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 Based entirely on previously unpublished sources, the book is the synthesis of six areas of research: Hitler’s Luftwaffe, the hunt and environmental history, military geography,...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 The Jewish Reformation: Bible Translation and Middle-Class German Judaism as Spiritual Enterprise (Oxford University Press, 2021) was the 2022 winner of the AHA’s Dorothy Rosenberg Prize in the history of Jewish diaspora. In it, Michach Gottlieb looks at Bible translations by Mendelssohn, Leopold Zunz, and Samson Raphael Hirsch. Gottlieb argues that each translator sought a "reformation" of Judaism along bourgeois lines, which involved aligning Judaism with a Protestant concept of religion. Mich...
Feb 04, 2023•40 min•Ep 360•Transcript available on Metacast The year 1943 was a pivotal one on the Eastern Front during World War II. The Axis had suffered a catastrophic defeat at the battle of Stalingrad earlier in the year, but wished to attempt to regain the initiative later in the summer by launching a massive offensive code-named "Operation Citadel" at the Red Army at Kursk. The Red Army heavily entrenched themselves and waited for the Germans to attack. What followed was one of the most dramatic battles of the Second World War. This is the subject...
Feb 04, 2023•1 hr 13 min•Ep 133•Transcript available on Metacast Chris Webb's The Belzec Death Camp: History, Biographies, Remembrance (Ibidem, 2016) is a comprehensive account of the Belzec death camp in Poland, which was the first death camp to use static gas chambers as part of the Aktion Reinhardt mass murder program. It covers the construction and the development of the mechanisms of mass murder. The story is painstakingly told from all sides—the Jewish inmates, the perpetrators, and the Polish inhabitants of the village of Belzec, who lived near the fac...
Jan 31, 2023•39 min•Ep 356•Transcript available on Metacast Adorno and the Ban on Images (Bloomsbury, 2022) upends some of the myths that have come to surround the work of the philosopher Theodor W. Adorno – not least amongst them, his supposed fatalism. Sebastian Truskolaski argues that Adorno's writings allow us to address what is arguably the central challenge of modern philosophy: how to picture a world beyond suffering and injustice without, at the same time, betraying its vital impulse. By re-appraising Adorno's writings on politics, philosophy, an...
Jan 30, 2023•59 min•Ep 351•Transcript available on Metacast The Holocaust in Romania: The Destruction of Jews and Roma Under the Antonescu Regime, 1940-1944 (Rowman & Littlefield, 2022), Radu Ioanid explores in great detail the physical destruction of Romania's Jewish and Roma communities, including the pogroms of Bucharest and Iaşi as well as the deportations and the massacres from Bessarabia, Bukovina, and Transnistria. Based on thousands of archival documents and testimonies of survivors, The Holocaust in Romania sheds new light on Romania's prefascis...
Jan 28, 2023•1 hr 23 min•Ep 354•Transcript available on Metacast The Aryan Jesus: Christian Theologians and the Bible in Nazi Germany (Princeton UP, 2010) documents the process, and relative ease, with which institutions of higher learning and the religious establishment, can be corrupted by political ideology and power. In Germany of the 1930’s the thin cloak of religion covered and sanitized the murderous evil of Naziism. Was Jesus a Nazi? During the Third Reich, German Protestant theologians, motivated by racism and tapping into traditional Christian anti-...
Jan 27, 2023•1 hr 6 min•Ep 88•Transcript available on Metacast In the midst of the Second World War, Central and East European governments-in-exile struggled to make their voices heard as they reported back to the Allies and sought to reach mass Allied publics with eyewitness testimony of German atrocities committed in their respective homelands. The most striking case is that of Poland, whose wartime exile government served as the principal conduit for first-hand testimony (much of which was initially ignored, questioned, or suppressed by the major Allies)...
