New Books In German Studies

Socialist Subjectivities: Queering East Germany under Honecker (University of Michigan Press, 2025) works within the logics of queer time to reanimate East German subjectivities in the 1970s and 1980s beyond the narrative of the German Democratic Republic’s long march towards demise. While East Germany certainly ended in dissolution, not all East Germans experienced late socialism in a singular manner. Rather, even after a generation of building socialism, East Germans under Honecker continued to pursue a range of socialist presents and a multiplicity of socialist futures up to and beyond 1989. This edited volume utilizes queer temporalities to interrogate how individuals lived non-normative possibilities in a highly normative world. Whether one was an apparatchik, artist, or alcoholic, the everyday interactions, experiences, and rituals of late socialism proved crucial to establishing the conditions around which subjecthood was constructed. Despite stereotypes of apathy and inertia, East Germans lent a con

Alex J. Kay (senior lecture of History at Potsdam University in Berlin) and David Stahel (senior lecturer in History at the University of New South Wales in Canberra) have edited a groundbreaking series of articles on German mass killing and violence during World War II. Four years in the making, this collection of articles spans the breadth of research on these topics and includes some non-English speaking scholars for the first time in a work of this magnitude. Mass Violence in Nazi-Occupied Europe (Indiana UP, 2018) argues for a more comprehensive understanding of what constitutes Nazi violence and who was affected by this violence. The works gathered consider sexual violence, food depravation, and forced labor as aspects of Nazi aggression. Contributors focus in particular on the Holocaust, the persecution of the Sinti and Roma, the eradication of "useless eaters" (psychiatric patients and Soviet prisoners of war), and the crimes of the Wehrmacht. The collection concludes with a consideration of memoriali

World War II endures in the popular imagination as a heroic struggle between good and evil, with villainous Hitler driving its events. But Hitler was not in power when the conflict erupted in Asia—and he was certainly dead before it ended. His armies did not fight in multiple theaters, his empire did not span the Eurasian continent, and he did not inherit any of the spoils of war. That central role belonged to Joseph Stalin. The Second World War was not Hitler’s war; it was Stalin’s war. Drawing on ambitious new research in Soviet, European, and US archives, Stalin's War: A New History of World War II (Basic Books, 2021) by award winning historian, Sean McMeekin, Professor of History at Bard College, revolutionizes our understanding of this global conflict by moving its epicenter to the east. Hitler’s genocidal ambition may have helped unleash Armageddon, but as McMeekin shows, the war which emerged in Europe in September 1939 was the one Stalin wanted, not Hitler. So, too, did the Pacific war of 1941–1945 fu

A riveting account of the five most crucial days in twentieth-century diplomatic history: from Pearl Harbor to Hitler's declaration of war on the United States. By early December 1941, war had changed much of the world beyond recognition. Nazi Germany occupied most of the European continent, while in Asia, the Second Sino-Japanese War had turned China into a battleground. But these conflicts were not yet inextricably linked--and the United States remained at peace. Hitler's American Gamble recounts the five days that upended everything: December 7 to 11. Tracing developments in real time and backed by deep archival research, historians Brendan Simms and Charlie Laderman show how Hitler's intervention was not the inexplicable decision of a man so bloodthirsty that he forgot all strategy, but a calculated risk that can only be understood in a truly global context. This book reveals how December 11, not Pearl Harbor, was the real watershed that created a world war and transformed international history. Learn m

A new history of how the musical worlds of German towns and cities were transformed during the Nazi era. In the years after the Nazis came to power in January 1933 and through the war years all aspects of life in Germany changed. However, despite the social and political upheaval, gentile citizens were able to continue leisure activities such as attending concerts. In this book, historian Neil Gregor surveys the classical concert scene in Nazi Germany from the perspective of the audience, rather than institutions or performers. Gregor delves into the cultural lives of ordinary Germans under conditions of dictatorship. Did the ways in which Germans heard music in the period change? Did a Nazi way of listening emerge? For audiences, Gregor shows, changes to the concert experience were small and often took place around the edges. This, combined with the preserved idea of the concert hall as a space of imagined civility and cultivation, led many concertgoers and music lovers to claim after the war that their fi

