In How the Wise Men Got to Chelm: The Life and Times of a Yiddish Folk Tradition (New York University Press, 2017), Ruth von Bernuth, Associate Professor in the Department of Germanic and Slavic Languages and Literatures and Director of the Carolina Center for Jewish Studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, presents the first in-depth study of Chelm literature and its relationship to its literary precursors. The Chelm stories surrounding the ‘wise men’ (fools) of this town con...
Apr 02, 2018•32 min•Transcript available on Metacast What did it mean to be perceived as Jewish or non-Jewish in Weimar Germany? How, in an age of growing antisemitism, was Jewishness revealed, or made invisible? Kerry Wallach of Gettysburg College, explores these questions in her new book, Passing Illusions: Jewish Visibility in Weimar Germany (University of Michigan Press, 2017). Wallach examines an array of cultural texts including film, artwork, periodicals, and fiction in order to determine the different circumstances in which individuals sou...
Mar 29, 2018•41 min•Transcript available on Metacast In his new book Theater of the Maimed: Fictional Characters between Deformation und Destruction in Theatrical Works of the Twentieth and early Twenty-First Centuries (Knigshausen and Neumann, 2015) (Theater der Versehrten: Kunstfiguren zwischen Deformation und Destruktion in Theatertexten des 20. und fruhen 21. Jahrhunderts), Till Nitschmann, a postdoc at the Leibniz University of Hannover, analyzes key German theatrical texts. By finding recurring themes in diverse texts, he develops a model cl...
Mar 23, 2018•15 min•Transcript available on Metacast In her new book, Imagining a Greater Germany: Republican Nationalism and the Idea of Anschluss (Cornell University Press, 2016), Erin Hochman, Associate Professor of Modern German and European History at Southern Methodist University offers a new perspective on state and national building in Germany and Austria during the interwar period. Hochman argues persuasively that nationalism and the goal of redrawing Germany’s borders was not only a goal of the radical right. She looks at how supporters ...
Mar 21, 2018•57 min•Transcript available on Metacast The Weimar Republic was home to the first gay rights movement, led by well-known sexologist Magnus Hirschfeld. It also inspired many literary and cinematic representations of sexual liberation in legendary 1920s Berlin. In her ambitious book, Sex and the Weimar Republic: German Homosexual Emancipation and the Rise of the Nazis (University of Toronto Press, 2015), Laurie Marhoefer revises several assumptions about the sexual politics of Germany during the 1920s and 1930s. She examines how the sex...
Mar 19, 2018•59 min•Transcript available on Metacast In his new book, Wissen um Stimmung (Knowledge of Mood), Sergej Rickenbacher, a post-doc at the University of Aachen, examines two works of Robert Musil from the perspective of knowledge and atmosphere/mood. In doing so, his approach differs from traditional readings of Musil and thus sheds new light on his work. Of particular interest are Rickenbacher’s exploration of the importance of space and fragrances within Musil’s writing. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Su...
Mar 14, 2018•44 min•Transcript available on Metacast Joseph Suss Oppenheimer became the “court Jew” of Carl Alexander, Duke of Wurttemberg in 1733. When Carl Alexander died, Oppenheimer was put on trial and condemned to death for his “misdeeds,” and on February 4, 1738, was hanged in front of a large crowd just outside Stuttgart. He was not allowed to give testimony at his own trial and left no written record of the case; we know little of his biography. Yet he remains an iconic figure to this day, not only as emblematic of the relationship betwee...
Mar 12, 2018•53 min•Transcript available on Metacast In German-Jewish Thought and Its Afterlife: A Tenuous Legacy (Indiana University Press, 2016), Vivian Liska, Professor of German Literature and Director of the Institute of Jewish Studies at the University of Antwerp in Belgium as well as a Distinguished Visiting Professor in the Faculty of the Humanities at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, focuses on the changing form, fate, and function of messianism, law, exile, election and remembrance in three different temporal and intellectual framewor...
Mar 09, 2018•28 min•Transcript available on Metacast Though he never enjoyed the fame of his contemporaries Mozart and Haydn, Antonio Rosetti was a successful composer whose works received a wide audience. In his book, The Career of an Eighteenth-Century Kapellmeister: The Life and Music of Antonio Rosetti (University of Rochester Press, 2014), Sterling Murray provides readers with both an account of Rosetti’s career and a style study of his compositions. As a young man Rosetti found employment as a double bass player at the southern German court ...
Mar 05, 2018•54 min•Transcript available on Metacast In her new book, Autodidacticism, Artistry, Media Practice (Autodidaktik, Artistik, Medienpraktik [Vandenhoeck and Ruprecht, 2016]), Julia Kerscher, postdoc at the University of Tubingen examines the historical development of appearances of dilettantism by analyzing works of Karl Philipp Moritz, Carl Einstein and Thomas Bernhard. She uncovers how the discussion about dilettantism is linked with the question of what is considered to be art and what should be excluded. Moreover, she shows how in t...
