German Jews in Love: A History (Stanford UP, 2022) explores the dynamic role of love in German-Jewish lives, from the birth of the German Empire in the 1870s, to the 1970s, a generation after the Shoah. During a remarkably turbulent hundred-year period when German Jews experienced five political regimes, rapid urbanization, transformations in gender relations, and war and genocide, the romantic ideals of falling in love and marrying for love helped German Jews to develop a new sense of self. App...
Dec 20, 2024•1 hr 13 min•Ep 588•Transcript available on Metacast The Earth That Modernism Built: Empire and the Rise of Planetary Design (University of Texas Press, 2024) by Dr. Kenny Cupers traces the rise of planetary design to an imperialist discourse about the influence of the earthly environment on humanity. Dr. Cupers argues that to understand how the earth became an object of design, we need to radically shift the terms of analysis. Rather than describing how new design ideas and practices traveled and transformed people and places across the globe, th...
Dec 17, 2024•1 hr 21 min•Ep 1523•Transcript available on Metacast In Embodied Histories: New Womanhood in Vienna, 1894–1934 (University of Chicago Press, 2024) historian Dr. Katya Motyl explores the everyday acts of defiance that formed the basis for new, unconventional forms of womanhood in early twentieth-century Vienna. The figures Dr. Motyl brings back to life defied gender conformity, dressed in new ways, behaved brashly, and expressed themselves freely, overturning assumptions about what it meant to exist as a woman. Dr. Motyl delves into how these women...
Dec 14, 2024•54 min•Ep 1520•Transcript available on Metacast David J Collins, SJ joins Jana Byars to talk about Disenchanting Albert the Great: the Life and Afterlife of a Medieval Magician (Penn State Press, 2024). Albert the Great (1200–1280) was a prominent Dominican friar, a leading philosopher, and the teacher of Thomas Aquinas. He also endorsed the use of magic. Controversial though that stance would have been, Albert was never punished or repudiated for what he wrote. Albert’s reception followed instead a markedly different course, leading ultimate...
Dec 12, 2024•1 hr 7 min•Ep 83•Transcript available on Metacast Spaces of Treblinka: Retracing a Death Camp (U Nebraska Press, 2024) utilizes testimonies, oral histories, and recollections from Jewish, German, and Polish witnesses to create a holistic representation of the Treblinka death camp during its operation. This narrative rejects the historical misconception that Treblinka was an isolated Nazi extermination camp with few witnesses and fewer survivors. Rather than the secret, sanitized site of industrial killing Treblinka was intended to be, Jacob Fla...
Dec 09, 2024•1 hr•Ep 215•Transcript available on Metacast The opening of classified documents from the Soviet era has been dubbed the "archival revolution" due to its unprecedented scale, drama, and impact. With a storyteller's sensibility, in Reading the Archival Revolution: Declassified Stories and Their Challenges (Stanford University Press, 2024), Cristina Vatulescu identifies and takes on the main challenges of reading in these archives. This transnational study foregrounds peripheral Eastern European perspectives and the ethical stakes of archiva...
Dec 08, 2024•47 min•Ep 79•Transcript available on Metacast Richard Evans, author of the acclaimed The Third Reich Trilogy and over two dozen other volumes on modern Europe, is our preeminent scholar of Nazi Germany. Having spent half a century searching for the truths behind one of the most horrifying episodes in human history, in Hitler's People: The Faces of the Third Reich (Penguin Press, 2024), he brings us back to the original site of the Nazi movement: namely, the lives of its most important members. Working in concentric circles out from Hitler a...
Dec 08, 2024•1 hr 6 min•Ep 1516•Transcript available on Metacast The trial of former SS lieutenant and Gestapo chief Klaus Barbie was France's first trial for crimes against humanity. Known as the "Butcher of Lyon" during the Nazi occupation of that city from 1942 to 1944, Barbie tortured, deported, and murdered thousands of Jews and Resistance fighters. Following a lengthy investigation and the overcoming of numerous legal and other obstacles, the trial began in 1987 and attracted global attention. Justice in Lyon: Klaus Barbie and France's First Trial for C...
Dec 06, 2024•1 hr 24 min•Ep 1513•Transcript available on Metacast Today I’m speaking with Jeffrey Pilcher, Professor of Food History at the University of Toronto. We are discussing his new book, Hopped Up: How Travel, Trade, and Taste Made Beer a Global Commodity (Oxford University Press, 2024). While beer, or even alcohol for that matter, is not consumed in many parts of the world, its near universality is still astonishing. Even in the Middle East, where alcohol is largely forbidden, non-alcoholic beer sells well. Perhaps most surprising is that in nearly ev...
Dec 06, 2024•52 min•Ep 17•Transcript available on Metacast Was migration to Germany a blessing or a curse? The main argument of this book is that the Greek state conceived labor migration as a traineeship into Europeanization with its shiny varnish of progress. Jumping on a fully packed train to West Germany meant leaving the past behind. However, the tensed Cold War realities left no space for illusions; specters of the Nazi past and the Greek Civil War still haunted them all. Adopting a transnational approach, The Greek Gastarbeiter in the Federal Rep...
