Episodios

  • Alison Rowlands, "Witchcraft Narratives in Germany: Rothenburg, 1561-1652" (Manchester UP, 2026)

    Alison Rowlands, "Witchcraft Narratives in Germany: Rothenburg, 1561-1652" (Manchester UP, 2026)
    Jan 21 2026
    Alison Rowlands, professor of Early Modern European History at the University of Essex, joins Jana Byars to talk about her classic book, Witchcraft Narratives in Germany, Rothenberg, 1561- 1652, out Manchester UP 2003. This conversation took place on the occasion of a new edition, this time a paperback release, in January 2026 Witchcraft Narratives in Germany: Rothenburg, 1561-1652 (Manchester UP, 2026). This meticulously-researched book relies on copious, detailed archival documents concerning people accused of witchcraft in the German city of Rothenburg ob der Tauber between 1561 and 1652. This city experienced a very restrained pattern of witch-trials and just one execution for witchcraft during that time, unlike some other places in German lands and Europe more broadly. This book explores the social and psychological conflicts that lay behind the making of accusations and confessions of witchcraft and offers insights into other areas of early modern life, such as experiences of and beliefs about communal conflict, magic, motherhood, childhood and illness. It also includes analysis on the role of gender. Find the open source of the original edition here. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/german-studies
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    52 m
  • Mark Christian Thompson, "Phenomenal Blackness: Black Power, Philosophy, and Theory" (U Chicago Press, 2022)

    Mark Christian Thompson, "Phenomenal Blackness: Black Power, Philosophy, and Theory" (U Chicago Press, 2022)
    Jan 17 2026
    Mark Christian Thompson's book, Phenomenal Blackness: Black Power, Philosophy, and Theory (University of Chicago Press, 2022) examines the changing interdisciplinary investments of key mid-century African American writers and thinkers, showing how their investments in sociology and anthropology gave way to a growing interest in German philosophy and critical theory by the 1960s. Thompson analyzes this shift in intellectual focus across the post-war decades, pinpointing its clearest expression in Amiri Baraka's writings on jazz and blues, in which he insisted on philosophy as the critical means by which to grasp African American expressive culture. More sociologically oriented thinkers, such as W. E. B. Du Bois, had understood blackness as a singular set of socio-historical characteristics. In contrast, writers such as Baraka, James Baldwin, Angela Y. Davis, Eldridge Cleaver, and Malcolm X were variously drawn to notions of an African essence, an ontology of Black being. For them, the work of Adorno, Habermas, Marcuse, and German thinkers was a vital resource, allowing for continued cultural-materialist analysis while accommodating the hermeneutical aspects of African American religious thought. Mark Christian Thompson argues that these efforts to reimagine Black singularity led to a phenomenological understanding of blackness--a "Black aesthetic dimension" wherein aspirational models for Black liberation might emerge. Brittney Edmonds is an Assistant Professor of Afro-American Studies at UW-Madison. I specialize in 20th and 21st century African American Literature and Culture with a special interest in Black Humor Studies. Read more about my work at brittneymichelleedmonds.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/german-studies
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    1 h y 2 m
  • Richard Fine, "The Price of Truth: The Journalist Who Defied Military Censors to Report the Fall of Nazi Germany" (Cornell, 2023)