Mutual Perceptions and Images in Japanese-German Relations, 1860-2010 (Brill, 2017) examines the mutual images formed between Japan and Germany from the mid-nineteenth to twenty-first centuries, and the influence of these images on the development of bilateral relations. Unlike earlier research on Japanese-German relations, which focused on the similarity of these countries' historical trajectories, this publication presents a more nuanced picture. It relativizes perceptions of a special "spiritual relationship" between Japan and Germany as well as their commonalities of "national character" through an exploration of previously untapped historical visual and textual sources. With essays by sixteen leading scholars in the field, this collection is an invaluable contribution to the historiography of modern Japan and Germany, and to the field of international relations. Contributors are: Hans-Joachim Bieber, Fukuoka Mariko, Hakoishi Hiroshi, Iwasa Takurō, Katō Yōko, Kawakita Atsuko, Gerhard Krebs, Kudō Akira, H

An award-winning writer captures a year that defined the modern world, intertwining historical events around the globe with key moments from her personal history.The year 1947 marks a turning point in the twentieth century. Peace with Germany becomes a tool to fortify the West against the threats of the Cold War. The CIA is created, Israel is about to be born, Simone de Beauvoir experiences the love of her life, an ill George Orwell is writing his last book, and Christian Dior creates the hyper-feminine New Look as women are forced out of jobs and back into the home.In the midst of it all, a ten-year-old Hungarian-Jewish boy resides in a refugee camp for children of parents murdered by the Nazis. This year he has to make the decision of a lifetime, one that will determine his own fate and that of his daughter yet to be born, Elisabeth. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/german-studies

Dr. Antonio J. Muñoz's Hitler’s War Against the Partisans During The Stalingrad Offensive: Spring 1942 to the Spring of 1943 (Frontline Books, 2025) explores the brutal and widespread partisan warfare on the Eastern Front during 1942-1943, detailing the Axis forces' anti-partisan efforts and the impact on the Soviet war effort. From the start of the war on the Eastern Front, Hitler’s Ostheer, his Eastern Army, and its associated forces would wage a vernichtungskrieg, or war of annihilation, in the East. Never before had such a wide-reaching campaign been fought. The preparations for the war against the partisans began before the launch of Operation Barbarossa, during which the Axis forces immediately put their plans into effect. The effects upon the newly conquered territories were soon being felt. The end of the initial phase of the German invasion of the Soviet Union was met by a Red Army winter offensive which began on 5 December 1941. As the author shows, this had repercussions behind the German lines,

Racializing Caste: Anthropology Between Germany and India and the Legacy of Irawati Karve (1905-1970) (De Gruyter, 2025) analyzes how racial knowledge has circulated in transnational entanglements, particularly between Germany and India, into the research on human variation in India, racializing the understanding of caste and ethnicity. It focuses on the legacy of Irawati Karve (1905-1970), an Indian anthropologist trained at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Anthropology, Eugenics, and Human Heredity in Berlin, Germany (1927-1930) and a prominent scientist in post-colonial India. Besides a historical analysis of Karve's adaptation of racial approaches to the study of Indian castes, the book applies material-semiotic and ethnographic lenses to examine how her work is taken up today in anthropology and population genetics. By showing how transnational and transcolonial entanglements in race science shape knowledge on human diversity in India, the book offers novel insights to discussions in anthropology, STS, a

The Violence of Reading: Literature and Philosophy at the Threshold of Pain (Palgrave Macmillan, 2024) expounds the scene of reading as one that produces an overwhelmed body exposed to uncontainable forms of violence. The book argues that the act of reading induces a representational instability that causes the referential function of language to collapse. This breakdown releases a type of "linguistic pain" (Scarry; Butler; Hamacher) that indicates a constitutive wounding of the reading body. The wound of language marks a rupture between linguistic reality and the phenomenal world. Exploring this rupture in various ways, the book brings together texts and genres from diverse traditions and offers close examinations of the rhetoric of masochism (Sacher-Masoch; Deleuze), the relation between reading and abuse (Nietzsche; Proust; Jelinek), the sublime experience of reading (Kant; Kafka; de Man), the "novel of the institution" (Musil; Campe), and literary suicide (Bachmann; Berryman; Okkervil River). Dominik Zec

