New Books In European Studies

When I was fourteen I was faced with a difficult choice. I was dreadful at languages but knew that I had another two years of brain-aching pain ahead of me full of verb tables and conjugations. The choice was between pain in French or pain in German. On the French side we had (for a fourteen year old) summer sun, beautiful women in skimpy dresses, and achingly cool films full of gruff types moodily smoking cigarettes. On the German side we had… Well, I was fourteen so I didn’t know much more than cars and wars. For some reason I chose German. It was by no means a bad decision. I spent several happy Easter holidays travelling to a small town just outside Frankfurt, where we stayed with German families, drank German beer and discovered German girls. We visited Heidelberg and the ominous, barbed wire border with East Germany. The sun shone. Somehow I even did pretty well in my German exams. A few years later I even ended up living in Vienna. The apparent oddness of my decision is something that is ta

When I was a kid I loved movies about Nazis who had escaped justice after the war. There was “The Marathon Man” (“Oh, don’t worry. I’m not going into that cavity. That nerve’s already dying.”). There was “The Boys from Brazil” (“The right Hitler for the right future! A Hitler tailor-made for the 1980s, 90s, 2000!”). And there was “The ODESSA File” (“Germany believes she doesn’t need us now…but one day she’ll know that she does!”). “The ODESSA File” was my favorite because it explained what really happened, how the evil Nazis formed a super-secret group (Organisation der Ehemaligen SS-Angeheorigen) to get themselves out of Germany so they could one day return to power. The trouble is that’s not what happened at all. In fact, there was no ODESSA. In 1947, someone tricked Nazi-hunter Simon Weisenthal into believing “ODESSA” existed (he was quite willing to be tricked). Then Fr

If you’re a native-born American, you’re probably familiar with Aunt Jemima (pancake syrup), Uncle Ben (precooked rice), and Rastus (oatmeal)–commercial icons all. They were co-oped in whole or part from stock characters in American minstrel shows, largely because they suggested to white consumers a comforting though bygone hospitality. Aunt Jemima said “You might not have a loving mammy to do your home cookin’, but you can eat as if you did.” I grew up with Aunt Jemima and loved her syrup dearly, so I knew this. But I did not know that a similar tradition of racist commercial icons existed in Imperial Germany. I do now, thanks to David Ciarlo‘s insightful Advertising Empire: Race and Visual Culture in Imperial Germany (Harvard UP, 2011). The Germans had been using images such as the “tobacco moor” to stamp their exotic trade goods since the eighteenth century. But it was only in the 1890s that they began to use the “moor” in mass advertising p

Many of us know that Nazi regime tried to control Germans’ fertility: some people should reproduce more, according to the National Socialists, and some should reproduce less or not at all. Policies like coercive sterilization for the supposedly “unfit” were the flip side to benefits for “racially fit” Germans who propagated. But the fact is, many states the world over have tried to exert control over their citizens’ reproductive practices. Even with radical differences in government, the notion that the state’s health depends in part on its citizens’ fertility can be remarkably stubborn. In her book, The Politics of Fertility in Twentieth-Century Berlin (Cambridge University Press, 2010), Historian Annette Timm takes us to “the belly of the beast”: to Germany’s capital, Berlin. But her interest isn’t so much in the ideology of reproductive politics as in its implementation. What programs did the German state – and the municipality

On November 10, 2009, Robert Enke stepped in front of an express train at a crossing in the German village of Eilvese. At age 32, Robert left behind a young family: he and his wife, Teresa, had just adopted a baby girl only six months earlier. And Robert was also at the top of his professional career. He was the star goalkeeper for the club Hannover 96 of the Bundesliga, and he was expected to be the starting keeper for the German national team at the World Cup in South Africa. But despite this success, and the new addition to his family, Robert was unable to overcome a severe clinical depression that had gripped him for months. Only a small circle of family and friends knew of the depth of his illness. For others, both those who knew Robert personally and those who knew of him only as one of Germany’s best footballers, his death was an incomprehensible shock. Ronald Reng was among those stunned by Robert Enke’s death.An award-winning German sports journalist based in Barcelona, Ronnie had meet R

