New Books In German Studies

Carl von Clausewitz wrote On War in 1832 after experiencing the Napoleonic wars. The eight books of this text contain Clausewitz’s theory of war. In it, he addresses the relationships between war and policy, tactics and strategy. A basic textbook in military academies, this book is read by both military strategists and political scientists. And it can be interpreted in two very different, but accurate ways. Gil-li Vardi is a military historian and visiting scholar at Stanford University where she teaches about military history, particularly the First and Second World Wars. She has published articles in War in History and the Journal for Strategic Studies. See more information on our website, WritLarge.fm. Follow us on Twitter @WritLargePod. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/german-studies

Immanuel Kant’s early work wasn’t much to write home about. But as his career developed, Kant published incredible works of philosophy that continue to challenge and influence our greatest thinkers. In 1785, he published the Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals and challenged the foundations of human value. Professor Richard Bourke untangles this complex work and discusses how Kant—whether we realize it or not—has permeated our culture. Richard Bourke is a professor of the History of Political Thought at the University of Cambridge. He is the author of Empire and Revolution: The Political Life of Edmund Burke and Peace in Ireland: The War of Ideas. See more information on our website, WritLarge.fm. Follow us on Twitter @WritLargePod. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/german-studies

In 1951, following the Holocaust and Second World War, Hannah Arendt wrote The Origins of Totalitarianism. Arendt’s aim was in part to document and reflect on the atrocities that had occurred. But more importantly, she wanted to expose the elements of the human condition that enabled those atrocities to happen as well as the tools societies can use to fight totalitarian regimes. Amir Eshel is a professor of German Studies and Comparative Literature at Stanford University. He is the author of Poetic Thinking Today and Futurity: Contemporary Literature and the Quest for the Past.  See more information on our website, WritLarge.fm. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/german-studies

Selling your soul to the devil in exchange for your deepest desire is a common theme in many western stories. The origins of this theme can be traced back to the German legend of Faust. The most well known version today is an epic poem, Faust, written by German poet Johann Wolfgang von Goethe. Part of the reason Faust continues to resonate with audiences is that everyone can relate to this feeling of striving against our own human limitations. John Hamilton is a professor of Comparative Literature in German at Harvard. He is the author of the books Music, Madness, and the Unworking of Language, Philology of the Flesh, and more. See more information on our website, WritLarge.fm. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/german-studies

In The Metabolic Museum (Hatje Cantz, 2020), Clémentine Deliss, a curator, researcher, and former director of the Frankfurt Weltkulturen Museum, explores possible functions for anthropological museums in a postcolonial culture. Anthropological museums in Europe, as products of imperialism, have been compelled to legitimate themselves because the very basis of their exhibitions, the history of their collections, came about all too often through colonial appropriation and outright theft. In this book, Deliss addresses this reality for enthographic or world culture museums in Europe, exploring the possible futures for these institutions. Connecting to reflections on her own work as the director of the Frankfurt Weltkulturen Museum with discussions of filmmakers, artists and authors to argue for an entity she calls the Metabolic Museum―an interventionist laboratory that opens up the potential of anthropological collections for the future. Holiday Powers (@holidaypowers) is Assistant Professor of Art History at VC

Shadowland: The Story of Germany Told by Its Prisoners (Reaktion Books, 2022) is a history of modern Germany told not through the lives of its leaders, but its lawbreakers. As Nelson Mandela said, “a nation should not be judged by how it treats its highest citizens, but its lowest ones.” Shadowland tells the sometimes inspiring, often painful stories of Germany’s prisoners, and thereby shines new light on Germany itself. The story begins at the end of the Second World War, in a defeated country on the edge of collapse, in which orphaned and lost children are forced into homelessness, scavenging and stealing to stay alive, often laying the foundations of a so-called criminal career. While East Germany developed detention facilities for its secret police, West Germany passed prison reform laws, which erected, in the words of a prisoner, “little asbestos walls in Hell.” Shadowland is Germany as seen through the lives, experiences, triumphs, and tragedies of its lowest citizens. Sarah Colvin is the Schröder Profe

In 1930, about 750,000 Jews called Romania home. At the end of World War II, approximately half of them survived. Only recently, after the fall of Communism, are details of the history of the Holocaust in Romania coming to light.  In The Romanian Orthodox Church and the Holocaust (Indiana UP, 2017), Ion Popa explores this history by scrutinizing the role of the Romanian Orthodox Church from 1938 to the present day. Popa unveils and questions whitewashing myths that covered up the role of the church in supporting official antisemitic policies of the Romanian government. He analyzes the church's relationship with the Jewish community in Romania, with Judaism, and with the state of Israel, as well as the extent to which the church recognizes its part in the persecution and destruction of Romanian Jews. Popa's highly original analysis illuminates how the church responded to accusations regarding its involvement in the Holocaust, the part it played in buttressing the wall of Holocaust denial, and how Holocaust mem