    Richard Fine, "The Price of Truth: The Journalist Who Defied Military Censors to Report the Fall of Nazi Germany" (Cornell, 2023)
    Jan 13 2026
    In The Price of Truth: The Journalist Who Defied Military Censors to Report the Fall of Nazi Germany (Cornell, 2023), Richard Fine recounts the intense drama surrounding the German surrender at the end of World War II and the veteran Associated Press journalist Edward Kennedy’s controversial scoop. On May 7, 1945, Kennedy bypassed military censorship to be the first to break the news of the Nazi surrender executed in Reims, France. Both the practice and the public perception of wartime reporting would never be the same. While, at the behest of Soviet leaders, Allied authorities prohibited release of the story, Kennedy stuck to his journalistic principles and refused to manage information he believed the world had a right to know. No action by an American correspondent during the war proved more controversial. The Paris press corps was furious at what it took to be Kennedy’s unethical betrayal; military authorities threatened court-martial before expelling him from Europe. Kennedy defended himself, insisting the news was being withheld for suspect political reasons unrelated to military security. After prolonged national debate, when the dust settled, Kennedy’s career was in ruins. This story of Kennedy’s surrender dispatch and the meddling by Allied Command, which was already being called a fiasco in May 1945, revises what we know about media-military relations. Discarding “Good War” nostalgia, Fine challenges the accepted view that relations between the media and the military were amicable during World War II and only later ran off the rails during the Vietnam War. The Price of Truth reveals one of the earliest chapters of tension between reporters committed to informing the public and generals tasked with managing a war. Dr. Andrew O. Pace is a historian of the US in the world who specializes in the fog of war. He is currently a DPAA Research Partner Fellow at the University of Southern Mississippi and a co-host of the Diplomatic History Channel on the New Books Network. He is also working on his first book manuscript which explains why the United States pursued victory at practically all costs in World War II. He can be reached at andrew.pace@usm.edu or here. Andrew is not an employee of DPAA, he supports DPAA through a partnership. The views presented are those of the author and do not necessarily represent the views of DPAA, DoD or its components.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/german-studies
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    58 m
  • Dagmar Herzog, "The New Fascist Body" (Wirklichkeit Books, 2025)

    Dagmar Herzog, "The New Fascist Body" (Wirklichkeit Books, 2025)
    Jan 13 2026
    The success of new far-right movements cannot be explained by fear or rage alone – the pleasures of aggression and violence are just as essential. As such, racism is particularly intense when it is erotically charged, migration presenting as a sexual threat to white women being one of many examples. Germany’s strikingly successful right-wing political party Alternative für Deutschland is, according to the historian Dagmar Herzog, characterized by this “sexy racism,” with its second main feature being that of an obsessive hostility to disability – both elements resonating strongly with Nazism. In The New Fascist Body, Herzog connects her analysis of fascism’s libidinous energy with its animus against bodies perceived as imperfect. Only by studying the emotional and intellectual worlds of past fascisms can we understand and combat their current manifestations. The book features an afterword by Alberto Toscano, author of Late Fascism: Race, Capitalism and the Politics of Crisis (Verso 2023). Lisa Schmidt-Herzog is a Berlin-based writer and researcher. Her academic work focuses on the biopolitics of medical standardization and the influence of cultural and ethico-political norms on mental health and illness. She is interested in the historicity of scientific concepts and subject-centered approaches to health and illness, and examines the radical thought of theorists and practitioners such as Georges Canguilhem, Frantz Fanon, and Erich Wulff. For NBN’s Critical Theory channel, she focuses on medical pluralism, the relationship between health and resistance, and the pragmatics of healing. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/german-studies
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    1 h y 5 m
  • Matthijs Lok, "Europe Against Revolution: Conservatism, Enlightenment, and the Making of the Past" (Cambridge UP, 2023)

    Matthijs Lok, "Europe Against Revolution: Conservatism, Enlightenment, and the Making of the Past" (Cambridge UP, 2023)
    Jan 12 2026
    Contemporary Europe seems to be divided between progressive cosmopolitans sympathetic to the European Union and the ideals of the Enlightenment, and counter-enlightened conservative nationalists extolling the virtues of homelands threatened by globalised elites and mass migration. Europe Against Revolution: Conservatism, Enlightenment, and the Making of the Past (Cambridge UP, 2023) seeks to uncover the roots of historically informed ideas of Europe, while at the same time underlining the fundamental differences between the writings of the older counter-revolutionary Europeanists and their self-appointed successors and detractors in the twenty-first century. In the decades around 1800, the era of the French Revolution, counter-revolutionary authors from all over Europe defended European civilisation against the onslaught of nationalist revolutionaries, bent on the destruction of the existing order, or so they believed. In opposition to the new revolutionary world of universal and abstract principles, the counter-revolutionary publicists proclaimed the concept of a gradually developing European society and political order, founded on a set of historical and - ultimately divine - institutions that had guaranteed Europe's unique freedom, moderation, diversity, and progress since the fall of the Roman Empire. These counter-revolutionary Europeanists drew on the cosmopolitan Enlightenment and simultaneously criticized its alleged revolutionary legacy. Throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, these ideas of European history and civilisation were rediscovered and adapted to new political contexts, shaping in manifold ways our contested idea of European history and memory until today. Matthijs Lok, Senior Lecturer in Modern European History, Universiteit van Amsterdam 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. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/german-studies
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    57 m
  • Andrew I. Port, "Never Again: Germans and Genocide After the Holocaust" (Harvard UP, 2023)