Feb 28, 2018•20 min•Transcript available on Metacast How did the Nazi regime respond to protest? How did Hitler’s desire for popular authority shape the relationship between state and society? Nathan Stoltzfus challenges the idea that the Third Reich relied on terror to survive in his new book Hitler’s Compromises: Coercion and Consensus in Nazi Germany (Yale University Press, 2016). By examining how Hitler maintained his popularity with tactical compromises in the face of protest, Nathan shows how the dictatorship sought to gradually change norms...
Feb 26, 2018•54 min•Transcript available on Metacast Historical debates about the actions of the Roman Catholic Church in relationship to the Third Reich have never been restricted to academic presses and journals like so many other topics. Rather several groups of partisans in both Germany and the United States actively followed them in popular books, magazines, and newspapers since the late 1940s. In his new book, The Battle for the Catholic Past in Germany, 1945-1980 (Cambridge University Press, 2017), Mark Edward Ruff explores seven divisive c...
Feb 21, 2018•1 hr 5 min•Transcript available on Metacast How do technological advances and changing archival practices alter historical memory? In what ways have developments in the preservation and dissemination of historical material already impacted how scholars and the public engage with the past? These are questions that Jeffrey Shandler, Professor of Jewish Studies at Rutgers University, grapples with in his new book, Holocaust Memory in the Digital Age: Survivors Stories and New Media Practices (Stanford University Press, 2017) Shandler’s thoug...
Feb 19, 2018•55 min•Transcript available on Metacast The First World War was not limited the trenches on the Western Front. Nor was the system of internment camps it spawned. In his new book, Colonial Captivity during the First World War: Internment and the Fall of the German Empire, 1914-1919 (Cambridge University Press, 2017), Mahon Murphy looks at the experiences of German colonial settlers interned by the Entente Powers, particularly the British, during World War I. Challenging Europe-centric interpretations of the conflict and internment, Mur...
Feb 14, 2018•58 min•Transcript available on Metacast In his new book, The Economy of Ethnic Cleansing: The Transformation of German-Czech Borderlands after World War II (Cambridge University Press, 2017), David Gerlach, Associate Professor of History at Saint Peter’s University, examines the expulsion of nearly 3 million Germans from the Czech-German borderlands. Dr. Gerlach looks extensively at the economic factors that led to the expulsion of Germans from this area. He argues convincingly how the promise of property and social mobility contribut...
Feb 05, 2018•1 hr 1 min•Transcript available on Metacast What if you suddenly discovered a cherished member of your family was a Nazi? How would you make sense of the code of silence that had kept an uncomfortable reality at bay? How would you resolve the wartime suffering of your family with their moral culpability for the Holocaust? Roger Frie explores the thorny issue of historical memory and intergenerational trauma in his new award winning book Not in My Family: German Memory and Responsibility After the Holocaust (Oxford University Press, 2017)....
Jan 30, 2018•1 hr 6 min•Transcript available on Metacast One of the most important developments in Holocaust Studies over the past couple decades has been one of scale. Rather than focus on decision making at the national or regional level, scholars are immersing themselves in the deep history of a small town or camp. In doing so you may miss the debates of diplomats and politicians. But you get a much better idea of how people actually experienced the Holocaust. Omer Bartov’s new book Anatomy of a Genocide: The Life and Death of a Town Called Buczacz...
Jan 30, 2018•1 hr 6 min•Transcript available on Metacast Noam Zadoff begins his biography of Gershon Scholem, one of the 20th century’s greatest scholars and an equally perplexing intellectual, at the point where Scholem ends his own autobiography From Berlin to Jerusalem: Memories of My Youth—with his arrival in Jerusalem in 1923. Gershom Scholem: From Berlin to Jerusalem and Back (Brandeis University Press, 2018) situates Scholem’s thought in the context of his biography, by skillfully reading Scholem’s self-fashioning against the grain and together...
Jan 23, 2018•1 hr 14 min•Transcript available on Metacast In her new book Der bewegende Blick: Literarische Blickinszenierungen der Moderne (Rombach Verlag, 2014)—The Moving View: The Gaze in the Modern German Literature—Margarete Fuchs, a postdoc at the Philipps University of Marburg, examines the role of gaze and looking within modern German literature. By studying various important authors, such as Heinrich Mann, Hugo von Hofmannsthal, Siegfried Kracauer and Walter Benjamin she uncovers several dimensions of the gaze. For example, she points at the ...
Jan 22, 2018•21 min•Transcript available on Metacast Lena Wetenkamp‘s Europe Narrated, Contextualized and Remembered: The Discourse of ‘Europe’ in Contemporary German Literature (Europa erzhalt, verortet, erinnert: Europa-Diskurse in der deutschsprachigen Gegenwartsliteratur (Koenigshausen and Neumann, 2017)) is an analysis of the idea of “Europe” in modern German literature. It not only deals with important issues such as spaces, borders, multilingualism and European identity, but also states that there is in fact something like a European poetic...