Royal Childhood and Child Kingship: Boy Kings in England, Scotland, France and Germany, c. 1050–1262 (Cambridge University Press, 2022) refines adult-focused perspectives on medieval rulership. Dr. Emily Joan Ward exposes the problematic nature of working from the assumption that kingship equated to adult power. Children's participation and political assent could be important facets of the day-to-day activities of rule, as this study shows through an examination of royal charters, oaths to young boys, cross-kingdom diplomacy and coronation. The first comparative and thematic study of child rulership in this period, Dr. Ward analyses eight case studies across northwestern Europe from c.1050 to c.1250. Dr. Ward stresses innovations and adaptations in royal government, questions the exaggeration of political disorder under a boy king, and suggests a ruler's childhood posed far less of a challenge than their adolescence and youth. Uniting social, cultural and political historical methodologies, Dr. Ward unveils h

German ambitions to transform Southwest Africa in the early part of the twentieth century were futile and resulted in the widespread death and suffering of indigenous populations. For years colonists wrestled ocean waters, desert landscapes, and widespread aridity as they tried to reach inland in their effort to turn outwardly barren lands into a profitable settler colony. In Environing Empire: Nature, Infrastructure and the Making of German Southwest Africa (Berghahn Books, 2022), Martin Kalb outlines the development of the colony up to World War I, deconstructing the common settler narrative, all to reveal the importance of natural forces and the Kaiserreich’s everyday violence. Martin Kalb is an Associate Professor of History at Bridgewater College in Virginia. Eric Grube is a Visiting Assistant Professor in the Department of History at Boston College. He also received his PhD from Boston College in the summer of 2022. He studies modern German and Austrian history, with a special interest in right-wing par

At the turn of the twentieth century, depictions of the colonized world were prevalent throughout the German metropole. Tobacco advertisements catered to the erotic gaze of imperial enthusiasts with images of Ovaherero girls, and youth magazines allowed children to escape into "exotic domains" where their imaginations could wander freely. While racist beliefs framed such narratives, the abundance of colonial imaginaries nevertheless compelled German citizens and settlers to contemplate the world beyond Europe as a part of their daily lives. An Imperial Homeland: Forging German Identity in Southwest Africa (Pennsylvania State University Press, 2022) reorients our understanding of the relationship between imperial Germany and its empire in Southwest Africa (present-day Namibia). Colonialism had an especially significant effect on shared interpretations of the Heimat (home/homeland) ideal, a historically elusive perception that conveyed among Germans a sense of place through national peculiarities and local land

Capitalism in Chaos: How the Business Elites of Europe Prospered in the Era of the Great War (Cornell UP, 2022) explores an often-overlooked consequence and paradox of the First World War—the prosperity of business elites and bankers in service of the war effort during the destruction of capital and wealth by belligerent armies. This study of business life amid war and massive geopolitical changes follows industrialists and policymakers in Central Europe as the region became crucially important for German and subsequently French plans of economic and geopolitical expansion in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Based on extensive research in sixteen archives, five languages, and four states, Máté Rigó demonstrates that wartime destruction and the birth of "war millionaires" were two sides of the same coin. Despite the recent centenaries of the Great War and the Versailles peace treaties, knowledge of the overall impact of war and border changes on business life remains sporadic, based on scant

By most accounts, the twentieth century was not kind to utopian thought. The violence of two world wars, Cold War anxieties, and a widespread sense of crisis after the 1973 global oil shock appeared to doom dreams of a better world. The eventual victory of capitalism and, seemingly, liberal democracy relieved some fears but exchanged them for complacency and cynicism. Not, however, in West Germany. In Sustainable Utopias: The Art and Politics of Hope in Germany (Harvard UP, 2022), Jennifer Allen showcases grassroots activism of the 1980s and 1990s that envisioned a radically different society based on community-centered politics―a society in which the democratization of culture and power ameliorated alienation and resisted the impotence of end-of-history narratives. Berlin’s History Workshop liberated research from university confines by providing opportunities for ordinary people to write and debate the story of the nation. The Green Party made the politics of direct democracy central to its program. Artists

Hannah Arendt said that she had one life-long “best friend.” That was Rachel Varnhagen, a Jewish woman who lived in Enlightenment-era Berlin around 1800 and died 73 years before Arendt was born, in 1906. Arendt wrote her first book, a startlingly original literary biography of Varnhagen who founded one of the most celebrated yet short-lived salons in Enlightenment era Prussia. I spoke with Courtney Blair Hodrick, a doctoral candidate completing a book-long study of Arendt, and Professor Amir Eshel, both of Stanford University to discover what is at stake in Arendt’s unusual biography, why the book meant at once so much to Arendt and why she nonetheless almost neglected to publish it, and what this biography of a Jewish women in 19th century Berlin can teach us today about questions of identity, belonging, assimilation, women, Jews, anti-Semitism, freedom, politics, the private and the public, and many of the other topics that concerned Arendt throughout her lifetime. Uli Baer teaches literature and photograph