Nov 30, 2024•1 hr 28 min•Ep 1510•Transcript available on Metacast Germany, spring 1945. Hitler is dead and his armies crushed. Across the conquered Reich, cities lie devastated by Allied saturation bombing; their traumatised populations, exhausted and embittered by defeat, face a future of acute privation and hardship. Such was the broken state of the nation in which a British civilian and military force arrived in the spring and summer of 1945 as explored in Don't Let's Be Beastly to the Germans: The British Occupation of Germany, 1945-49 (Bloomsbury, 2023) b...
Nov 28, 2024•1 hr 14 min•Ep 253•Transcript available on Metacast Prof. Gullachsen's newest book, The Defeat and Attrition of the 12. SS-Panzer-Division “Hitlerjugend,” Volume I: The Normandy Bridgehead Battles, 7–11 June 1944, offers a comprehensive examination of the German military response on the eastern flank of the Normandy Bridgehead. The work delves deeply into both the division's combat operations and the broader strategic context that shaped its actions during this critical period. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Suppor...
Nov 27, 2024•47 min•Ep 252•Transcript available on Metacast The exceptional opening of the archives of the pontificate of Pius XII (1939-1958) in 2020 did not end the controversies surrounding the silence of the pope in the face of Nazi atrocities. But, beyond the controversies, what do these new sources reveal? What do they contribute to our understanding of the Shoah, the Second World War and religious power? Do they allow us to grasp more finely the deep ambivalences of the Vatican, between charity and prejudice, in the face of anti-Jewish persecution...
Nov 26, 2024•1 hr 4 min•Ep 575•Transcript available on Metacast To many, German food is humble comfort food, the kind of food that may not win a beauty award, but more than makes up for it with its power to soothe, nourish and cheer. In Classic German Cooking (Ten Speed Press, 2024), Luisa Weiss—who was born in Berlin to an Italian mother and American father, and married into a family with roots in Saxony—has collected and mastered the essential everyday recipes of Germany and Austria. Classic German Cooking features traditional and time-honored recipes that...
Nov 23, 2024•49 min•Ep 165•Transcript available on Metacast Indian Philosophy and Yoga in Germany by Owen Ware (Routledge, 2024) takes the reader on a tour through the reception of Yoga philosophies in nineteenth-century German and the early twentieth century. European luminaries like Schlegel, Hegel, von Günderrode, Schelling, Humbolt, and Müller all engaged with works like the Bhagavad Gītā and Yogā Sūtras, though in very different ways, some reading yogic thought as entailing a threatening nihilism, others lauding it as superlatively philosophical. Wa...
Nov 20, 2024•1 hr 2 min•Ep 358•Transcript available on Metacast Historical Turns: Weimar Cinema and the Crisis of Historicism (University of California Press, 2024) by Dr. Nicholas Baer reassesses Weimar cinema in light of the "crisis of historicism" widely diagnosed by German philosophers in the early twentieth century. Through bold new analyses of five legendary works of German silent cinema—The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, Destiny, Rhythm 21, The Holy Mountain, and Metropolis—Dr. Baer argues that films of the Weimar Republic lent vivid expression to the crisi...
Nov 16, 2024•39 min•Ep 166•Transcript available on Metacast How do street-level bureaucrats in Austria’s public service deal with linguistic diversity? In this episode of the Language on the Move podcast, Ingrid Piller speaks with Dr Clara Holzinger (University of Vienna) about her PhD research investigating how employment officers deal with the day-to-day communication challenges arising when clients have low levels of German language proficiency. For additional resources, show notes, and transcripts, go here. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit meg...
Nov 15, 2024•43 min•Ep 36•Transcript available on Metacast When we think of Nazi camps, names such as Auschwitz, Bergen-Belsen, and Dachau come instantly to mind. Yet the history of the Holocaust extends beyond those notorious sites. In the former territory of Transnistria, located in occupied Soviet Ukraine and governed by Nazi Germany's Romanian allies, many Jews perished due to disease, starvation, and other horrific conditions. Through an intimate blending of memoir, history, and reportage, So They Remember: A Jewish Family’s Story of Surviving the ...
Nov 13, 2024•2 hr 31 min•Ep 570•Transcript available on Metacast Paper, bottles, metal scrap, kitchen garbage, rubber, hair, fat, rags, and bones--the Nazi empire demanded its population obsessively collect anything that could be reused or recycled. Entrepreneurs, policy makers, and ordinary citizens conjured up countless schemes to squeeze value from waste or invent new purposes for defunct or spent material, no matter the cost to people or the environment. As World War II dragged on, rescued loot--much of it waste--clogged transport routes and piled up in w...
Nov 11, 2024•1 hr 1 min•Ep 1496•Transcript available on Metacast During World War I, thousands of young African men conscripted to fight for France and Britain were captured and held as prisoners of war in Germany, where their stories and songs were recorded and archived by German linguists. In Knowing by Ear: Listening to Voice Recordings with African Prisoners of War in German Camps (1915–1918) (Duke University Press, 2024), Anette Hoffmann demonstrates that listening to these acoustic recordings as historical sources, rather than linguistic samples, opens ...