The Victor’s Crown brings to vivid life the signal role of sport in the classical world. Ranging over a dozen centuries–from Archaic Greece through to the late Roman and early Byzantine empires–David Potter’s lively narrative shows how sport, to the ancients, was not just a dim reflection of religion and politics but a potent social force in its own right. The passion for sport among the participants and fans of antiquity has been matched in history only by our own time. Potter first charts the origins of competitive athletics in Greece during the eighth century BC and the emergence of the Olympics as a preeminent cultural event. He focuses especially on the experiences of spectators and athletes, especially in violent sports such as boxing and wrestling, and describes the physiology of conditioning, training techniques, and sport’s role in education. Throughout, we meet the great athletes of the past and learn what made them great. The rise of the Roman Empire transformed the sp

Carl Schmitt (1888-1985) was the author of numerous influential books and essays on political theory, law, and other subjects. In Carl Schmitt: Writings on War (Polity Press, 2011), Rhodes Scholar Timothy Nunan has provided us with an excellent translation of three of Schmitt’s essay on military affairs. These essays are relevant from a variety of perspectives. They reflect interwar debates about international law, neutrality, and the League of Nations and so are of interest to historians of the period. Schmitt was also a fervent supporter of Hitler and the Nazi party and so it may be surprising that his influence (note his longevity) may in some ways be increasing. His ideas about what constitutes an empire, his thoughts on “just war,” and on war crimes demand our attention despite our revulsion at his political views. For making more of Schmitt’s work accessible to an English-speaking audience, Nunan is to be thanked.Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

If Edith Sheffer‘s excellent Burned Bridge: How East and West Germans Made the Iron Curtain (Oxford UP, 2011) has a single lesson, it’s that dividing a country is not as easy as you might think. You don’t just draw a line and tell people that it’s now the “border,” for in order for borders to be borders, they have to be seen as such. Sheffer shows that for quite a number of years after 1945, the Germans in Neustadt and Sonneberg–closely situated towns in, respectively, the American and Soviet zones of occupation–didn’t really know whether the border was a border and, if so, what kind of border it was or should be. “It”–whatever it was–was shifting, lawless, contested, resented, profitable, and sometimes deadly. The Grenze at Burned Bridge was really a kind of anarchical region dividing people who were in no way different from one another but who were compelled to behave as if they were by two occupying powers. The degree to which th

We’ve dealt with the question of how racial categories and conceptions evolve on New Books in History before, most notably in our interview with Nell Irving Painter. She told us about the history of “Whiteness.” Today we’ll return to the history of racial ideas and listen to Andrew Curranexplain the history of “Blackness.” Doubtless Europeans have noted that different humans from different parts of the globe lookdifferent for millennia. But it was only relatively recently, as Curran explains in The Anatomy of Blackness: Science and Slavery in an Age of Enlightenment (Johns Hopkins UP, 2011), that they took a serious interest inexplaining these differences in a manner we would call “scientific.” There are two major reasons for this tardiness. First, metaphysical and biblical schemes provided the primary context for the interpretation of the human until the mid eighteenth century. Second, the most important scientific communities in Europe-those of France and Engl

This past summer Germany hosted the 2011 FIFA Women’s World Cup. The 32 matches drew more than 800,000 fans, while the total number of foreign tourists visiting Germany increased by nine per cent over the previous summer. The German government’s commissioner for tourism proudly declared that the success of the Women’s World Cup “strengthened the global image of Germany as a cosmopolitan and family-friendly travel destination with excellent infrastructure,” making the country the “world champion of hospitality.” As the statement shows, German officials are highly conscious of their nation’s “brand,” and the effectiveness of that brand in drawing tourists. The same can be said of other nations that host major international sporting events. Think of the attention to the “new South Africa” in 2010 or the “new China” in 2008. Organizers of these events do not simply plan a schedule of competitions; they seek to present an attractiv

