New Books in German Studies

Lili Zách is a Senior Lecturer in the Department of English Studies at ELTE (Eötvös Loránd University) in Budapest and has previously taught at Maynooth University (Ireland). She received her MA Degrees in History and Irish Studies in 2006 from the University of Szeged, Hungary. In 2010 she completed a Diploma Course in Irish Language and completed her PhD at the National University of Ireland, Ga...

Today I talked to Ulrich Gutmair about his book The First Days of Berlin: The Sound of Change (Polity Press, 2021). Berlin in the early 1990s, right after the fall of the Berlin Wall: this is the place to be. Berlin-Mitte, the central district of the city, with its wastelands and decaying houses, has become the centre of a new movement. Artists, musicians, squatters, club owners, DJs and ravers ar...

In her new book, The Jews of Denmark in the Holocaust: Life and Death in Theresienstadt Ghetto (Routledge, 2020), Silvia Goldbaum Tarabini Fracapane uses previously unexplored personal accounts and archival documentation in order to examine life and death in the Theresienstadt ghetto, seen through the eyes of the Jewish victims from Denmark. The book covers an important aspect of the experience of...

States of Liberation: Gay Men Between Dictatorship and Democracy in Cold War Germany (U Toronto Press, 2022) traces the paths of gay men in East and West Germany from the violent aftermath of the Second World War to the thundering nightclubs of present-day Berlin. Following a captivating cast of characters, from gay spies and Nazi scientists to queer politicians and secret police bureaucrats, Stat...

Jewish Childhood in Kraków: A Microhistory of the Holocaust (Rutgers UP, 2021) is the first book to tell the history of Kraków in the second World War through the lens of Jewish children's experiences. Here, children assume center stage as historical actors whose recollections and experiences deserve to be told, analyzed, and treated seriously. Sliwa scours archives to tell their story, gleaning e...

In Irma's Passport: One Woman, Two World Wars, and a Legacy of Courage (She Writes Press, 2021), Catherine Ehrlich explores her Austrian grandparents’ influential lives at the crossroads of German and Jewish national movements. Weaving her grandmother Irma’s spellbinding memoirs into her narrative, she profiles a charismatic woman who confronts history with courage and rebuilds lives—for herself a...

Communism in Eastern Europe (Routledge, 2021) is a groundbreaking new survey of the history of Eastern Europe since 1945. It examines how Communist governments came to Eastern Europe, how they changed their societies and the legacies that persisted after their fall. Written from the perspective of the 21st century, this book shows how Eastern Europe’s trajectory since 1989 fits into the longer his...

Today we are joined by Heather Dichter, Associate Professor of Sports History and Sports Management at the International Centre for Sports History and Culture at De Montfort University. She is also the author of Bidding for the 68 Olympic Games: International Sport’s Cold War Battle with NATO (University of Massachusetts Press, 2021). In our conversation, we discussed the origins of the East Germa...

South of the Norman city of Caen, the twin features of the Verrières and Bourguebus ridges were key stepping stones for the British Second Army in late July 1944--taking them was crucial if it was to be successful in its attempt to break out of the Normandy bridgehead. To capture this vital ground, Allied forces would have to defeat arguably the strongest German armored formation in Normandy: the...

In 1847, Herman Helmholtz, arguably the most important German physicist of the nineteenth century, published his formulation of what became known as the conservation of energy--unarguably the most important single development in physics of that century, transforming what had been a conglomeration of separate topics into a coherent field unified by the concept of energy. In Helmholtz and the Conser...

This is the first translation in English of Rudolf Ramm’s textbook Ärztliche Rechts- und Standeskunde: Der Arzt als Gesundheitserzieher, translated and introduced by Melvin Wayne Cooper. Medical Jurisprudence and Rules of the Medical Profession (Springer, 2019) has been reported to be an influential manual for medical ethics in Nazi Germany and is commonly quoted as representing the Nazi viewpoint...

Lemberg, Lwów, Lvov, Lviv… The city, which is located in the western part of Ukraine, evokes a highly entangled past that contains references to a number of nations, ethnicities, empires, states, and communities. They have their own (hi)story and they claim their right to make this story visible.  Ola Hnatiuk’s Courage and Fear (Harvard Ukrainian Research Institute, 2019) focuses on the crossroads...