    Andrew I. Port, "Never Again: Germans and Genocide After the Holocaust" (Harvard UP, 2023)
    Jan 11 2026
    As reports of mass killings in Bosnia spread in the middle of 1995, Germans faced a dilemma. Should the Federal Republic deploy its military to the Balkans to prevent a genocide, or would departing from postwar Germany’s pacifist tradition open the door to renewed militarism? In short, when Germans said “never again,” did they mean “never again Auschwitz” or “never again war”? Looking beyond solemn statements and well-meant monuments, Andrew I. Port examines how the Nazi past shaped German responses to the genocides in Cambodia, Bosnia, and Rwanda—and further, how these foreign atrocities recast Germans’ understanding of their own horrific history. In the late 1970s, the reign of the Khmer Rouge received relatively little attention from a firmly antiwar public that was just “discovering” the Holocaust. By the 1990s, the genocide of the Jews was squarely at the center of German identity, a tectonic shift that inspired greater involvement in Bosnia and, to a lesser extent, Rwanda. Germany’s increased willingness to use force in defense of others reflected the enthusiastic embrace of human rights by public officials and ordinary citizens. At the same time, conservatives welcomed the opportunity for a more active international role involving military might—to the chagrin of pacifists and progressives at home. Making the lessons, limits, and liabilities of politics driven by memories of a troubled history harrowingly clear, Never Again: Germans and Genocide After the Holocaust (Harvard UP, 2023) is a story with deep resonance for any country confronting a dark past. Kelly McFall is Professor of History and Director of the Honors Program at Newman University. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/german-studies
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    1 h y 16 m
  • Stuart Carroll, "Enmity and Violence in Early Modern Europe" (Cambridge UP, 2023)

    Stuart Carroll, "Enmity and Violence in Early Modern Europe" (Cambridge UP, 2023)
    Jan 5 2026
    Stuart Carroll's Enmity and Violence in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge University Press, 2023) transforms our understanding of Europe between 1500 and 1800 by exploring how ordinary people felt about their enemies and the violence it engendered. Enmity, a state or feeling of mutual opposition or hostility, became a major social problem during the transition to modernity. He examines how people used the law, and how they characterised their enmities and expressed their sense of justice or injustice. Through the examples of early modern Italy, Germany, France and England, we see when and why everyday animosities escalated and the attempts of the state to control and even exploit the violence that ensued. This book also examines the communal and religious pressures for peace, and how notions of good neighbourliness and civil order finally worked to underpin trust in the state. Ultimately, enmity is not a relic of the past; it remains one of the greatest challenges to contemporary liberal democracy. Jana Byars is the Academic Director of Netherlands: International Perspectives on Sexuality and Gender. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/german-studies
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    51 m
  • Richard Wolin, "Heidegger in Ruins: Between Philosophy and Ideology" (Yale UP, 2023)

    Richard Wolin, "Heidegger in Ruins: Between Philosophy and Ideology" (Yale UP, 2023)
    Jan 4 2026
    What does it mean when a radical understanding of National Socialism is inextricably embedded in the work of the twentieth century's most important philosopher? Martin Heidegger's sympathies for the conservative revolution and National Socialism have long been well known. As the rector of the University of Freiburg in the early 1930s, he worked hard to reshape the university in accordance with National Socialist policies. He also engaged in an all-out struggle to become the movement's philosophical preceptor, "to lead the leader." Yet for years, Heidegger's defenders have tried to separate his political beliefs from his philosophical doctrines. They argued, in effect, that he was good at philosophy but bad at politics. But with the 2014 publication of Heidegger's "Black Notebooks," it has become clear that he embraced a far more radical vision of the conservative revolution than previously suspected. His dissatisfaction with National Socialism, it turns out, was mainly that it did not go far enough. The notebooks show that far from being separated from Nazism, Heidegger's philosophy was suffused with it. In Heidegger in Ruins: Between Philosophy and Ideology (Yale University Press, 2022), Richard Wolin explores what the notebooks mean for our understanding of arguably the most important philosopher of the twentieth century, and of his ideas--and why his legacy remains radically compromised. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/german-studies
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    1 h y 53 m