Carolin Duttlinger is Professor of German Literature and Culture at the University of Oxford (UK) and Co-Director of the Oxford Kafka Research Centre, where she is currently leading a three-year UKRI-funded research project,Kafka's Transformative Communities. She has published widely on German literature from the eighteenth century to the present; on Walter Benjamin and the Frankfurt School; the history of psychology; and on photography and visual culture. Selected publications: Kafka and Photography (Oxford University Press, 2007); ed., with Ben Morgan and Anthony Phelan, Walter Benjamins anthropologisches Denken (Rombach, 2012); The Cambridge Introduction to Franz Kafka (Cambridge University Press, 2013); ed., Franz Kafka in Context (Cambridge University Press, 2017); Attention and Distraction in German Literature, Thought, and Culture (Oxford University Press 2022). She is also the editor of the book series Visual Culture with Legenda. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support

What happens when migrants are rejected by the host society that first invited them? How do they return to a homeland that considers them outsiders? Foreign in Two Homelands: Racism, Return Migration, and Turkish-German History explores the transnational history of Turkish migrants, Germany's largest ethnic minority, who arrived as 'guest-workers' (Gastarbeiter) between 1961 and 1973. By the 1980s, amid rising racism, neo-Nazis and ordinary Germans blamed Turks for unemployment, criticized their Muslim faith, and argued they could never integrate. In 1983, policymakers enacted a controversial law: paying Turks to leave. Thus commenced one of modern Europe's largest and fastest waves of remigration: within one year, 15% of the migrants—250,000 men, women, and children—returned to Turkey. Their homeland, however, ostracized them as culturally estranged 'Germanized Turks' (Almancı). Through archival research and oral history interviews in both countries and languages, Michelle Lynn Kahn highlights migrants' pers

Julia Sneeringer's book provides a concise overview of developments in the Federal Republic of Germany from the end of the Second World War and Germany's division, to the unification of East and West Germany in 1990. Within the framework of key political and economic moments, it illuminates how West Germans experienced social, economic, and cultural change across four decades. Chronologically structured and supplemented with timelines, each chapter in the book presents the major themes, events and developments occurring during the period. A focused bibliography is also included to offer guidance on further reading. Among the notable topics covered are: - The redefining of German identity after Nazism- Democratization- The explosion of consumer culture- The protest movements of 1968- Changing gender and sexual roles- Immigration and multiculturalism- Pop culture- Environmentalism- Terrorism- The return of the right in politics West Germany in Focus is a peerless introduction to West Germany for anyone looki

It is indisputable that Marx began his intellectual trajectory as a philosopher, but it is often thought that he subsequently turned away from philosophy. In Karl Marx and the Actualization of Philosophy (Cambridge University Press, 2025), Christoph Schuringa proposes a radically different reading of Marx's intellectual project and demonstrates that from his earliest writings his aim was the 'actualization' of philosophy. Marx, he argues, should be understood not as turning away from philosophy, but as seeking to make philosophy a practical force in the world. By analysing a series of texts from across Marx's output, Schuringa shows that Marx progressively overcame what he called 'self-sufficient philosophy', not in order to leave philosophy behind but to bring it into its own. This involves a major reinterpretation of Marx's relationship to his ancestors Aristotle, Kant and Hegel, and shows that philosophy, as it actualizes itself, far from being merely a body of philosophical doctrine, figures as an instrum

Furious economic growth and social change resulted in pervasive civic conflict in Imperial Germany. Roger Chickering presents a wide-ranging history of this fractious period, from German national unification to the close of the First World War. Throughout this time, national unity remained an acute issue. It appeared to be resolved momentarily in the summer of 1914, only to dissolve in the war that followed. This volume examines the impact of rapid industrialization and urban growth on Catholics and Protestants, farmers and city dwellers, industrial workers and the middle classes. Focusing on its religious, regional, and ethnic reverberations, Chickering also examines the social, cultural, and political dimensions of domestic conflict. Providing multiple lenses with which to view the German Empire, Chickering's survey examines local and domestic experiences as well as global ramifications. The German Empire, 1871-1918 provides the most comprehensive survey of this restless era available in the English languag

