NB German Studies (2024)

01/07/2022

THE HYGIENIC APPARATUS :Weimar Cinema and Environmental Disorder (Northwestern University Press) traces how the environmental effects of industrialization reverberated through the cinema of Germany’s Weimar Republic. In the early 20th century, hygiene encompassed the myriad attempts to create healthy spaces for life and work amid the pollution, disease, accidents, and noise of industrial modernity. Examining classic films—including The Last Laugh, Faust, and Kuhle Wampe—as well as documentaries, cinema architecture, and studio practices, Paul Dobryden demonstrates how cinema envisioned and interrogated hygienic concerns about environmental disorder.

Framing hygiene within the project of national reconstruction after World War I, THE HYGIENIC APPARATUS explores cinema’s material contexts alongside its representations of housework, urban space, traffic, pollution, disability, aging, and labor. Dobryden recovers a set of ecological and biopolitical concerns to show how the problem of environmental disorder fundamentally shaped cinema’s relationship to modernity. Author-interview podcast link 👇

https://newbooksnetwork.com/the-hygienic-apparatus

29/06/2022

Beginning in 1955, West Germany recruited millions of people as guest workers from Yugoslavia, Italy, Greece, Spain, Portugal, and especially Turkey. This labor force was essential to creating the postwar German economic miracle. Employers fantasized that foreign "guest workers" would provide labor power in their prime productive years without having to pay for their education, pensions, or medical care. They especially hoped that the workers would leave behind their spouses and children and not encumber the German state or society with the cost of caring for them.

As Lauren Stokes argues in FEAR of the FAMILY: Guest Workers and Family Migration in the Federal Republic of Germany (Oxford University Pree), the Federal Republic of Germany turned fear of this foreign family into the basis of policymaking, while at the same time implementing policies that inflicted fear in foreign families. Workers did not always prove willing to live their work lives in the FRG and their family lives elsewhere. They consistently challenged the state's assumption that "family" and "labor" could be cleanly divided, defied restrictive and discriminatory policies, staged political protests, and took their deportation orders to court. In 1973, the federal court legally recognized the constitutional right to family reunification, but almost immediately after the decision, the migration bureaucracy sought to limit that right in practice. Officials derided family migrants as a group of burdensome dependents seeking to defraud the welfare state and demonized them as a dangerous source of foreign values on German soil. Learn more on the author-interview podcast 👇

https://newbooksnetwork.com/fear-of-the-family

16/06/2022

In THE ATLANTIC REALISTS: Empire and International Political Thought Between Germany and the United States (Stanford University Press), intellectual historian Matthew Specter offers a boldly revisionist interpretation of "realism," a prevalent stance in post-WWII US foreign policy and public discourse and the dominant international relations theory during the Cold War. Challenging the common view of realism as a set of universally binding truths about international affairs, Specter argues that its major features emerged from a century-long dialogue between American and German intellectuals beginning in the late nineteenth century. Specter uncovers an "Atlantic realist" tradition of reflection on the prerogatives of empire and the nature of power politics conditioned by fin de siècle imperial competition, two world wars, the Holocaust, and the Cold War. Focusing on key figures in the evolution of realist thought, including Carl Schmitt, Hans Morgenthau, and Wilhelm Grewe, this book traces the development of the realist worldview over a century, dismantling myths about the national interest, Realpolitik, and the "art" of statesmanship. Hear Specter on the podcast ↙️

https://newbooksnetwork.com/the-atlantic-realists

13/06/2022

In N**I BILLIONAIRES: The Dark History of Germany's Wealthiest Dynasties (HarperCollins), journalist David de Jong presents a groundbreaking investigation of how the N***s 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 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 Hi**er’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. Give the author's NBN interview a listen ⬇️

https://newbooksnetwork.com/nazi-billionaires

04/05/2022

Maria Theresa (1717–1780) was once the most powerful woman in Europe. At the age of 23 she ascended to the throne of the Habsburg Empire, a far-flung realm composed of diverse ethnicities and languages, beset on all sides by enemies and rivals. Barbara Stollberg-Rilinger's new book provides the definitive biography of Maria Theresa. Listen in as she joins us to discuss MARIA THERESA: The Habsburg Empress in her Time (Princeton University Press), her new biography that reveals this exceptional empress within her time while dispelling the myths surrounding her, on the podcast 👇

https://newbooksnetwork.com/maria-theresa

02/05/2022

When the N***s came to power, they used various strategies to expel German Jews from social, cultural, and economic life. FIGHTER, WORKER, and FAMILY MAN (University of Toronto Press) focuses on the gendered experiences and discrimination that German-Jewish men faced between 1933 and 1941.

