New Books in German Studies

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 th...

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...

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 wou...

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 collect...

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...

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 langu...

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 att...

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 Judais...

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 in...

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 sa...

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 doc...

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 Re...

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...

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...

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 part...

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 tr...

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 use...

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 Nat...

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. Aft...

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,...

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 nu...

In the fall of 1942, only the city of Stalingrad stood between Soviet survival and defeat as Hitler’s army ran rampant. With the fate of the USSR hanging in the balance, Soviet propaganda chiefs sent their finest writers into the heat of battle. After six months of terrifying work, these men succeeded in creating an enduring epic of Stalingrad. Their harrowing tales of valour and heroism offered h...

Martin Heidegger did not like small thoughts. He was fascinated by the most expansive questions humans can ask themselves. Questions like: Why are we here at all? Why do things exist as they do? What does it mean to be in the world? Heidegger came to believe that many of the modern answers to these questions were based on old, unexamined assumptions. Instead of accepting those assumptions, Heidegg...

In Feminist Transformations and Domestic Violence Activism in Divided Berlin, 1968-2002 (Oxford University Press, 2022), Jane Freeland traces the development of the shelter movement in East and West Germany. In the 1970s, feminist activists exposed the harmful gender norms and lack of legal protections that left women vulnerable to abuse in the home. Their efforts led to the founding of the first...

Kiril Feferman's The Holocaust in the Crimea and the North Caucasus (Yad Vadhem, 2016) presents a comprehensive account of the Jews in the Crimea and the North Caucasus in the Holocaust years. Based on extensive archival research, Feferman covers the life and destruction of the Jewish population in the region and describes in detail the relations between Jews and non-Jews before and during the war...