Nov 09, 2024•45 min•Ep 9•Transcript available on Metacast What happens when the elitist space of 'Western' classical music seeks to diversify itself? And what are the social effects worked through diversity discourses in classical music institutions? The Sound of Difference: Race, Class and the Politics of 'Diversity' in Classical Music (Manchester UP, 2024) by Dr. Kristina Kolbe addresses these concerns by critically examining how diversity work takes shape in a cultural sector so deeply implicated in hierarchies of class, structures of whiteness, and...
Nov 02, 2024•53 min•Ep 255•Transcript available on Metacast Between 1776 and 1783, Britain hired an estimated 30,000 German soldiers to fight in its war against the Americans. Collectively known as Hessians, they actually came from six German territories within the Holy Roman Empire. Over the course of the war, members of the German corps, including women and children, spent extended periods of time in locations as dispersed and varied as Canada in the North to West Florida and Cuba in the South. They shared in every significant British military triumph ...
Oct 30, 2024•1 hr 3 min•Ep 165•Transcript available on Metacast The Holocaust and New World Slavery: Volume 2 (Cambridge UP, 2019) second volume of the first, in-depth comparison of the Holocaust and new world slavery. Providing a reliable view of the relevant issues, and based on a broad and comprehensive set of data and evidence, Steven T. Katz analyses the fundamental differences between the two systems and re-evaluates our understanding of the Nazi agenda. Among the subjects he examines are: the use of black slaves as workers compared to the Nazi use of ...
Oct 22, 2024•54 min•Ep 561•Transcript available on Metacast Does Marx have a coherent ethical vision? How does that square with his sometimes-scathing dismissal of morality? What does his critique of capital have to do with ethics? Why is the proletariat the revolutionary class? What is the normative importance of that claim? In Marx’s Ethical Vision (Oxford University Press, 2024), Vanessa Wills provides a careful reconstruction of Marx’s understanding of human nature and the possibility of creating a world best suited to our flourishing. Working from M...
Oct 21, 2024•1 hr•Ep 356•Transcript available on Metacast Few would dispute that Hitler’s ideas led to war and genocide. Less clear however, is how and when those ideas developed. In his latest book, Becoming Hitler: The Making of a Nazi (Basic Books, 2017), Thomas Weber highlights the years between 1918 and 1926 as the period in which Hitler’s worldview developed. Challenging Hitler’s own narrative, as well as the received wisdom it engendered, Weber puts paid to the idea that the future dictator was radicalized in Vienna or during the First World War...
Oct 18, 2024•1 hr 11 min•Ep 30•Transcript available on Metacast Nazi Germany, Annexed Poland and Colonial Rule: Resettlement, Germanization and Population Policies in Comparative Perspective (Bloomsbury, 2023) examines Nazi Germany's expansion, population management and establishment of a racially stratified society within the Reichsgaue (Reich Districts) of Wartheland and Danzig-West Prussia in annexed Poland (1939-1945) through a colonial lens. The topic of the Holocaust has thus far dominated the scholarly debate on the relevance of colonialism for our un...
Oct 16, 2024•1 hr 3 min•Ep 214•Transcript available on Metacast Children are Everywhere: Conspicuous Reproduction and Childlessness in Reunified Berlin (Berghahn Books, 2024) by Dr. Meghana Joshi engages with how demographic anxieties and reproductive regimes emerge as forms of social inclusion and exclusion in a low fertility Western European context. This book explores everyday experiences of parenting and childlessness of ‘ethnic’ Germans in Berlin, who came of age around the fall of the Berlin Wall, and brings them into conversation with theories on pare...
Oct 15, 2024•59 min•Ep 164•Transcript available on Metacast Over 150 years ago, Marx published the first volume of Capital, a systematic and voluminous account of capitalism, from the economic bedrock all the way up to the social and political consequences. The book itself would stand as one of the most influential and decisive texts of all time, proving to be a wildly fruitful foundation for further research into everything it touched, and also becoming a cornerstone text for various political movements that would try and develop the critical analysis i...
Oct 07, 2024•3 hr 41 min•Ep 486•Transcript available on Metacast Writing in the 1920s, Winston Churchill argued that the First World War on the Eastern Front was "incomparably the greatest war in history. In its scale, in its slaughter, in the exertions of the combatants, in its military kaleidoscope, it far surpasses by magnitude and intensity all similar human episodes." It was, he concluded, "the most frightful misfortune" to fall upon mankind "since the collapse of the Roman Empire before the Barbarians." Yet Churchill was an exception, and the war in the...
Oct 06, 2024•55 min•Ep 1485•Transcript available on Metacast When scholars and policymakers consider how technological advances affect the rise and fall of great powers, they draw on theories that center the moment of innovation—the eureka moment that sparks astonishing technological feats. In Technology and the Rise of Great Powers: How Diffusion Shapes Economic Competition (Princeton UP, 2024), Jeffrey Ding offers a different explanation of how technological revolutions affect competition among great powers. Rather than focusing on which state first int...
Oct 05, 2024•35 min•Ep 107•Transcript available on Metacast 