Sebastian Huebel argues that Jewish men’s gender identities, intersecting with categories of ethnicity, race, class, and age, underwent a profound process of marginalization that destabilized accustomed ways of performing masculinity. At the same time, in their attempts to sustain their conceptions of masculinity these men maintained agency and developed coping strategies that prevented their full-scale emasculation. Huebel draws on a rich archive of diaries, letters, and autobiographies to interpret the experiences of these men, focusing on their roles as soldiers and protectors, professionals and breadwinners, and parents and husbands. Learn more on the podcast ↙️

https://newbooksnetwork.com/fighter-worker-and-family-man

27/04/2022

THE AMERICAN ARMY in GERMANY, 1918–1923: Success against the Odds (University Press of Kansas) by Dean A. Nowowiejski fills a gap in American military and political history through thorough research and a compelling narrative of the Rhineland occupation. After the armistice ended the fighting on the Western Front in World War I, the Third US Army marched into the American occupation zone around the city of Koblenz, Germany, in December 1918. American forces remained there as part of an “inter-Allied” coalition until early 1923. Nowowiejski reintroduces us to a successful military-diplomat, Major General Henry T. Allen, who faced two major challenges: build an efficient army and handle the complexity of working with the Allied powers of France, Britain, and Belgium in the Inter-Allied Rhineland High Commission (IARHC). Learn more on the podcast 👇

https://newbooksnetwork.com/the-american-army-in-germany-1918-1923

20/04/2022

On the eve of the First World War, the German Social Democratic Party (SPD) was the largest and most powerful socialist party in the world. GERMAN SOCIAL DEMOCRACY through BRITISH EYES: A Documentary History, 1870–1914 (University of Toronto Press) examines the SPD’s rise using British diplomatic reports from Saxony, the 3rd-largest federal state in Imperial Germany and the cradle of the socialist movement in that country.

Rather than focusing on the Anglo-German antagonism leading to the First World War, the book peers into the everyday struggles of German workers to build a political movement and emancipate themselves from the worst features of a modern capitalist system: exploitation, poverty, and injustice. Delve deeper on the podcast 👇

https://newbooksnetwork.com/german-social-democracy-through-british-eyes

15/02/2022

Before 1871, Germany was not yet a nation but simply an idea.
Its founder, Otto von Bismarck, had a formidable task at hand. How would he bring 39 individual states under the yoke of a single Kaiser? How would he convince proud Prussians, Bavarians, and Rhinelanders to become Germans? Once united, could the young European nation wield enough power to rival the empires of Britain and France--all without destroying itself in the process?

In BLOOD and IRON: The Rise and Fall of the German Empire (Pegasus Books), Katja Hoyer tells the story of the German Empire from its violent beginnings to its calamitous defeat in the First World War. Learn more on the podcast 👇

https://newbooksnetwork.com/blood-and-iron

26/01/2022

Around the beginning of the 20th century, Jewish writers and artists across Europe began depicting fellow Jews as savages or "primitive" tribesmen.

In JEWISH PRIMITIVISM (Stanford University Press), Samuel J. Spinner argues that these and other Jewish modernists developed a distinct primitivist aesthetic that, by locating the savage present within Europe, challenged the idea of the threatening savage other from outside Europe on which much primitivism relied: in Jewish primitivism, the savage is already there. This book offers a new assessment of modern Jewish art and literature and shows how Jewish primitivism troubles the boundary between observer and observed, cultured and "primitive," colonizer and colonized. Learn more on the podcast ↙

https://newbooksnetwork.com/jewish-primitivism

17/12/2021

N**IS of COPLEY SQUARE: The Forgotten Story of the Christian Front (Harvard University Press) by Charles R. Gallagher, S.J., traces the machinations of far-right Catholic thinkers and activists in the US during the outbreak of the Second World War. The work highlights New York City and Boston as flashpoints of paramilitary Putsch plans and foreign espionage that radiated out from the Christian Front organization. The book strongly intervenes in numerous historiographies, complicating progressivist narratives of Catholic integration, overturning standard assessments of N**i intelligence operations, and foregrounding radical right-wing agents too often dismissed as marginal. Gallagher joins us on the podcast 👇

https://newbooksnetwork.com/nazis-of-copley-square

16/12/2021

THREE CITIES AFTER HI**ER: Redemptive Reconstruction Across Cold War Borders (University of Pittsburgh Press) compares how 3 prewar German cities shared decades of postwar development under three competing post-N**i regimes: Frankfurt in capitalist West Germany, Leipzig in communist East Germany, and Wrocław (formerly Breslau) in communist Poland. Transcending both the Iron Curtain and freshly homogenized nation-states, 3 cities under 3 rival regimes shared a surprisingly common history before, during, and after Hi**er—in terms of both top-down planning policies and residents’ spontaneous efforts to make home out of their city as its shape shifted around them. Delve deeper on the podcast 👇

https://newbooksnetwork.com/three-cities-after-hitler

15/12/2021

How do terror and popularity merge under a dictatorship? How did the Gestapo deal with critics of N***sm? Based on hundreds of secret police case files, ENEMIES of the PEOPLE: Hi**er's Critics and the Gestapo (Cambridge UP) explores the day-to-day reality of political policing under Hi**er. Examining the Gestapo's policy of 'selective enforcement', J. Ryan Stackhouse challenges the abiding perception of the Gestapo as policing exclusively through terror. Instead, he reveals the complex system of enforcement that defined the relationship between state and society in the Third Reich and helps to explain the Germans' abiding support for Hi**er and their complicity in the regime's crimes. Give his NBN interview a listen 👇

https://newbooksnetwork.com/enemies-of-the-people

NB German Studies