Jan 25, 2023•1 hr 4 min•Ep 183•Transcript available on Metacast Wolfgang Muller, Marriage Litigation in the Western Church, 1215- 1517 (Cambridge University Press, 2021). From the establishment of a coherent doctrine on sacramental marriage to the eve of the Reformation, late medieval church courts were used for marriage cases in a variety of ways. Ranging widely across Western Europe, including the Upper and Lower Rhine regions, England, Italy, Catalonia, and Castile, this study explores the stark discrepancies in practice between the North of Europe and th...
Jan 21, 2023•52 min•Ep 23•Transcript available on Metacast Why is it so hard for left wing parties in the West to win elections? Some such as the UK Labour Party have headed to the centre. The history of Labour since 1979 tells the story – their record goes lost, lost, lost, lost, Blair, Blair, Blair, lost, lost, lost, lost. But what does heading the centre consist of? And are their alternative strategies? Listen to Owen Bennett Jones discuss leftist parties and what they need to do to win with Eunice Goes of the Richmond American International Universi...
Jan 20, 2023•49 min•Ep 47•Transcript available on Metacast Stuart Carroll's Enmity and Violence in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge University Press, 2023) transforms our understanding of Europe between 1500 and 1800 by exploring how ordinary people felt about their enemies and the violence it engendered. Enmity, a state or feeling of mutual opposition or hostility, became a major social problem during the transition to modernity. He examines how people used the law, and how they characterised their enmities and expressed their sense of justice or injusti...
Jan 16, 2023•52 min•Ep 28•Transcript available on Metacast Fort Breendonk was built in the early 1900s to protect Antwerp, Belgium, from possible German invasion. Damaged at the start of World War I, it fell into disrepair . . . until the Nazis took it over after their invasion of Belgium in 1940. Never designated an official concentration camp by the SS and instead labeled a "reception" camp where prisoners were held until they were either released or transported, Breendonk was no less brutal. About 3,600 prisoners were held there--just over half of th...
Jan 16, 2023•1 hr 9 min•Ep 343•Transcript available on Metacast What does it mean when a radical understanding of National Socialism is inextricably embedded in the work of the twentieth century's most important philosopher? Martin Heidegger's sympathies for the conservative revolution and National Socialism have long been well known. As the rector of the University of Freiburg in the early 1930s, he worked hard to reshape the university in accordance with National Socialist policies. He also engaged in an all-out struggle to become the movement's philosophi...
Jan 10, 2023•2 hr 54 min•Ep 129•Transcript available on Metacast How do states and societies confront the legacies of war and occupation, and what do truth, guilt, and justice mean in that process? In Ghosts of War: Nazi Occupation and Its Aftermath in Soviet Belarus (Cornell UP, 2022), Franziska Exeler examines people's wartime choices and their aftermath in Belarus, a war-ravaged Soviet republic that was under Nazi occupation during the Second World War. After the Red Army reestablished control over Belarus, one question shaped encounters between the return...
Jan 06, 2023•2 hr 32 min•Ep 182•Transcript available on Metacast In the chaos of the end of WWI, the Russian Civil War, and a brief period of Ukrainian independence there occurred a series of massacres of German Mennonites. Sean Patterson's recent book Makhno and Memory: Anarchist and Mennonite Narratives of Ukraine's Civil War, 1917-1921 (University of Manitoba Press, 2020) analyzes the varying historical memories of these massacres. Patterson's book raises numerous and timely issues of national memory and identity, and contains much poignant reflection on t...
Dec 28, 2022•1 hr 9 min•Ep 213•Transcript available on Metacast Among the Jewish writers who emigrated from Eastern Europe to France in the 1910s and 1920s, a number chose to switch from writing in their languages of origin to writing primarily in French, a language that represented both a literary center and the promises of French universalism. But under the Nazi occupation of France from 1940 to 1944, these Jewish émigré writers—among them Irène Némirovsky, Benjamin Fondane, Romain Gary, Jean Malaquais, and Elsa Triolet—continued to write in their adopted ...
Dec 28, 2022•1 hr 14 min•Ep 340•Transcript available on Metacast 