Earlier this month, U.S. President Joe Biden signed the CHIPS and Science Act, a bill purportedly meant to revive U.S. dominance in research and development. “We used to rank number one in the world in research and development; now we rank number nine,” Biden said at the signing ceremony. “China was number eight decades ago; now they are number two.” And a recent study from Japan’s science ministry reported that China now leads the world not just in quantity of scientific research, but in quality too. The success of the U.S.--and perhaps China, into the future–is due to the “research university”, an academic institution that offers professors the freedom to study and research, and students the freedom to learn, leading to high-quality academic output. Those universities are the subject of Professor William Kirby’s Empires of Ideas: Creating the Modern University from Germany to America to China (Harvard University Press, 2022). In this interview, Professor Kirby and I talk about the research university: Humbo

Scottish philosopher David Hume thought that rationalism didn’t work at all. German philosopher Immanuel Kant thought rationalism didn’t work by itself. Critique of Pure Reason, the first in a three-part project, is Kant’s attempt to join the beliefs of Hume with the beliefs of the rationalists. In his system, thoughts, experience, physics, morality, political and religious questions all exist in relation to one another. It wasn’t a takedown of reason; it was an investigation. Professor Michael Rosen is a professor of Ethics in Politics and Government at Harvard University. His work includes philosophy, social theory, and the history of ideas. He is well known for his work on 19th and 20th century European philosophy. See more information on our website, WritLarge.fm. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/german-studies

From one of the world's leading economists, a grand narrative of the century that made us richer than ever, yet left us unsatisfied Before 1870, humanity lived in dire poverty, with a slow crawl of invention offset by a growing population. Then came a great shift: invention sprinted forward, doubling our technological capabilities each generation and utterly transforming the economy again and again. Our ancestors would have presumed we would have used such powers to build utopia. But it was not so. When 1870-2010 ended, the world instead saw global warming; economic depression, uncertainty, and inequality; and broad rejection of the status quo.  Brad DeLong's Slouching Towards Utopia: An Economic History of the Twentieth Century (Basic Books, 2022) tells the story of how this unprecedented explosion of material wealth occurred, how it transformed the globe--and why it failed to deliver us to utopia. Of remarkable breadth and ambition, it uncovers the last century to have been less a march of progress than a s

'Theory' - a magical glow has emanated from this word since the sixties. Theory was more than just a succession of ideas: it was an article of faith, a claim to truth, a lifestyle. It spread among its adherents in cheap paperbacks and triggered heated debates in seminar rooms and cafés. The Frankfurt School, Structuralism, Post-Structuralism, Adorno, Derrida, Foucault: these and others were the exotic schools and thinkers whose ideas were being devoured by young minds. But where did the fascination for dangerous thoughts come from? In The Summer of Theory: History of a Rebellion, 1960-1990 (Polity Press, 2021), Philipp Felsch follows the hopes and dreams of a generation that entered the jungle of difficult texts. His setting is West Germany in the decades from the 1960s to the 1990s: in a world frozen in the Cold War, movement only came from big ideas. It was the time of apocalyptic master thinkers, upsetting reading experiences and glamorous incomprehensibility. As the German publisher Suhrkamp published Ado

When the Germans requested an armistice in October 1918, it was a shock to the Allied political and military leadership. They had been expecting, and planning for, the war to continue into 1919, the year they hoped to achieve a complete military victory over the Central Powers.  In Coalition Strategy and the End of the First World War: The Supreme War Council and War Planning, 1917-1918" (Cambridge UP, 2019), Meighen McCrae illuminates how, throughout this planning process, the Supreme War Council evolved to become the predominant mechanism for coalition war-making. She analyses the Council's role in the formulation of an Allied strategy for 1918-1919 across the various theatres of war and compares the perspectives of the British, French, Americans and Italians. In doing so we learn how, in an early example of modern alliance warfare, the Supreme War Council had to coordinate national needs with coalition ones. Alex Beckstrand is a PhD candidate in history at the University of Connecticut, an officer in the M

Play is an essential part of childhood. But according to German philosopher Johann Friedrich von Schiller’s treatise “On the Aesthetic Education of Man,” play was a key part of adulthood, too. In fact, in this collection of letters, Schiller claimed that the only way we could achieve utopia was by making play a central aspect of society. Professor Doris Sommer is a professor of Romance Languages and Literatures and African American Studies at Harvard University and Director of the Cultural Agents Initiative. Her books include The Work of Art in the World: Civic Agency and Public Humanities and Bilingual Aesthetics: A New Sentimental Education. See more information on our website, WritLarge.fm. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/german-studies

The Brexit debate has been so all-consuming and filled with so much misinformation that many Brits and others can overlook some the challenges facing the European Union itself. Looked at in broad terms, it has been an astonishingly successful political project, having delivered 70 years of peace and prosperity. But what lies ahead? What issues does it need to tackle to maintain that kind of success? Luuk van Middelaar is a Dutch historian, Professor of EU law at Leiden University. He has worked at the heart of EU institutions and give his observations and analysis of the underlying tensions in the EU and what lies ahead. Owen Bennett-Jones is a freelance journalist and writer. A former BBC correspondent and presenter he has been a resident foreign correspondent in Bucharest, Geneva, Islamabad, Hanoi and Beirut. He is recently wrote a history of the Bhutto dynasty which was published by Yale University Press. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium