New Books in German Studies

Two new books on secularism and atheism in German and Soviet socialist cultures are reshaping scholarly understandings of the relationship between socialism and religion. Todd Weir and Victoria Smolkin show that socialist secularism and atheism were not concerned solely with destroying a tool of class oppression, as Marx had envisioned, but with creating a positive faith in science and materialism...

Since the 1990s, Germany has embarked on a daring campaign to restructure its energy system around renewable power, sparking a global revolution in solar and wind technology. But this pioneering energy transition has been plagued with problems. In Energy and Power: Germany in the Age of Oil, Atoms, and Climate Change (Oxford UP, 2023), Stephen G. Gross explains the deeper origins of the Energiewen...

Exactly a century ago, intelligence agencies across Europe first became aware of a fanatical German nationalist whose political party was rapidly gathering momentum. His name was Adolf Hitler. From 1933, these spy services watched with growing alarm as they tried to determine what sort of threat Hitler's regime would now pose to the rest of Europe. Would Germany rearm, either covertly or in open d...

Why does state-led and intercommunal violence occur? How do past episodes of mass violence reverberate in the present? How do victims and perpetrators make sense of each other in the aftermath of mass violence? What are the ethical and professional obligations of historians who uncover episodes of mass violence in the course of their research? These questions, and the difficult search for answers,...

The surprise success of the German offensive in the West that commenced on May 10, 1940 caught the Allies completely off-guard, and France would soon capitulate to the Germans in late June. During the course of the campaign, large numbers of Allied forces would become trapped along the coast of the English Channel at the port of Dunkirk. The mass evacuation of Allied forces at the port of Dunkirk...

Today I talked to Elly Gotz, author of the memoir Flights of Spirit (Azrieli Foundation, 2018). Sixteen-year-old Elly Gotz hides with his family in an underground bunker in the Kovno ghetto in Lithuania, prepared to die rather than be found by the Nazis. After surviving three years in the ghetto, where thousands from his community have been murdered, Elly and his family refuse to be the Nazis' nex...

From summer 1941 onwards, Romania actively pursued at its own initiative the mass killing of Jews in the territories it controlled. 1941 saw 13,000 Jewish residents of the Romanian city of Iai killed, the extermination of thousands of Jews in Northern Bukovina and Bessarabia by Romanian armed forces and local people, large-scale deportations of Jews to the camps and ghettos of Transnistria, and ma...

As reports of mass killings in Bosnia spread in the middle of 1995, Germans faced a dilemma. Should the Federal Republic deploy its military to the Balkans to prevent a genocide, or would departing from postwar Germany’s pacifist tradition open the door to renewed militarism? In short, when Germans said “never again,” did they mean “never again Auschwitz” or “never again war”? Looking beyond solem...

The twentieth-century artist Bruno Schulz was born an Austrian, lived as a Pole, and died a Jew. First a citizen of the Habsburg monarchy, he would, without moving, become the subject of the West Ukrainian People’s Republic, the Second Polish Republic, the USSR, and, finally, the Third Reich. Yet to use his own metaphor, Schulz remained throughout a citizen of the Republic of Dreams. He was a mast...

In 2021, the world commemorates the 80th anniversary of the massacres of Jews at Babyn Yar. The present collection brings together for the first time the responses to the tragic events of September 1941 by Ukrainian Jewish and non-Jewish poets of the Soviet and post-Soviet periods, presented here in the original and in English translation by Ostap Kin and John Hennessy. Written between 1942 and 20...

In this podcast we discuss visibility, haunting and fascism with art historian and theorist Elizabeth Otto. Otto's book Haunted Bauhaus explores the marginalized histories of occult spirituality, gender fluidity and queer identity within the Bauhaus; offering fresh insight into one of the most canonized periods of European art history. The Bauhaus (1919–1933) is widely regarded as the twentieth ce...

This week on International Horizons, we present RBI's director John Torpey's interview with David Gill, General Consul of Germany, in New York to celebrate the 2023 Otto and Frank Walter Memorial Lecture. The conversation goes explaining the term “Zeitenwende” and what that entails for Germans, its history and how the military approach of Germany came to a new era. David Gill also discusses the ef...

Toward the end of World War II, Hitler's many health complications became even more pronounced, making an evil man yet more erratic and dangerous. While the subject of Hitler's health has been catalogued previously, never has it been done so this thoroughly or with this level of up-to-date medical expertise. Tom Hutton's Hitler's Maladies and Their Impact on World War II (Texas Tech UP, 2023) draw...

Crispin Brooks and Kiril Feferman's edited volume Beyond the Pale: The Holocaust in the North Caucasus (U Rochester Press, 2020) is the first book devoted exclusively to the Holocaust in the North Caucasus, exploring mass killings, Jewish responses, collaboration, and memory in a region barely known in this context. When war between the Soviet Union and Germany broke out in 1941, thousands of refu...

Although Kant considered him the greatest critic of his work, and Fichte thought him the most impressive mind of the generation, Salomon Maimon (1753-1800) has fallen into relative obscurity. Apiqoros: The Last Essays of Salomon Maimon (Hebrew Union College Press, 2021) draws attention to works written during the final years of Maimon's life. These essays are of particular interest: they show that...

Auschwitz is perhaps the best-known memorial site in the world. Epicenter of the Nazi extermination campaign of Europe’s Jewish population, the Auschwitz-Birkenau camp system also held over 400,000 inmates (Jews and Gentiles both) in unspeakable conditions. Famous survivors such as Elie Wiesel and Primo Levi are widely read by high-schoolers and undergraduates, but a synoptic overview of the human...

Today I talked to Heidi Langbein-Allen about Save the Last Bullet: Memoir of a Boy Soldier in Hitler's Army (Pen & Sword Military, 2022). Willi Langbein was just thirteen when the Nazis took him away from his parents under the pretense of protecting him. Their real reason was to turn him into cannon-fodder for use against Hitler’s enemies. Deployed to the collapsing Eastern Front in the last days...

South of the Norman city of Caen, Verrières Ridge was seen a key stepping-stone for the British Second Army if it was to break out of the Normandy bridgehead in late July 1944. Imposing in height and containing perfect terrain for armored operations, the Germans viewed it as the lynchpin to their defenses south of the city of Caen and east of the Orne river. Following the failure of British Operat...

While Immanuel Kant’s account of human reason is well known and celebrated, his account of human animality (Thierheit) is virtually unknown. Animality and reason, as pillars of Kant’s vision of human nature, are original and ineradicable. And yet, the relation between them is fraught: at times tense and violent, at other times complementary, even harmonious.  Kant on the Human Animal (Northwestern...

How did the Serengeti become an internationally renowned African conservation site and one of the most iconic destinations for a safari? In Our Gigantic Zoo: A German Quest to Save the Serengeti (Oxford UP, 2020), Thomas M. Lekan illuminates the controversial origins of this national park by examining how Europe's greatest wildlife conservationist, former Frankfurt Zoo director and Oscar-winning d...

To the Soviet Union, the sacrifices that enabled the country to defeat Nazi Germany in World War II are sacrosanct. The foundation of the Soviets’ hard-won victory was laid during the battle for the city of Stalingrad, resting on the banks of the river Volga. To Russians it was a pivotal landmark of their nation’s losses, with more than two million civilians and combatants either killed, wounded,...

During World War II, the Germans put the Jews in Nazi-occupied Poland into ghettos which restricted their movement and, most crucially for their survival, access to food. The Germans saw the Jews as 'useless eaters, ' and denied them sufficient food for survival. The hunger which resulted from this intentional starvation impacted every aspect of Jewish life inside the ghettos.  The Atrocity of Hun...

When Pope Pius XII died in 1958, his papers were sealed in the Vatican Secret Archives, leaving unanswered questions about what he knew and did during World War II. Those questions have only grown and festered, making Pius XII one of the most controversial popes in Church history, especially now as the Vatican prepares to canonize him. In 2020, Pius XII’s archives were finally opened, and David I....

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...

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 Germa...