Nazi,” and immediately the Holocaust springs to mind. This reflexive association is probably a good thing, as it reminds us of the dangers of ethnic hatred in an era that knows it too well. But in another way the Nazi = Holocaust equation obscures part of the story of Hitler’s insanity and that of all genocidal madness. For as Mark Mazower points out in his excellent new book Hitler’s Empire: Nazi Rule in Occupi...

Oct 02, 2008•47 min•Transcript available on Metacast

Robert Gellately, “Lenin, Stalin, and Hitler: The Age of Social Catastrophe” (Knopf, 2007)

Today we’re pleased to feature an interview with Robert Gellately of Florida State University. Professor Gellately is a distinguished and widely read historian of Germany, with a particular focus on the Nazi period. He’s the author of a number of path-breaking books, including The Politics of Economic Despair: Shopkeepers and German Politics, 1890-1914 (Sage Publications, 1974), The Gestapo and German Society: Enforcing Racial Policy, 1933-1945 (Oxford University Press, 1990), and Backing Hitler...

Apr 18, 2008•1 hr 12 min•Transcript available on Metacast