New Books In German Studies

According to one dictionary definition, the term means: “to yield or concede to the belligerent demands of (a nation, group, person, etc.) in a conciliatory effort, sometimes at the expense of justice or other principles”. Of course when one employs this term in a historical context, it is usually taken to refer to the ‘Appeasement’ by Great Britain of the Fascist powers during the 1930s. In this latest edition of ‘Arguing History’, Professor of History Jeremy Black and Dr. Charles Coutinho of the Royal Historical Society, discuss the historical nature of appeasement and endeavor to go beyond the reductionist and ahistorical picture so popular with some historians and much of the reading public. Going beyond the sloganeering that originated with Michael Foot’s The Guilty Men, and more recent tomes like Tim Bouverie’s Appeasement, this discussion of the topic endeavors to examine at length the underlying variables which factored into British policy in the 1930s. Professor Jeremy Black MBE, Is Professor of Hist

Millions of tourists visit Holocaust museums and memorials every year. Holocaust tourism is a thriving industry and plays a crucial role in Holocaust memorialization and remembrance. However, Holocaust tourism is not without criticism. Some argue that sightseeing at sites of genocide is cringeworthy, offensive, inappropriate, and superficial. In Postcards from Auschwitz: Holocaust Tourism and the Meaning of Remembrance (NYU Press, 2018), Daniel Reynolds examines the phenomenon of Holocaust tourism, its implication on Holocaust remembrance, and what we can learn from tourists taking selfies at Auschwitz. Postcards from Auschwitz transports the reader to a variety of museums and memorial sites around the world to unpack the phenomenon of Holocaust tourism. Daniel Reynolds is Seth Richards Professor in Modern Languages in Department of German Studies at Grinnell College. Lindsey Jackson is a PhD student at Concordia University in Montreal, Canada. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In Martin Buber: A Life of Faith and Dissent (Yale University Press, 2019), Paul Mendes-Flohr, professor emeritus at the University of Chicago Divinity School and the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, paints a detailed and compelling portrait of one of the twentieth century's most versatile and influential thinkers. Tracing Buber's personal and intellectual biographical arcs, Mendes-Flohr helps us understand Buber as an accomplished scholar, a reverent student of Judaism, and a proponent of genuine engagement on the personal, cultural, and political levels -- but also as a person at times deeply affected by loss, dislocation, and marginalization. David Gottlieb earned his PhD, studying under Professor Mendes-Flohr in the History of Judaism at the University of Chicago Divinity School, in 2018. He teaches at Spertus Institute in Chicago, and is the author of the forthcoming Second Slayings: The Binding of Isaac and the Formation of Jewish Memory (Gorgias Press). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.

The history of anthropology has been written from multiple viewpoints, often from perspectives of gender, nationality, theory, or politics. Winner of the 2017 International Convention of Asia Scholars Book Prize, Before Boas: The Genesis of Ethnography and Ethnology in the German Enlightenment (University of Nebraska Press, 2015; paperback edition, 2018), delves deeper into issues concerning anthropology’s academic origins to present a groundbreaking study that reveals how ethnography and ethnology originated during the eighteenth rather than the nineteenth century, developing parallel to anthropology, or the “natural history of man.” Han F. Vermeulen, alumnus of Leiden University and research associate at the Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology in Halle, Germany, explores primary and secondary sources from Russia, Germany, Austria, the United States, the Netherlands, Hungary, the Czech Republic, Slovakia, France, and Great Britain in tracing how “ethnography” originated as field research by German-s

There is perhaps no more iconic symbol of the Cold War than the Berlin Wall, the 96-mile-long barrier erected around West Berlin in 1961 to stem the flow of refugees from Eastern Europe. In Checkpoint Charlie: The Cold War, The Berlin Wall, and the Most Dangerous Place On Earth (Scribner, 2019), Iain MacGregor draws upon interviews with a wide range of people to recount the history of the wall and how it affected the lives of the people on either side of it. Through their firsthand experiences he recounts the tension-filled hours when East German workers began constructing the first elements of what became an elaborate series of obstacles that restricted access to the two sides of the partitioned city. As Berliners gradually adapted to the presence of the wall, thousands of people on the eastern side risked their lives in their search for ways around, above, and below the barriers to gain their freedom in the West. As MacGregor explains, underlying much of this was the assumption by nearly all sides of the pe

Carlo Bonomi's two-volume set dreams the foundation of psychoanalysis as it writes its history. The work animates the reader's imagination, inviting them to journey the interwoven paths of Sigmund Freud's associations, anxieties and conflicts. These books tackle what has often remained hidden both in the historical writing about psychoanalysis and in Freud's explicit account of castration: the practice of female genital mutilation, pervasive in major European cities as treatment for hysteria in the end of 19th century. In this interview we discussed the first volume of work, The Cut and the Building of Psychoanalysis: Sigmund Freud and Emma Eckstein (Routledge, 2017). We talked about Freud's reaction to the practices of medical castration of women and children, as well as his attempts to cope with the demands of his father that Sigmund, following the orthodox Jewish custom, circumcise his own sons. We begin to introduce the complex imagistic structure of Bonomi's analysis: the dreams that form the backbone of

When Tennessee’s Governor recently ordered a holiday to celebrate the memory of confederate general Nathan Bedford Forest, a convicted war criminal who helped found the Ku Klax Klan, the New York Times columnist Paul Krugman commented: “The world would be horrified if Germany announced plans to start celebrating Erich von Manstein Day.” Krugman’s point was to emphasize that to celebrate a commander of the German Army from the Nazi period does not behoove a modern democratic nation. But his analogy of celebrating the founder of the Klan in today’s America and a Nazi in today’s Germany is more than another dispute between liberals and conservative Americans. Krugman invokes Germany’s “overcoming” or “coming to terms with” its past of racial violence, atrocity and genocide as a possible guide for American attitudes toward its racialized past. But how did Germany deal with the Nazi past? How did post-Germany move from the legacy of fascism to today’s democratic political culture? And how can America learn from a

As you may know, university presses publish a lot of good books. In fact, they publish thousands of them every year. They are different from most trade books in that most of them are what you might called "fundamental research." Their authors--dedicated researchers one and all--provide the scholarly stuff upon which many non-fiction trade books are based. So when you are reading, say, a popular history, you are often reading UP books at one remove. Of course, some UP books are also bestsellers, and they are all well written (and, I should say, thoroughly vetted thanks to the peer review system), but the greatest contribution of UPs is to provide a base of fundamental research to the public. And they do a great job of it. How do they do it? Today I talked to Kathryn Conrad, the president of the Association of University Presses, about the work of UPs, the challenges they face, and some terrific new directions they are going. We also talked about why, if you have a scholarly book in progress, you should talk to

From 1931 to 1945, leaders of the SS sought to transform their organization into a racially-elite family community that would serve as the Third Reich’s new aristocracy. They utilized the science of eugenics to convince SS men to marry suitable wives and have many children. In her new book entitled Marriage and Fatherhood in the Nazi SS (University of Toronto Press, 2018), Amy Carney assesses the role of SS men as husbands and fathers during the Third Reich. The family community, and the place of men in this community, started with one simple order issued by SS leader Heinrich Himmler. He and other SS leaders continued to develop the family community throughout the 1930s, and not even the Second World War deterred them from pursuing their racial ambitions. Carney’s insight into the eugenic-based measures used to encourage SS men to marry and to establish families sheds new light on their responsibilities not only as soldiers, but as husbands and fathers as well. Michael E. O’Sullivan is Professor of History a

The things that make people academics -- as deep fascination with some arcane subject, often bordering on obsession, and a comfort with the solitude that developing expertise requires -- do not necessarily make us good teachers. Jessamyn Neuhaus’s Geeky Pedagogy: A Guide for Intellectuals, Introverts, and Nerds Who Want to Be Effective Teachers (West Virginia University Press, 2019) helps us to identify and embrace that geekiness in us and then offers practical, step-by-step guidelines for how to turn it to effective pedagogy. It’s a sharp, slim, and entertaining volume that can make better teachers of us all. Stephen Pimpare is Senior Lecturer in the Politics & Society Program and Faculty Fellow at the Carsey School of Public Policy at the University of New Hampshire. He is the author of The New Victorians (New Press, 2004), A Peoples History of Poverty in America (New Press, 2008), winner of the Michael Harrington Award, and Ghettos, Tramps and Welfare Queens: Down and Out on the Silver Screen (Oxford, 2017

In the late Enlightenment, a new imperative began to inform theories of interpretation: all literary texts should be read in the same way that we read the Bible. However, this assumption concealed a problem—there was no coherent "we" who read the Bible in the same way. In Secularism and Hermeneutics (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2019), Yael Almog shows that several prominent thinkers of the era constituted readers as an imaginary "we" around which they could form their theories and practices of interpretation. She argues that this conception of interpreters as a universal community established biblical readers as a coherent collective. In the first part of the book, Almog focuses on the 1760s through the 1780s and examines these writers' works on biblical Hebrew and their reliance on the conception of the Old Testament as a cultural, rather than religious, asset. She reveals how the detachment of textual hermeneutics from confessional affiliation was stimulated by debates on the integration of Jews in En

What makes some people aid the persecuted while others just stand by?Questions about rescue and resistance have been fundamental to the field of genocide studies since its inception.  Mark Roseman offers a sophisticated and deeply human exploration of this question in his new book Lives Reclaimed: A Story of Rescue and Resistance in Nazi Germany (Metropolitan Books, 2019). The book is a careful examination of a small organization called “League:  Community for Socialist Life.”  Generally referred to by its German shorthand, the Bund was founded in the 1920s to inspire Germans to create a new, more ethical and more communal world.  But the emergence of Nazi rule forced the Bund to consider how it could achieve its goals and even survive in a much different political climate than it faced originally.  As they did so, its members strove to discern what living their ideals meant in a Nazi world and how to do so safely.Members of the Bund responded in a complicated, contingent ways. 