Holocaust movies have become an important segment of world cinema and the de-facto Holocaust education for many. One quarter of all American-produced Holocaust-related feature films have won or been nominated for at least one Oscar. In fact, from 1945 through 1991, half of all American Holocaust features were nominated. Yet most Holocaust movies have fallen through the cracks and few have been com...

Unlikely Allies: Nazi German and Ukrainian Nationalist Collaboration in the General Government During World War II (Purdue UP, 2021) offers the first comprehensive and scholarly English-language analysis of German-Ukrainian collaboration in the General Government, an area of occupied Poland during World War II. Drawing on extensive archival material, the Ukrainian position is examined chiefly thro...

Want to read a fantastic book about art, love, politics, and resistance during the Second World War? Jeffrey H. Jackson's Paper Bullets: Two Artists Who Risked Their Lives to Defy the Nazis (Algonquin Books, 2020) is a riveting account of the lives of Lucy Schwob/Claude Cahun) and Suzanne Malherbe/Marcel Moore, two French artists whose remarkable creative and romantic relationship spanned many tum...

In this special follow-up episode in honor of International Holocaust Remembrance Day, I again speak with Rich Brownstein, author of Holocaust Cinema Complete: A History and Analysis of 400 Films, with a Teaching Guide (McFarland, 2021). In this interview, Rich lists the 15 greatest holocaust films from his long-time study. He uses the categories he developed for his book and chooses 3 films from...

Around the beginning of the twentieth century, Jewish writers and artists across Europe began depicting fellow Jews as savages or "primitive" tribesmen. Primitivism—the European appreciation of and fascination with so-called "primitive," non-Western peoples who were also subjugated and denigrated—was a powerful artistic critique of the modern world and was adopted by Jewish writers and artists to...

Before 1871, Germany was not yet nation but simply an idea. Its founder, Otto von Bismarck, had a formidable task at hand. How would he bring thirty-nine individual states under the yoke of a single Kaiser? How would he convince proud Prussians, Bavarians, and Rhinelanders to become Germans? Once united, could the young European nation wield enough power to rival the empires of Britain and France-...

How do people link the past to the present, marking continuity in the face of the fundamental discontinuities of history? A Time to Gather: Archives and the Control of Jewish Culture (Oxford UP, 2021) argues that historical records took on potent value in modern Jewish life as both sources of history and anchors of memory because archives presented one way of transmitting Jewish history from one g...

Western ruins have long been understood as objects riddled with temporal contradictions, whether they appear in baroque poetry and drama, Romanticism’s nostalgic view of history, eighteenth-century paintings of classical subjects, or even recent photographic histories of the ruins of postindustrial Detroit. Decay and Afterlife: Form, Time, and the Textuality of Ruins, 1100 to 1900 (U Chicago Press...

Romanian Germans, mainly from the Banat and Transylvania, have occupied a place at the very heart of major events in Europe in the twentieth century yet their history is largely unknown. This east-central European minority negotiated their standing in a difficult new European order after 1918, changing from uneasy supporters of Romania, to zealous Nazis, tepid Communists, and conciliatory European...

Following the fall of the Berlin Wall and demise of the Soviet Union, prominent Western thinkers began to suggest that liberal democracy had triumphed decisively on the world stage. Having banished fascism in World War II, liberalism had now buried communism, and the result would be an end of major ideological conflicts, as liberal norms and institutions spread to every corner of the globe. With t...

In Yiddish Writers in Weimar Berlin: A Fugitive Modernism (Indiana UP, 2021), Marc Caplan explores the reciprocal encounter between Eastern European Jews and German culture in the days following World War I. By concentrating primarily on a small group of avant-garde Yiddish writers—Dovid Bergelson, Der Nister, and Moyshe Kulbak—working in Berlin during the Weimar Republic, Caplan examines how thes...

Wim Wenders: Making Films That Matter (Bloomsbury, 2020) is the first book in 15 years to take a comprehensive look at Wim Wenders's extensive filmography. In addition to offering new insights into his cult masterpieces, the 10 essays in this volume highlight the thematic and aesthetic continuities between his early films and his latest productions. Wenders's films have much to contribute to curre...

The late 19th and early 20th centuries in Europe were times of intense technological, social and political change and transformation, and so it’s no surprise that much of the art and literature of this period was equal in its innovative intensity, attempting to make sense of times that were radically out of joint. Traditional scholarship on this period has focused on the alienation and disassociat...