“Before reggae there was rock steady, and before that, ska,” writes Cedella Marley in the foreword to Heather Augustyn’s 2010 book Ska: An Oral History (McFarland, 2010). By way of interviews with dozens of ska musicians, Augustyn traces the history of the music from its Jamaican roots, through its 2Tone revival in 1970’s and 80’s England, to its current regional popularity in the United States. She interviewed Derrick Morgan, Doreen Shaffer, Laurel Aitken, Toots Hibert, Judge Dread, Roddy Radiation, Dave Wakeling, Pauline Black, Kix Thompson, and Buster Bloodvessel to name just a few. The book provides a solid understanding of ska as a music with roots in American jazz and soul mixed with the indigenous music of the Carribean. Augustyn’s interviews also highlight the importance of Jamaica’s status as a former colony in the creation of English ska as well as providing an insight into the music’s reflection of British and Jamaican race and class relations. Most i

When I was in college in the 1980s, I liked to listen to Iggy Pop (aka James Newell Osterberg, Jr.). I was always mystified, however, by his song “Five Foot One,” with its odd and catchy refrain “I wish life could be/Swed-ish mag-a-zines!” What in the heck did that mean? I’d never seen a “Swed-ish mag-a-zine.” Thanks to Elizabeth Heineman‘s wonderful book Before Porn Was Legal: The Erotica Empire of Beate Uhse (University of Chicago Press, 2011), now I understand. You see, the last and perhaps most significant Swedish contribution (if that’s what it was) to Western Civilization was legalized hardcore porn. In the early 1970s the Swedes (and their porn-allies, the Danes) flooded European markets with the stuff. The Scandinavians were making a killing. As Lisa explains, the “Swedish Invasion” put the queen of the German erotica industry, Beate Uhse, in something of a bind – but it also came at a moment of great opportunity. In the first two

As we close in on the centennial of the First World War, no doubt there will be a flood of new interpretations and “hidden histories” of the conflict. Many books will certainly promise much, but in the end deliver little. Fortunately this is not the case with Michael Neiberg‘s latest book Dance of the Furies: Europe and the Outbreak of World War I (Harvard University Press, 2011). In this important new view of the opening months of the war, Neiberg offers a fresh look at the July Crisis, how it was perceived across Europe, and the first two months of the war. Rather than focusing on the same old voices of the European literati and political elites, Neiberg shows us how the average person considered the march to war. In the process he reveals a number of startling insights that challenge the war’s standard historical orthodoxy, revealing that many of our assumptions about the collective and individual responses to the July Crisis are based on misperception and poor assumptions. Rather

Most modern sports have some creation myth that usually links them to an almost-sacred place of origin. Baseball has its Cooperstown. Golf its St. Andrews. Basketball its Springfield College. If you are a football fan, whether of the All Blacks or the Springboks, the Magpies or the Swans, the Longhorns or the Stampeders, your ancestral shrine is a centuries-old boarding school in the West Midlands of England. It was at this place in 1823, according to legend, that schoolboy William Webb Ellis first caught a football and ran with it. The game that developed after this violation of the rules took the name of young Webb Ellis’ school: Rugby. The branches of rugby football spread widely in the 19th century and took on distinctive shapes, so that every sport today in which players run with and toss an oval ball, as opposed to dribbling and kicking a round one, can trace its history back to Webb Ellis’ forward rush. The legend of William Webb Ellis is just one subject that Tony Collins addresses in A So

Konrad H. Jarausch, whose varied and important works on German history have been required reading for scholars for several decades, has published Reluctant Accomplice: A Wehrmacht Soldier’s Letters from the Eastern Front (Princeton University Press, 2011), a collection of his father’s missives from Poland and Russia during the early years of the Second World War, now translated into English. As you can imagine, this was an intensely personal project, and one that says almost as much about the postwar generation of “fatherless children” like Jarausch as it reveals about men like his father (also named Konrad) who found themselves in the cauldron of war. Jarausch seems to resist the comparison but I liken this work to Victor Klemperer’s diaries, I Shall Bear Witness, that were published with great fanfare almost fifteen years ago. The circumstances of the two men were vastly different (Klemperer was converted Jew, married to an “Aryan,” living in Dresden during the year

