New Books in German Studies

In her new book Der bewegende Blick: Literarische Blickinszenierungen der Moderne (Rombach Verlag, 2014)—The Moving View: The Gaze in the Modern German Literature—Margarete Fuchs, a postdoc at the Philipps University of Marburg, examines the role of gaze and looking within modern German literature. By studying various important authors, such as Heinrich Mann, Hugo von Hofmannsthal, Siegfried Kraca...

Lena Wetenkamp‘s Europe Narrated, Contextualized and Remembered: The Discourse of ‘Europe’ in Contemporary German Literature (Europa erzhalt, verortet, erinnert: Europa-Diskurse in der deutschsprachigen Gegenwartsliteratur (Koenigshausen and Neumann, 2017)) is an analysis of the idea of “Europe” in modern German literature. It not only deals with important issues such as spaces, borders, multiling...

In his recent book, Persecution and Rescue: The Politics of the Final Solution in France, 1940-1944 (University of Michigan Press, 2017). Wolfgang Seibel explores the factors that shaped the Holocaust in wartime France. Eschewing the recent emphasis on ideology, Seibel offers a more administrative-science-based analysis, arguing that the fate of the Jews both their persecution and rescue was the r...

Marie von Clausewitz: The Woman Behind the Making of On War (Oxford University Press, 2016) is an important and fascinating book that not only tells the story of a remarkable woman’s life during the tumultuous years of the French Revolution and Restoration. Based on a recently discovered cache of letters between Marie von Clausewitz and her renowned husband, Carl, it also dramatically expands our...

In his new book, Coming of Age: Constructing and Controlling Youth in Munich, 1942-1973 (Berghan Books, 2016), Martin Kalb, Assistant Professor of History at Bridgewater College examines the construction of youth culture in Munich Germany. Kalb describes constructions of Munich youth in three distinct periods, beginning with the years following the conclusion of World War II, followed by the years...

In her new book Longing for the Good. The Relationship between Literature and Ethics in the Work of Peter Handke (Wilhelm Fink Verlag, 2017), Tanja Angela Kunz, a postdoc at the Humboldt University of Berlin, analyzes the work of the Austrian contemporary writer Peter Handke from a new perspective: By consulting philosophical theories about the relationship between ethics and aesthetics she achiev...

The German youth movement of the late Kaiserreich and ill-fated Weimar Republic has been a subject of controversy since its inception. The longing for community that drove the movement, and a sense of shared experience that members found on long hikes to historic sites, has been linked to everything from a revolution in conservative thought to the rise of Nazism. But how did the youth movement see...

In his new book, The Malmedy Massacre: The War Crimes Trial Controversy (Harvard University Press, 2017), Steven Remy, professor of history at City University of New York, examines the Malmedy massacre which took place on December 17, 1944 and the trial that followed after the conclusion of World War II. Remy effectively demonstrates how in the decade following the trial how a network of German an...

Associate professor of anthropology at the University of Washington Sareeta Amrute has written Encoding Race, Encoding Class: Indian IT Workers in Berlin (Duke University Press, 2016), a study of contemporary capitalism, new forms of work, and the racialized underpinnings of immaterial labor regimes. Amrute conducted research among Indian IT workers —“coders”—who were in Berlin for the short-term...

In his new book, The Politics of Unreason: The Frankfurt School and the Origins of Modern Antisemitism (SUNY Press, 2017) , Lars Rensmann, Professor of European Politics and Society at the University of Groningen, argues that even scholars of the Frankfurt school have often treated the theme of antisemitism with scant attention. However, as Rensmann argues, the problem of antisemitism had been a c...

In his new book Morality and Literature: A Historical Typology (Wilhelm Fink Verlag, 2013)—in German: Moral und Literatur. Eine historische Typologie—Christian Kirchmeier, post doc at the University of Munich who is currently at Yale for a research stay, examines a change of different moral systems within the course of history. By looking at very many different German literary texts from different...

“Monsters exist, but they are too few in number to be truly dangerous.” Thus begins Guenter Lewy’s latest book, Perpetrators: The World of the Holocaust Killers (Oxford University Press, 2017), a welcome attempt to challenge the idea that all Nazi perpetrators were the same, and that they were all driven by the same bass motivations. Largely a synthesis of material previously only available in Ger...

