New Books in German Studies
This podcast is a channel on the New Books Network. The New Books Network is an academic audio library dedicated to public education. In each episode you will hear scholars discuss their recently published research with another expert in their field.
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826
Nicholas Stargardt, “The German War: A Nation U...
In all of the thousands upon thousands of books written about Nazi Germany, it’s easy to lose track of some basic questions. What did Germans think they were fighting for? Why did they support the war? How did they (whether the they were soldiers fight...
69 min
827
Shelly Cline, “Women at Work: The SS Aufseheri...
Is it ok–practically and ethically–to feel sympathetic toward the guards of concentration camps? Today’s interview marks the conclusion of my summer-long series of podcasts on the concentration camps and ghettos of Nazi Germany,
53 min
828
Kelly J. Whitmer, “The Halle Orphanage as Scien...
Kelly J. Whitmer‘s new book offers a history of science set in the Halle Orphanage, a building that was founded in the middle of the 1690s in the Prussian city of Halle by a group of German Lutherans known as Pietists.
67 min
829
Dan Stone, “The Liberation of the Camps: The En...
Every year I ask my students to tell me when the Holocaust ended. Most of them are surprised to hear me say that it has not yet. Today’s podcast is the fourth of a summer long series of podcasts about the system of camps and ghettos that pervaded Nazi ...
59 min
830
Nikolaus Wachsmann, “KL: A History of the Nazi...
Today’s podcast is the second in our summer series of interviews about the concentration camps in and around Nazi Germany. Earlier this summer I talked with Geoff Megargee about the US Holocaust Museum’s Encyclopedia of Camps and Ghettos and Sarah Helm...
57 min
831
Sarah Helm, “Ravensbruck: Life and Death in Hit...
Today’s podcast is the second in our summer series of interviews about the concentration camps in and around Nazi Germany. Earlier this summer I talked with Geoff Megargee about the US Holocaust Museum’s Encyclopedia of Camps and Ghettos. Later,
85 min
832
Geoff Megargee, ed., “The USHMM Encyclopedia of...
Every semester when I get to the point in World Civ when we’re talking about Nazi Germany, I ask my students to guess how many camps and ghettos there were. I get guesses anywhere from a few, to a few dozen, to a couple thousand. When I tell them that...
53 min
833
Anton Weiss-Wendt, “The Nazi Genocide of the Ro...
Normally I don’t try and talk about two books in the same interview. But, in discussing the interview, Anton Weiss-Wendt suggested that it made sense to pair The Nazi Genocide of the Roma (Berghahn Books, 2015) and Racial Science in Hitler’s New Europe...
75 min
834
J. Laurence Hare, “Excavating Nations: Archaeol...
A recent book review I read began with the line “borderlands are back.” It’s certainly true that more and more historians have used borderland regions as the stage for some excellent work on the construction of national identities (or indifference to t...
51 min
835
Emily Kuriloff, “Contemporary Psychoanalysis an...
In her new book, Contemporary Psychoanalysis and the Third Reich: History, Memory, Tradition (Routledge, 2013), Emily Kuriloff details a dimension of psychoanalytic history that has never been so extensively documented: The impact of the Shoah on the n...
51 min
836
Juergen Matthaus et al., “War, Pacification and...
Historians have spent the last two decades detailing and explaining the actions of the Einsatzgruppen in the Soviet Union. We now know much more than we used to about the escalation of violence in 1941 and the so-called “Holocaust by Bullets.
50 min
837
Michael Leggiere, “Blucher: Scourge of Napoleon...
I have really enjoyed Michael Leggiere‘s earlier work, including the excellent Napoleon and Berlin : The Franco-Prussian War in North Germany, 1813 (2002), like this work, part of the Campaigns and Commanders series at the University of Oklahoma Press....
56 min
838
Thomas Kemple, “Intellectual Work and the Spiri...
Thomas Kemple‘s new book is an extraordinarily thoughtful invitation to approach Max Weber (1864-1920) as a performer, and to experience Weber’s work by attending to his spoken and written voice. Intellectual Work and the Spirit of Capitalism: Weber’s ...
69 min
839
Michael Gorra, “The Bells in Their Silence: Tra...
Despite being Germany’s most famous literary lion, in 1786 Johann Wolfgang von Goethe had to jump on a mail coach incognito to begin his travels to Italy (of course, he asked permission first from his patron the duke Karl August).
55 min
840
Udi Greenberg, “The Weimar Century: German Emig...
American policymakers and scholars alike have looked to the rapid transformation of Germany, specifically West Germany, from a defeated Nazi state into a thriving democracy as one of the most successful postwar reconstructions of the twentieth century....
47 min
841
Alon Confino, “A World Without Jews: The Nazi I...
Alon Confino‘s A World Without Jews: The Nazi Imagination from Persecution to Genocide (Yale University Press, 2014) begins with a vivid and devastating scene in the small German town of Fürth on November 10,
51 min
842
Martin Shuster, “Autonomy after Auschwitz: Ador...
The work of Theodore Adorno is well established as a crucial resource for understanding the complexities of contemporary capitalism, playing a foundational role in Critical Theory. Dialectic of Enlightenment,
46 min
843
Anne Knowles, Mastering Iron (U of Chicago Pres...
Last month on New Books in Geography, historian Susan Schulten discussed the development of thematic maps in the nineteenth century. Such maps focused on a particular topic such as disease, immigration, or politics and raised questions about society an...
47 min
844
Sean Forner, “German Intellectuals and the Chal...
The Federal Republic of Germany is often held up today as one of the world’s great democracies, where the commitment to such ideals as transparency, careful deliberation, social and political equality, a vibrant public sphere,
77 min
845
Thomas Kuehne, “Belonging and Genocide: Hitler’...
As a teenager, I heard or read or saw (in films or on television) story after story about the Gestapo, the Nazi secret police. Despite the occasional ‘corrective’ offered by Hogan’s Heroes, the impression given was that the Gestapo were all knowing and...
68 min
846
Michelle Moyd, “Violent Intermediaries: African...
In her imaginative and scrupulous book, Violent Intermediaries: African Soldiers, Conquest, and Everyday Colonialism in German East Africa (Ohio University Press, 2014), historian Michelle Moyd writes about theaskari,
64 min
847
Todd H. Weir, “Secularism and Religion in Ninet...
If you look up the word “secular” in just about about any English-language dictionary, you’ll find that the word denotes, among other things, something that is not religious. This “not-religious-ness” would seem to be the modern essence of the word.
63 min
848
Edward Ross Dickinson, “Sex, Freedom and Power ...
In this interview with historian Edward Ross Dickinson we talk about sex. Well, actually we talk about the talk about sex. Since Michel Foucault’s epochal work History of Sexuality (1976) how moderns talked about sex has been a central concern of cultu...
73 min
849
Thomas Kohut, “A German Generation: An Experien...
Germans belonging to the generation born at the turn of the twentieth century endured staggering losses, many of which became difficult to mourn or even acknowledge: their parents in World War I, financial and physical security during the Weimar Republ...
65 min
850
Anson Rabinbach and Sander Gilman, “The Third R...
Primary source readers represent an unusual historical genre. Unlike editions, their aim is not to enable the reader to hear, as clearly as possible, the voice of a single historical personage or institution.
53 min