How does civil war shape state building and national identity over the long term? What do the underlying conflicts between Hanoverians and the Prussian state reveal about the course of German history from 1866 up to the rise of Hitler? In his new book Making Prussians, Raising Germans: A Cultural History of Prussian State-Building after Civil War, 1866-1935(Cambridge University Press, 2017), Jasper Heinzen analyzes these questions over the long durée with transnational points of comparison. By examining key areas of patriotic activity, Jasper unearths long-term trends in emerging nations forged through civil war. Indeed, Heinzen reveals how political violence was either contained or expressed through centre-periphery interactions with implications for the rise of Nazism.Jasper Heinzen is a Lecturer in Modern History at University of York where he specialises in the history of modern European nationalism, the Napoleonic Wars, and prisoners of war. His research on these topics has been supported by the British

Alex Kay’s The Making of an SS Killer: the Life of Colonel Alfred Filbert, 1905-1990 (Cambridge University Press, 2016) is a must read for those interested in the Third Reich, the Holocaust, and World War II.  Focusing on the actions and consequences of a “front-line Holocaust perpetrator”, Kay’s biographies diverges drastically with the traditional bios of other more well-known Nazis.  Kay argues that Filbert chose to become an exceptional Nazi Party member and his career as well as his life hinged upon what seems to be an unquestionable dedication to the cause.  This book is not only well-researched, but intellectually tantalizing and addictive.  Kay’s narrative hooks you from his introduction and by the time the reader has finished, it is hard to believe that this is based on the facts of Filbert’s life and career.  Instead, it seems almost Hollywood-like in its tensions and its twist of an ending.Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

At the start of the 19th century, the field we now call psychology was still the branch of philosophy that studied the soul. How did psychology come to define itself as a separate area of inquiry, and how did it come to be a science? In Wundt, Avenarius and Scientific Psychology: A Debate at the Turn of the Twentieth Century (Palgrave MacMillan 2019), Chiara Russo Krauss considers the conceptual foundations of psychology as a science in the conflicting views of Wilhelm Wundt and Richard Avenarius. Wundt established the first psychology lab but continued to see psychology as a science of self-observation, while the philosopher Avenarius embraced the emerging materialistic perspective in which the same physical methods that had just been successfully applied to explaining life could be used to explain conscious experience. Russo Krauss, a researcher at the University of Naples Federico II, makes clear the major role that Avenarius played in the shaping of psychology into the science that it is today.Learn more

Can there be a political science of the Holocaust? Evgeny Finkel, in his new book Ordinary Jews: Choice and Survival during the Holocaust(Princeton University Press, 2017), answers Charles King's question with a resounding yes.Finkel is interested in a very specific question: What made individual Jews choose from a variety of different strategies in responding to the threat posed by German violence. He lays out several possible strategies for survival, ranging from cooperation and collaboration to coping and compliance to evasion and resistance. Each of these strategies offered very real possibilities and risked very real dangers. Jews in every location adopted some combination of these strategies. But the mix of strategies adopted varied widely from place to place.Finkel's research helps us understand why specific communities tended to employ a distinctive mix of strategies. He argues that the nature of the prewar environment in which Jews lived--the way local governments treated Jews, the degree of assimila

Did the Allied bombing plan for the liberation of France follow a carefully orchestrated plan, or was it executed on an ad-hoc basis with little concern or regard for collateral damage? How did the bombing of French cities and railheads follow – or disregard – existing air power doctrine, and where did the decision making occur, within the Army Air Forces and Bomber Command, or among the ground unit leaders? What was the cost to human life and material artistic and historic centers, and was it worth it? These are only a few of the questions Stephen Alan Bourque addresses in his well-conceived and well-researched book, Beyond the Beach: The Allied War Against France (Naval Institute Press, 2018). At almost every turn, Stephen challenges the existing triumphalist narratives of the liberation of France to present a heart-wrenching account of disproportionate violence targeting not the German military, but the French people during this stage of the war. A book rife with lessons for our generation, Beyond the Beac

Andrew Wright Hurley talks about the life and afterlife of the Prussian explorer Ludwig Leichhardt, a man whose reputation has shifted to reflect the changing cultures of Australia and Germany over the past 160 years. Hurley is an associate professor in the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences at the University of Technology, Sydney. He’s the author of Ludwig Leichhardt’s Ghosts: The Strange Career of a Traveling Myth (Camden House, 2018).After the renowned Prussian scientist and explorer Ludwig Leichhardt left the Australian frontier in 1848 on an expedition to cross the continent, he disappeared without a trace. Andrew Hurley's book complicates that view by undertaking an afterlife biography of "the Humboldt of Australia." Although Leichhardt's remains were never located, he has been sought and textually "found" many times over, particularly in Australia and Germany. He remains a significant presence, a highly productive ghost who continues to "haunt" culture.Michael F. Robinson is professor of history at Hi