Hundreds of thousands of people took to the streets in western Europe over the 1970s. Observers feared Germany was becoming “ungovernable” and France was moving toward “civil war.” The source of this discontent? Nuclear power. Not weapons. Electricity. How did anti-nuclear protest become a debate about the future of society? What united farmers, housewives, hippies, and anarchists against the stat...

In his new book, The Right Wrong Man: John Demjanjuk and the Last Great Nazi War Crimes Trial (Princeton University Press 2016), Lawrence R. Douglas, the James J. Grosfeld Professor of Law, Jurisprudence and Social Thought at Amherst College examines the trial of John Demjanjuk. The Right Wrong Man examines Demjanjuk’s legal odyssey that began in 1975. Over the course of the next several decades D...

In his new book Thieves: Stealing in Literature, Philosophy, and Myth (Wilhelm Fink Verlag, 2016)—in German: Diebe: Die heimliche Aneignung als Ursprungserzahlung in Literatur, Philosophie und Mythos—Andreas Gehrlach, post doc at the Humboldt University of Berlin, explores theft from a cross-cultural approach. This includes a discussion of several key German philosophers, such as Georg Wilhelm Fri...

In her new book, Selling under the Swastika: Advertising and Commercial Culture in Nazi Germany (Stanford University Press, 2013), Pamela Swett, Professor of History at McMaster University is the first comprehensive examination of commercial advertising in the Third Reich. Swett argues that advertisements played a much greater role in normalizing the Third Reich then previously thought. She highli...

One of the defining characteristics of the Nazi regime that ruled Germany from 1933 until 1945 was its attention to presentation as a means of winning support. In Marketing the Third Reich: Persuasion, Packaging and Propaganda (Routledge, 2017), Nicholas O’Shaughnessy details the centrality of political marketing to how the Nazis governed Germany, showing how vital it was to its success. As he exp...

The categories religion and race share a common genealogy. The modern understanding of these terms emerges within the European enlightenment but grasping their gradual production requires us to investigate further. In Modern Religion, Modern Race (Oxford University Press, 2016), Theodore Vial, Professor at Iliff School of Theology, argues that the intersection of religion and race can be better un...

How did a generation of Germany’s best and brightest become radicalized? What convinced young intellectuals to join the SS and perpetrate genocide in pursuit of a racial utopia? Find out in our conversation with Christian Ingrao about his book Believe and Destroy: Intellectuals in the SS War Machine (Polity Press, 2015). Christian traces the experiences of the war youth generation from defining ev...

In her new book, Max Liebermann: Modern Art and Modern Germany (Routledge 2015), Marion Deshmukh, the Robert T. Hawkes Professor of History Emeritus at George Mason University, examines the life and career of the prolific German artist Max Liebermann. Liebermann, a pioneer of German modernism, portrayed scenes of the Dutch countryside and rural life, along with portraits of Germany’s cultural and...

In Strangers in Berlin: Modern Jewish Literature between East and West, 1919-1933 (University of Michigan Press, 2016), Rachel Seelig, Visiting Scholar in the Department of Germanic Languages and Literatures at the University of Toronto, works against the prevailing tendency to view German and East European Jewish cultures as separate fields of study. Looking at four writers, Seelig presents Jewis...

The new German Democratic Republic, known as East Germany, faced many challenges when it was founded in 1949. Not least of which was convincing its citizens that they should be loyal to the new state and mobilizing the population towards its ideological goals. In The People’s Own Landscape: Nature, Tourism and Dictatorship in East Germany (University of Michigan Press, 2014), Scott Moranda explore...

Food is a hot topic these days, and not just among the folks posting pictures of their dinner on Instagram. A growing number of scholars in many fields study food’s production, distribution, consumption, connection to geopolitics, environmental impact and history. Alice Weinreb‘s new book, Modern Hungers: Food and Power in Twentieth-Century Germany (Oxford University Press, 2017), is a most welcom...

Where Europeans have gone, so, too, have their ideas about religion. We know that this was no one-way street, that Christian missionaries have both changed and been changed by their interaction with nonwhite, non-Christian peoples, and that their experiences have had a profound impact on the development of religious and philosophical thinking in Europe itself, while Christianity has left an indeli...

The idea that there is some unholy connection between Nazism and occultism has a lengthy history. It long predates 1933, when the National Socialist party took power in Germany. But what’s behind that idea? Some top-ranking members of the party were deeply engaged with the occult, perhaps most notably Rudolf Hess and Heinrich Himmler. Was Nazi occultism just a predilection of a handful of Nazi eli...