Adi Nester is an Assistant Professor of German and Jewish Studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Her first monograph, Unsettling Difference: Bible, Music Drama, and the Critique of German Jewish Identity, appeared with Cornell University Press. The book studies the discourse of Jewish difference in the first half of the twentieth century through its expressions in biblical-themed musical dramas, their literary sources, and the intellectual debates surrounding the works. Adi’s research and teaching concentrate on the interrelations between music, literature, and philosophy in the German and German Jewish traditions. She has published essays on topics ranging from the music philosophies of Theodor Adorno and Vladimir Jankélévitch, the role of Wagner’s music in Thomas Mann’s literature, and the language philosophy of Walter Benjamin, to the treatment of memory culture in the poetry and social critical writings of contemporary German-Jewish activist Max Czollek. Learn more about your ad choic

A detailed history of Nazi anti-partisan warfare on the Eastern Front during Operation Barbarossa. From the start of the war on the Eastern Front, Hitler's Ostheer, his Eastern Army, would wage a vernichtungskrieg, or war of annihilation, in the East. Never before had such a wide-reaching campaign been fought. Preparations for Germany's invasion of the Soviet Union had included the drawing up of plans and allocation of resources to secure the newly conquered territories. These plans included the premeditated murder of many innocent civilians. Adolf Hitler said as much when in July 1941, shortly after Stalin ordered the formation of partisans, he told his Army High Command: 'This partisan war has some advantage for us; it enables us to eradicate everyone who opposes us.' Anticipating resistance to Nazi occupation and rule, Hitler instructed the Ostheer to act ruthlessly, not only on the front lines but in the rear areas as well. When, in July 1941, Stalin ordered partisan forces to be created, the stage was

Today I interviewed Jan Borowicz about Perverse Memory and the Holocaust: A Psychoanalytic Understanding of Polish Bystanders (Routledge, 2024). "The assumptions of my book rely on a simple thesis: indifference to violence is impossible and that the primal scene for Polish culture is the experience of Nazism. In Poland we have still a humanitarian crisis by our border. And there is a tiny minority of local and non-local activists who sacrifice themselves and who give help to the people that are dying in the forests, especially during the wintertime. And there are people who live nearby and live day to day-by-day helping the helping the people crossing even and crossing the border and they're harassed and victims of police brutality. And then I had a very strange thought that now I can understand what happened during the during the war and during the Holocaust where exactly this where exactly this happened. And people who deal with Holocaust history and Holocaust memory had the same association, same analogy,

Sébastien Tremblay is a historian specialized in queer, global, and conceptual history. Born in Montreal / Tiohtià:ke, he received his PhD at the DFG Graduate School 'Global Intellectual History' at the Friedrich-Meinecke-Institute in 2020. He is currently a Postdoc at the Department for History and Didactics of History at the University of Flensburg.  His monograph, A Badge of Injury: The Pink Triangle as Global Symbol of Gay and Lesbian Identities in the 20th Century was published by DeGruyter in 2023. It analyzes gay and lesbian transregional cultural communication networks from the 1970s to the 2000s, focusing on the importance of National Socialism, visual culture, and memory in the queer Atlantic. Provincializing Euro-American queer history, it illustrates how a history of concepts which encompasses the visual offers a greater depth of analysis of the transfer of ideas across regions than texts alone would offer. It also underlines how gay and lesbian history needs to be reframed under a queer lens and

In the late sixteenth century, a German Lutheran scholar named Martin Crusius compiled an exceptionally rich record of Greek life under Ottoman rule. Although he never left his home in the university town of Tübingen, Crusius spent decades annotating books and manuscripts, corresponding with the Greek Orthodox Patriarch, and interviewing Greek Orthodox alms-seekers. Ultimately, he gathered his research into a seminal work called the Turcograecia, which served for centuries as Europe’s foremost source on Ottoman Greece. Yet as Richard Calis reveals, Crusius’s massive—and largely untapped—archive has much more to tell us about how early modern Europeans negotiated cultural and religious difference. In particular, Crusius’s work illuminates Western European views of the religious “other” within Christianity: the Greek Orthodox Christians living under Ottoman rule, a group both familiar and foreign. Many Western Europeans, including Crusius, developed narratives of Greek cultural and religious decline under Otto