Being a historian is a bit of a slog: years in graduate school, more years in dusty libraries and archives, and even more years teaching students who sometimes don’t seem interested in learning what you have to teach. But the job does have its pleasures, and one of the greatest–and surely the guiltiest–is watching people screw history up. Not a day goes by when we don’t see someone get it wrong, dead wrong, or so wrong that it’s not even wrong. To us, history is firmly anchored in authenticated sources that have been subjected to intense scrutiny and debate by people who know what they are talking about. To most other folks (though surely none of the people reading these words), history is something a dimly remembered teacher taught you, something you saw on the “History Channel,” or something someone told you once. This kind of history is not anchored in anything other than popular ideas and attitudes, which themselves are constantly changing. In this light, it’

Matthias Strohn‘s The German Army and the Defense of the Reich: Military Doctrine and the Conduct of the Defensive Battle, 1918-1939 (Cambridge University Press, 2011) is an important challenge to the existing literature on interwar German military doctrine. The stunning German victories in 1939 and 1940 have usually been attributed to their practice of “Blitzkrieg” (Lightning War). The inventive use of armored divisions and airpower allowed the Wehrmacht to sweep its enemies from the battlefield with relatively low casualties (on the German side, at least) and with little negative impact on the German homefront or domestic economy. James Corum, Robert Citino (a recent interviewee) and others have traced the roots of this combined arms doctrine in the interwar period, focusing on the “stormtroop” innovations World War One and the advocacy of mobility above all else by planners like Hans von Seeckt. But Strohn believes that this understandable fixation on the roots of Blitzkrieg h

Very little illustrates history as well as the personal story. For all of the wars, deportations and suffering of the mid Twentieth Century, it’s only when there are real people that the figures come alive. Luckily there are some very good books out there that help us get our heads around the otherwise near-incomprehensible, and Matthew Kelly‘s book Finding Poland: From Tavistock to Hruzdowa and Back Again (Jonathan Cape, 2010) can be added to that list. Matthew’s book is about a family that was finding its feet in inter-war Poland, before history happened to them. First the country was divided between the Nazis and the Soviets, before they were deported to the USSR. The story takes them from Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan to Persia, India and – finally – Devon, in England’s lush West Country. Matthew helps us to understand what this remarkable journey was like for those involved – partly because they are his own family. The book is full of personal photographs and letter

Today is Memorial Day here in the United States, the day on which we remember those who have fought and died in the service of our country. It’s fitting, then, that we are talking to Adam Hochschild about his To End All Wars: A Story of Loyalty and Rebellion, 1914-1918 (Houghton Mifflin, 2011). The book itself is a memorial of sorts, or rather a reminder of what may, in hindsight, seem to us to have been a kind of collective insanity. The Great Powers fought World War I over nothing in particular. They pursued no great cause, sought to right no terrible injustice. They appear to us, therefore, to have fought for no good reason and to have been, therefore, out of their heads. But here we are wrong, for the combatants were not insane. Not at all. They simply lived in a different world and, therefore, thought differently than we do. They fought, as Adam points out, because they wanted to fight. For them, the bloody struggle of nation against nation was a necessary and salutary phenomenon. War made them who

What is the role of personality in shaping history? Shortly before the beginning of the First World War, the German sociologist Max Weber puzzled over this question. He was sure that there was a kind of authority that drew strength from character itself. He called this authority “charismatic,” a type of legitimate political power that rested “on devotion to the exceptional sanctity, heroism or exemplary character of an individual person, and of the normative patterns or order revealed or ordained by him.” The charismatic leader is not like us. In fact, he is not like anyone. He is sui generis, a mysterious force of nature, a sort of political demiurge. According to Jonathan Steinberg, Weber may well have had Otto von Bismarck in mind when he defined charismatic authority. In his wonderful Bismarck: A Life (Oxford UP, 2011), Steinberg argues that Bismarck’s successes (and some of his failures) can be largely attributed to the awesome force of his personality. Not “social str