New Books in German Studies

In her imaginative and scrupulous book, Violent Intermediaries: African Soldiers, Conquest, and Everyday Colonialism in German East Africa (Ohio University Press, 2014), historian Michelle Moyd writes about theaskari, Africans soldiers recruited in the ranks of the German East African colonial army. Praised by Germans for their loyalty and courage, the askari were reviled by Tanzanians for the vio...

If you look up the word “secular” in just about about any English-language dictionary, you’ll find that the word denotes, among other things, something that is not religious. This “not-religious-ness” would seem to be the modern essence of the word. If a government is secular, it can’t be religious. If a court is secular, it can’t be religious. If a party is secular, it can’t be religious. But, as...

In this interview with historian Edward Ross Dickinson we talk about sex. Well, actually we talk about the talk about sex. Since Michel Foucault’s epochal work History of Sexuality (1976) how moderns talked about sex has been a central concern of cultural and intellectual historians. Foucault linked a number of nineteenth-century phenomena, such as the growth of sexology as a discipline and the pa...

Germans belonging to the generation born at the turn of the twentieth century endured staggering losses, many of which became difficult to mourn or even acknowledge: their parents in World War I, financial and physical security during the Weimar Republic, the racially pure utopian promise of the Third Reich, and likely several loved ones in the catastrophic final throes of World War II and the pri...

Primary source readers represent an unusual historical genre. Unlike editions, their aim is not to enable the reader to hear, as clearly as possible, the voice of a single historical personage or institution. Nor are they purely interpretive works in which the author’s voice is foregrounded. In this conversation with Princeton University historian Anson Rabinbach, we learn what methodological, but...

I occasionally teach Western Civilization and you may have taken it in college. We all know the drill: Greeks-Romans-Dark Ages-Middle Ages-Renaissance-Reformation-Scientific Revolution-Enlightenment-Romanticism-Modernity. Or something like that. I teach Western Civilization as a “march of ideas”: Reason, Beauty, Freedom, Equality, Justice (caps intended) and the like. This way of telling the tale...

At the close of the Second World War, the Allies expelled several million Germans from the eastern portion of the former Reich. Thanks to the work of many historians, we know quite a bit about Allied planning for the expulsion, when and how it took place, and the multitude of deaths that occurred as a result of it. We know much less about what happened to the expellees after the expulsion. Where d...

My marginal comment, recorded at the end of the chapter on the Belzec trial in Michael Bryant‘s fine new book Eyewitness to Genocide: The Operation Reinhard Death Camp Trials, 1955-1966 (University of Tennessee Press, 2014), is simple:  “!!!!”  Text speak, to be sure, but it conveys the surprise I felt. One can ask many questions about the trials of the German guards and administrators of Belzec,...

In 1873, the German scientist Rudolf Virchow declared in Parliament that liberals were locked in a Kulturkampf, a “culture war” with the forces of Catholicism, which he viewed as the chief hindrance to progress and modernity. Over the past two decades, historians have appropriated the term “culture war,” liberated it from its German origin and applied it as a generic expression for secular-catholi...

It seems quite reasonable to wonder if there’s anything more to learn about the Holocaust. Scholars from a variety of disciplines have been researching and writing about the subject for decades. A simple search for “Holocaust” on Amazon turns up a stunning 27,642 results. How can there still be uncovered terrain? Wendy Lower shows it is in fact possible to say new things about the Holocaust (to be...

For over three years, from June 1941 to late 1944, the German Army and related Nazi forces (the SS, occupation troops, administrative organizations) conducted a Vernichtungskrieg–a war of annihilation–against the Soviet Union on Soviet soil. The Germans killed millions upon millions of Red Army soldiers, Communist Party officials, and ordinary Soviet citizens. As the Germans were pushed back by th...

This book tells a remarkable and–to me at least–little known but very important story. In Nazis, Islamists, and the Making of the Modern Middle East(Yale UP, 2014), Barry Rubin and Wolfgang G. Schwanitz trace the many connections between Germany–Imperial and Nazi–and the Arab world. Their particular focus is on a fellow named Amin al-Husseini, the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem between from 1921 to 1948...

For many years now, historians have wondered whether Hitler had any sort of consistent ideology. His writings are rambling and confusing. His speeches are full of plain lies. His “table talk” reflects a wandering, impulsive mind distinguished by a remarkable disconnection from reality. There are obvious themes: strident German nationalism, radical racialism, vicious anti-semitism, and militarism....

Thomas Mann referred to Ludwig Klages (1872-1956) as a “criminal philosopher,” a “Pan-Germanist,” “an irrationalist,” a “Tarzan philosopher,” “a cultural pessimist… the voice of the world’s downfall.” Yet, Walter Benjamin urged his friend Gershom Scholem to read Klage’s latest book in 1930, at a time when Klages was increasingly bending his anti-Semitic philosophy of life (Lebensphilosophie) in a...

If you have spent a bit of time in Germany or with German friends, you may have noticed the deep interest and affinity many Germans have for American Indians. What are the origins of this striking and enduring fascination? In many ways, it might be said to go back to Tacitus’ Germania – or at least, to 19th-century Germans’ readings of Germania – but it was also indelibly shaped by the writings of...

In his new collection of wonderfully engaging and provocative set of essays on Darwin and Darwinians, Robert J. Richards explores the history of biology and so much more. The eight essays collected in Was Hitler a Darwinian?: Disputed Questions in the History of Evolutionary Theory (University of Chicago Press, 2013), include reflections on  Darwin’s theories of natural selection and divergence, E...

“A good wife and a healthy child are better for one’s temper than frogs.” For Gabriel Finkelstein, Emil du Bois-Reymond was “the most important forgotten intellectual of the nineteenth century.” Most famously in a series of experimental works on electricity, but also in a series of public lectures that generated very strong, furious responses, du Bois-Reymond galvanized (ha! see what I did there?...

The question of Wehrmacht complicity in the Holocaust is an old one. What might be called the “received view” until recently was that while a small number of German army units took part in anti-Jewish atrocities, the great bulk of the army neither knew about nor participated in the Nazi genocidal program. In other words, the identified cases were isolated exceptions. Who was at fault? Why, the SS...

I always learn something when I interview authors, but in this chat with Todd H. Weir I learned something startling: I’m a monist. What is more, you may be a monist too and not even know it. Do you believe that there is really only one kind of stuff and that everything we observe–and our powers of observation themselves–are made of that stuff? If so, you’re a monist. But what kind? As Todd explain...

We’ve talked before on the show about how hard it is to enter into the field of Holocaust Studies. Just six weeks ago, for instance, I talked with Dan Stone about his thoughtful work analyzing and critiquing the current state of our knowledge of the subject. This week is a natural follow-on to that interview. Peter Hayes and John Roth have edited a remarkable compilation of essays about the Holoca...

In West Germany in September and October of 1977, a group of self-described urban guerrillas of the Red Army Faction (RAF) kidnapped industrialist Hanns Martin Schleyer. In exchange for Schleyer, the RAF demanded the release of its imprisoned leaders, Andreas Baader and Gudrun Ensslin. Those months in 1977 following the abduction of Schleyer are often referred to as the German Autumn, and they rep...

Occasionally you hear shrill news reports about American Nazis. Judging by the pictures of them, they are almost always skin-headed morons who can’t put two words together (other than “Sieg Heil” or some such). Often it’s not clear whether they are really Nazis or are just parodies of Nazis. Or maybe, hoping for a sick laugh, they’re just having us on. One thing is clear: they are very, very few....

Germany embarked on the age of imperialism a bit later than other global powers, and the German experience of empire was much shorter-lived than that of Britain or France or Portugal. Nonetheless, empire was fundamental, Jeff Bowersox argues, to Germans’ self-understanding and sense of place in the world in an era marked by sweeping changes, including rapid industrialization and economic growth; t...

I don’t think it’s possible anymore for someone, even an academic with a specialty in the field, let alone an interested amateur, to read even a fraction of the literature written about the Holocaust. If you do a search for the word “Holocaust” on Amazon (as I just did), you get 18,445 results. That’s just in English, and just books available right now on Amazon. Admittedly this is a poor search s...

I have read quite a few books on terrorism but always from an English language perspective. This has meant that I was missing the alternative stories from other nations. Guido Steinberg has done me a favour by publishing his German study in English. German Jihad: On the Internationalisation of Islamist Terrorism (Columbia UP, 2013)provides an excellent, detailed analysis of the recent history of t...