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New Books in German Studies

New Books in German Studies

Marshall Poe

Interviews with Scholars of Germany about their New Books Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/german-studies
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Top 10 New Books in German Studies Episodes

Goodpods has curated a list of the 10 best New Books in German Studies episodes, ranked by the number of listens and likes each episode have garnered from our listeners. If you are listening to New Books in German Studies for the first time, there's no better place to start than with one of these standout episodes. If you are a fan of the show, vote for your favorite New Books in German Studies episode by adding your comments to the episode page.

Lucy Barnhouse of Arkansas State University talks with Jana Byars about her new book, Hospitals in Communities of the Late Medieval Rhineland: Houses of God, Places for the Sick, out 2023 with Amsterdam University Press. From the mid-twelfth century onwards, the development of European hospitals was shaped by their claim to the legal status of religious institutions, with its attendant privileges and responsibilities. The questions of whom hospitals should serve and why they should do so have recurred -- and been invested with moral weight -- in successive centuries, though similarities between medieval and modern debates on the subject have often been overlooked. Hospitals' legal status as religious institutions could be tendentious and therefore had to be vigorously defended in order to protect hospitals' resources. This status could also, however, be invoked to impose limits on who could serve in and be served by hospitals. As recent scholarship demonstrates, disputes over whom hospitals should serve, and how, find parallels in other periods of history and current debates.

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Books about the origins of humanity dominate bestseller lists, while national newspapers present breathless accounts of new archaeological findings and speculate about what those findings tell us about our earliest ancestors. We are obsessed with prehistory—and, in this respect, our current era is no different from any other in the last three hundred years. In this coruscating work, The Invention of Prehistory: Empire, Violence, and Our Obsession with Human Origins (Liveright, 2024) acclaimed historian Dr. Stefanos Geroulanos demonstrates how claims about the earliest humans not only shaped Western intellectual culture, but gave rise to our modern world.

The very idea that there was a human past before recorded history only emerged with the Enlightenment, when European thinkers began to reject faith-based notions of humanity and history in favor of supposedly more empirical ideas about the world. From the “state of nature” and Romantic notions of virtuous German barbarians to theories about Neanderthals, killer apes, and a matriarchal paradise where women ruled, Dr. Geroulanos captures the sheer variety and strangeness of the ideas that animated many of the major thinkers of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, including Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Charles Darwin, and Karl Marx. Yet as Geroulanos shows, such ideas became, for the most part, the ideological foundations of repressive regimes and globe-spanning empires. Deeming other peoples “savages” allowed for guilt-free violence against them; notions of “killer apes” who were our evolutionary predecessors made war seem natural. The emergence of modern science only accelerated the West’s imperialism. The Nazi obsession with race was rooted in archaeological claims about prehistoric IndoGermans; the idea that colonialized peoples could be “bombed back to the Stone Age” was made possible by the technology of flight and the anthropological idea that civilization advanced in stages.

As Dr. Geroulanos argues, accounts of prehistory tell us more about the moment when they are proposed than about the deep past—and if we hope to start improving our future, we would be better off setting aside the search for how it all started. A necessary, timely, indelible account of how the quest for understanding the origins of humanity became the handmaiden of war and empire, The Invention of Prehistory will forever change how we think about the deep past.

This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose forthcoming book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars.

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Kant scholars have paid relatively little attention to his raciology. They assume that his racism, as personal prejudice, can be disentangled from his core philosophy. They also assume that racism contradicts his moral theory. In Kant, Race, and Racism: Views from Somewhere (Oxford UP, 2023), philosopher Huaping Lu-Adler challenges both assumptions. She shows how Kant's raciology--divided into racialism and racism--is integral to his philosophical system. She also rejects the individualistic approach to Kant and racism. Instead, she uses the notion of racism as ideological formation to demonstrate how Kant, from his social location both as a prominent scholar and as a lifelong educator, participated in the formation of modern racist ideology.

As a scholar, Kant developed a ground-breaking scientific theory of race from the standpoint of a philosophical investigator of nature or Naturforscher. As an educator, he transmitted denigrating depictions of the racialized others and imbued those descriptions with normative relevance. In both roles, he left behind, as one of his legacies, a worldview that excluded non-whites from such goods as recognitional respect and candidacy for cultural and moral achievements. Scholars who research and teach Kant's philosophy therefore have an unshakable burden to take part in the ongoing antiracist struggles, through their teaching practices as well as their scholarship. And they must do so with a pragmatic attention to nonideal social realities and a deliberate orientation toward substantial racial justice, equality, and inclusion.

Lu-Adler pushes the discourse about Kant and racism well beyond the old debates about whether he was racist or whether his racism contaminates his philosophy. By foregrounding the lasting legacies of Kant's raciology, her work calls for a profound reorientation of Kant scholarship.

Huaping Lu-Adler is Associate Professor of Philosophy at Georgetown University. She specializes in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Western philosophy (particularly epistemology, metaphysics, philosophy of science, and logic). She is the author of Kant and the Science of Logic (Oxford, 2018).

Morteza Hajizadeh is a Ph.D. graduate in English from the University of Auckland in New Zealand. His research interests are Cultural Studies; Critical Theory; Environmental History; Medieval (Intellectual) History; Gothic Studies; 18th and 19th Century British Literature. YouTube channel. Twitter.

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New Books in German Studies - Why Should We Preserve Memory of the Holocaust?
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04/02/24 • 44 min

Wojtek Soczewica has led the Auschwitz-Birkenau Foundation since 2019, near the site of the killing fields. The Foundation aims at the preservation of the remains of the concentration and extermination camp and of all the personal items that belonged to victims and survivors. Today they serve as material witnesses of the tragic history safeguarding “the place of Auschwitz in human memory.” In this episode of International Horizons, he speaks with John Torpey, director of the Ralph Bunche Institute, about the work of the Foundation and its role not only in contemporary Poland but in today’s turmoil. He reflects on the role of memorials and museums and how they serve as mirrors to help us to ask ourselves the difficult questions. Additionally, Soczewica attempts an answer concerning the relationship between politics and history.

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I am a child of the so-called transition in Bulgaria and growing-up I could never understand why my parents and grandparents would spend our family gatherings talking about the socialist past. It wasn’t until much later that I realized how much socialism and its end are imprinted on my grandparents’, my parents’ and my generation and that such dramatic changes cannot just be bygones. Kristen Ghodsee, an ethnographer and professor of Russian and East European Studies at the University of Pennsylvania, has spent many years digging into the layers of East European socialist and post-socialist experience trying to give voice to more nuanced narratives about this time, and I was very happy to once again have the chance to talk with her, this time about her book Red Hangover: Legacies of Twentieth-Century Communism (Duke University Press, 2017). In this very personal book with essays and short stories, Ghodsee describes the post-socialist realities of the victims of the greedy neoliberalism that has dismantled their social safety nets and expresses her frustration about the continuing tendency to reduce the twentieth-century East European state socialisms to Stalinism and the Gulags. While acknowledging the many crimes committed in the name of the communist ideal by these regimes, she insists that there were some good aspects and policies from which our present governments could learn, if they would be willing to leave aside the oversimplified and blackwashed tale they cherish so much. “After thirty of years of nursing this terrible hangover from the experience of twentieth century state socialism in Eastern Europe maybe it’s time that we take a little sip and start to clear our heads and figure out where we go from here” Ghodsee says. I invite you to listen and read what she has to say about our need for the proverbial hair of a dog* to sober us up after the heavy drinking of socialism in the twentieth century. Maybe a little bit more of the same could paradoxically help?

Check out my previous interview with Kristen Ghodsee about her most recent book Second World, Second Sex and Ghodsee’s blog - https://kristenghodsee.com/blog

*Note for ESL listeners: the proverb “a hair of the dog” is a shortening of “a hair of the dog that bit you” and it is when you drink a little bit of alcohol to cure a hangover. It comes from an old belief that when you are bitten by a rabid dog, you need to take a medicine containing a hair of the dog that bit you to be cured of rabies.

Marina Kadriu is an international MA student in Anthropology at Simon Fraser University, Canada

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Jennifer Cazenave’s An Archive of the Catastrophe: The Unused Footage of Claude Lanzmann’s Shoah (SUNY Press, 2019) is a fascinating analysis of the 220 hours of outtakes edited out of the final nine and a half-hour 1985 film with which listeners and readers might be familiar. Well known around the world as one of the greatest documentary films ever made, and certainly one of the most important works/artifacts of Holocaust history and memory, Lanzmann’s eventual finished film emerged from an astonishing 230 hours of interview footage shot in various locations. Commissioned originally by the State of Israel to make a film about the catastrophe, Lanzmann collected these testimonies over a period of several years before beginning the epic task of editing the film. He saved the outtakes as a vital repository of accounts of those who had lived through the Shoah. The footage has since been acquired, preserved, and digitized as an archive by the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.

The chapters of Cazenave’s book explore the film’s conceptualization and production, reframing the final film in terms of all that it left out, to think about what was included in relationship to those stories and scenes excluded for different reasons. Over years from an initial dissertation project to this volume, Cazenave pursued the story of the film and its outtakes through archival research, detective work, and close technical, aesthetic and theoretical consideration. The resulting analysis takes author and reader from consideration of the film/archive in relationship to Holocaust trials (and especially the Eichmann trial of 1961), to issues of gender and the feminine, to the question of rescue and refugees, as well as debates about representation, witnessing, and testimony. The book is a wonderful and complex study that will be of great interest to readers in Holocaust and cinema studies. The magnum opus of a French filmmaker working with a largely French crew, and produced with funding provided in part by the French government, the film also illuminates, in its own ways (including its silences) the difficult French past and politics of Holocaust history and memory.

Roxanne Panchasi is an Associate Professor of History at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver, Canada who specializes in twentieth and twenty-first century France and empire. She is the founding host of New Books in French Studies, a channel launched in 2013.

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Influential sexologist and activist Magnus Hirschfeld founded Berlin's Institute of Sexual Sciences in 1919 as a home and workplace to study homosexual rights activism and support transgender people. It was destroyed by the Nazis in 1933. This episode in history prompted Heike Bauer to ask, “Is violence an intrinsic part of modern queer culture?” In her new book, The Hirschfeld Archives: Violence, Death, and Modern Queer Culture (Temple University Press, 2017), Heike Bauer answers this critical question by examining the violence that shaped queer existence in the first part of the twentieth century. Hirschfeld himself escaped the Nazis, and many of his papers and publications survived. Bauer examines his accounts of same-sex life from published and unpublished writings, as well as books, articles, diaries, films, photographs and other visual materials, to scrutinize how violence-including persecution, death and suicide-shaped the development of homosexual rights and political activism. The Hirschfeld Archives brings these fragments of queer experience together to reveal many unknown and interesting accounts of LGBTQ life in the early twentieth century, but also to illuminate the fact that homosexual rights politics were haunted from the beginning by racism, colonial brutality, and gender violence.

Michael E. O’Sullivan is Professor of History at Marist College where he teaches courses about Modern Europe. He published Disruptive Power: Catholic Women, Miracles, and Politics in Modern Germany, 1918-1965 with University of Toronto Press in 2018.

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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-hand testimony (much of which was initially ignored, questioned, or suppressed by the major Allies) of both the Holocaust and the German occupiers’ mass repression and killing of non-Jewish Poles. Historian Michael Fleming offers a rich and unprecedented take on the story of Poles’ contributions to the emergence of a global legal regime for prosecuting war crimes, by reconstructing the central contribution of the Polish War Crimes Office in London to the emergence, successful work, and postwar legacy of the UN War Crimes Commission.

In the Shadow of the Holocaust: Poland, the United Nations War Crimes Commission, and the Search for Justice (Cambridge University Press, 2022) is a ground-breaking intervention in global legal history, in Polish history, and in the history of the transition from World War II to the Cold War.

Piotr H. Kosicki is Associate Professor of History at the University of Maryland, College Park. He is the author of Catholics on the Barricades (Yale, 2018) and editor, among others, of Political Exile in the Global Twentieth Century (with Wolfram Kaiser).

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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 documents and testimonies of survivors, The Holocaust in Romania sheds new light on Romania's prefascist and fascist antisemitic legislation and its implementation. New chapters consider the forced labor of the Jews, persecution by the Protestant churches, and the decision-making process of the Antonescu government in its treatment of Jews and Roma. With this book, the Romanian Holocaust will no longer be forgotten.

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In Nazi Billionnaires: The Dark History of Germany's Wealthiest Dynasties (HarperCollins, 2022), journalist David de Jong presents a groundbreaking investigation of how the Nazis helped German tycoons make billions off the horrors of the Third Reich and World War II—and how America allowed them to get away with it.

In 1946, Günther Quandt—patriarch of Germany’s most iconic industrial empire, a dynasty that today controls BMW—was arrested for suspected Nazi collaboration. Quandt claimed that he had been forced to join the party by his arch-rival, propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels, and the courts acquitted him. But Quandt lied. And his heirs, and those of other Nazi billionaires, have only grown wealthier in the generations since, while their reckoning with this dark past remains incomplete at best. Many of them continue to control swaths of the world economy, owning iconic brands whose products blanket the globe. The brutal legacy of the dynasties that dominated Daimler-Benz, cofounded Allianz, and still control Porsche, Volkswagen, and BMW has remained hidden in plain sight—until now.

In this landmark work of investigative journalism, David de Jong reveals the true story of how Germany’s wealthiest business dynasties amassed untold money and power by abetting the atrocities of the Third Reich. Using a wealth of untapped sources, de Jong shows how these tycoons seized Jewish businesses, procured slave laborers, and ramped up weapons production to equip Hitler’s army as Europe burned around them. Most shocking of all, de Jong exposes how America’s political expediency enabled these billionaires to get away with their crimes, covering up a bloodstain that defiles the German and global economy to this day.

This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose doctoral work focused on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars.

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FAQ

How many episodes does New Books in German Studies have?

New Books in German Studies currently has 845 episodes available.

What topics does New Books in German Studies cover?

The podcast is about Society & Culture, History and Podcasts.

What is the most popular episode on New Books in German Studies?

The episode title 'Clayton Whisnant, "Queer Identities and Politics in Germany: A History, 1880-1945" (Harrington Park Press, 2016)' is the most popular.

What is the average episode length on New Books in German Studies?

The average episode length on New Books in German Studies is 61 minutes.

How often are episodes of New Books in German Studies released?

Episodes of New Books in German Studies are typically released every 3 days.

When was the first episode of New Books in German Studies?

The first episode of New Books in German Studies was released on Apr 18, 2008.

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