Jan 16, 2018•32 min•Transcript available on Metacast In his recent book, Persecution and Rescue: The Politics of the Final Solution in France, 1940-1944 (University of Michigan Press, 2017). Wolfgang Seibel explores the factors that shaped the Holocaust in wartime France. Eschewing the recent emphasis on ideology, Seibel offers a more administrative-science-based analysis, arguing that the fate of the Jews both their persecution and rescue was the result of different agencies pursuing competing aims within the French Power-Sharing Administration. ...
Jan 09, 2018•1 hr 2 min•Transcript available on Metacast Marie von Clausewitz: The Woman Behind the Making of On War (Oxford University Press, 2016) is an important and fascinating book that not only tells the story of a remarkable woman’s life during the tumultuous years of the French Revolution and Restoration. Based on a recently discovered cache of letters between Marie von Clausewitz and her renowned husband, Carl, it also dramatically expands our understanding of the process by which Carl’s famous treatise, On War, came to be. Vanya E. Bellinger...
Jan 03, 2018•41 min•Transcript available on Metacast In his new book, Coming of Age: Constructing and Controlling Youth in Munich, 1942-1973 (Berghan Books, 2016), Martin Kalb, Assistant Professor of History at Bridgewater College examines the construction of youth culture in Munich Germany. Kalb describes constructions of Munich youth in three distinct periods, beginning with the years following the conclusion of World War II, followed by the years of economic stability following the Marshal Plan, finally ending with the protest years culminating...
Jan 03, 2018•45 min•Transcript available on Metacast In her new book Longing for the Good. The Relationship between Literature and Ethics in the Work of Peter Handke (Wilhelm Fink Verlag, 2017), Tanja Angela Kunz, a postdoc at the Humboldt University of Berlin, analyzes the work of the Austrian contemporary writer Peter Handke from a new perspective: By consulting philosophical theories about the relationship between ethics and aesthetics she achieves a new understanding of Handke’s very specific style of writing. Within this context, Kunz’s obser...
Dec 24, 2017•36 min•Transcript available on Metacast The German youth movement of the late Kaiserreich and ill-fated Weimar Republic has been a subject of controversy since its inception. The longing for community that drove the movement, and a sense of shared experience that members found on long hikes to historic sites, has been linked to everything from a revolution in conservative thought to the rise of Nazism. But how did the youth movement see history? Why did hiking become a bridge between the past and the present? What possibilities did me...
Dec 19, 2017•1 hr 3 min•Transcript available on Metacast In his new book, The Malmedy Massacre: The War Crimes Trial Controversy (Harvard University Press, 2017), Steven Remy, professor of history at City University of New York, examines the Malmedy massacre which took place on December 17, 1944 and the trial that followed after the conclusion of World War II. Remy effectively demonstrates how in the decade following the trial how a network of German and American sympathizers succeeded in discrediting the trial. Remy directly looks at the accusations ...
Dec 13, 2017•57 min•Transcript available on Metacast Associate professor of anthropology at the University of Washington Sareeta Amrute has written Encoding Race, Encoding Class: Indian IT Workers in Berlin (Duke University Press, 2016), a study of contemporary capitalism, new forms of work, and the racialized underpinnings of immaterial labor regimes. Amrute conducted research among Indian IT workers —“coders”—who were in Berlin for the short-term under Germany’s Green Card program. Instead of tech workers unmarked by race, class or gender, she i...
Dec 13, 2017•49 min•Transcript available on Metacast In his new book, The Politics of Unreason: The Frankfurt School and the Origins of Modern Antisemitism (SUNY Press, 2017) , Lars Rensmann, Professor of European Politics and Society at the University of Groningen, argues that even scholars of the Frankfurt school have often treated the theme of antisemitism with scant attention. However, as Rensmann argues, the problem of antisemitism had been a central motivating dynamic for their interdisciplinary research, from the very early years of the Ins...
Dec 11, 2017•1 hr 1 min•Transcript available on Metacast In his new book Morality and Literature: A Historical Typology (Wilhelm Fink Verlag, 2013)—in German: Moral und Literatur. Eine historische Typologie—Christian Kirchmeier, post doc at the University of Munich who is currently at Yale for a research stay, examines a change of different moral systems within the course of history. By looking at very many different German literary texts from different centuries he tries to find something which he calls “the historical grammar of moral judgments,” wh...
Dec 01, 2017•30 min•Transcript available on Metacast “Monsters exist, but they are too few in number to be truly dangerous.” Thus begins Guenter Lewy’s latest book, Perpetrators: The World of the Holocaust Killers (Oxford University Press, 2017), a welcome attempt to challenge the idea that all Nazi perpetrators were the same, and that they were all driven by the same bass motivations. Largely a synthesis of material previously only available in German, Lewy presents a typology of perpetrator types and dispels the idea that it was impossible for k...
Nov 29, 2017•41 min•Transcript available on Metacast 
