New Books in Western European Studies

What claims could Jewish veterans make on the Nazi state by virtue of their having fought for Germany? How often did Germans treat Jewish veterans differently from Jewish men without military experience during the Weimar and Nazi periods? How did perceptions of masculinity and of Germanness intersect to shape attitudes and behaviors of Jewish veterans?  Michael Geheran's wonderful new book Comrades Betrayed: Jewish World War I Veterans under Hitler (Cornell UP, 2020) tries to understand how Jewish participation in World War I shaped their lives in 1920s, 1930s and 1940s. He uses a seemingly never-ending supply of diaries, letters, journals and other sources to paint a compelling picture of the ways in which German Jews understood their identities and influenced  their interactions with Germans and with the restrictions imposed by the Nazi Government. It raises new questions about how to periodize the Holocaust and how to think about the role of Germans--both civilian and military--in the persecution and elimination of German Jews.Kelly McFall is Professor of History and Director of the Honors Program at Newman University. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies

The Secular Enlightenment by Professor Margaret C. Jacob, has been called a major new history on how the Enlightenment transformed people's everyday lives. It’s a panoramic account of the radical ways that life began to change for ordinary people in the age of Locke, Voltaire, and Rousseau. In this landmark book, familiar Enlightenment figures share places with voices that have remained largely unheard until now, from freethinkers and freemasons to French materialists, anticlerical Catholics, pantheists, pornographers, readers, and travelers.Jacob, one of our most esteemed historians of the Enlightenment, reveals how this newly secular outlook was not a wholesale rejection of Christianity but rather a new mental space in which to encounter the world on its own terms. She takes readers from London and Amsterdam to Berlin, Vienna, Paris, and Naples, drawing on rare archival materials to show how ideas central to the emergence of secular democracy touched all facets of daily life. Human frailties once attributed to sin were now viewed through the lens of the newly conceived social sciences. People entered churches not to pray but to admire the architecture, and some began to spend their Sunday mornings reading a newspaper or even a risqué book. The secular-minded pursued their own temporal and commercial well-being without concern for the life hereafter, regarding their successes as the rewards for their actions and their failures as the result of blind economic forces.A wonderful work of intellectual and cultural history, The Secular Enlightenment demonstrates how secular values and pursuits took hold of eighteenth-century Europe, spilled into the American colonies, and left their lasting imprint on the Western world for generations to come.Margaret Jacob is Distinguished Professor of History at the University of California, Los Angeles. Her many books include The Radical Enlightenment: Pantheists, Freemasons, and Republicans and The First Knowledge Economy: Human Capital and the European Economy, 1750-1850.Carrie Lynn Evans is a PhD student at Université Laval in Quebec City Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies

Julius Caesar was no aspiring autocrat seeking to realize the imperial future but an unusually successful republican leader who was measured against the Republic's traditions and its greatest heroes of the past. Catastrophe befell Rome not because Caesar (or anyone else) turned against the Republic, its norms, and institutions, but because Caesar's extraordinary success mobilized a determined opposition that ultimately preferred to precipitate civil war rather than accept its political defeat. Based on painstaking re-analysis of the ancient sources in the light of recent advances in our understanding of the participatory role of the People in the republican political system, a strong emphasis on agents' choices rather than structural causation, and profound skepticism toward the facile determinism that often substitutes for historical explanation, Julius Caesar and the Roman People (Cambridge University Press, 2021) offers a radical reinterpretation of a figure of profound historical importance who stands at the turning point of Roman history from Republic to Empire.Robert Morstein-Marx is Professor of Classics at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies

When civil war broke out in Spain in 1936, tens of thousands of young men and women from across the world flocked there to fight against the Nationalist uprising. Though their history has been told before, Giles Tremlett’s The International Brigades: Fascism, Freedom and the Spanish Civil War (Bloomsbury, 2021) draws upon previously unavailable materials to tell the stories of the war they fought. Though these people came from a variety of backgrounds and held a range of different left-wing political views, what united them was their opposition to fascism. Despite their disorganization and lack of training, they made an impact on the battlefield soon after their deployment, and became a highly visible presence in the war against Francisco Franco’s Nationalist forces. While the Spanish Republic they fought for was ultimately defeated, Tremlett explains how many of those who served in the Brigades continued their struggle against fascism during the Second World War, reflecting the lasting legacy of their service for their cause. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies

The Beatles’ sojourn in the St. Pauli district of Hamburg during the early 1960s is part of music legend. As Julia Sneeringer reveals in A Social History of Early Rock ‘n’ Roll in Germany: Hamburg from Burlesque to The Beatles, 1956-69 (Bloomsbury, 2018), though, this was just the most famous episode in the neighborhood’s momentous engagement with rock ‘n’ roll during that period, one of importance not just to music history but to the history of modern Germany. Located as it was outside the walls of the medieval city, St. Pauli was known for centuries as the entertainment quarter of Hamburg. The neighborhood had only recently recovered from the hardships of the postwar era when German club owners began booking English bands to play the new style of music that had just been introduced in Europe. The performances quickly proved a hit among teenage Germans, who flocked to out-of-the-way venues to watch the acts perform. As Sneeringer details, the encounters changed everyone involved, giving the musicians the chance to hone their skills and develop their style while through their participation the young men and women in the audience pushed against the conservative social boundaries imposed on them by their families and their society. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies

Teenage Intimacies offers a new account of the ‘sexual revolution’ in mid-twentieth century England. Rather than focusing on ‘Swinging London’, the book reveals the transformations in social life that took place in school playgrounds, local cinemas, and suburban bedrooms. Based on over 300 personal testimonies, Teenage Intimacies traces the everyday experiences of teenage girls, illuminating how romance, sex and intimacy shaped their young lives. The book shows how sex became embedded in ideas about ‘growing up’ and explores how heterosexuality influenced young women’s social lives and vice versa. It offers new explanations of why sexual mores shifted in this period, revealing the pivotal role that young women played in changing sexual values, cultures and practices in the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies

Violence and Propaganda in European Civil Wars explores the complex interplay between violence and propaganda during the continent's major civil conflicts in the first half of the 20th century. The book, edited by Yiannis Kokosalakis and Francisco J. Leira Castiñeira, uses a multidisciplinary approach to analyze how propaganda both reflected and fueled violence in conflicts like those in Russia, Finland, Ireland, Spain, Italy, and Greece. In essence, the book argues that violence during European civil wars was not solely a result of ideological clashes but was also deeply intertwined with and shaped by propaganda, which manipulated perceptions and fueled brutality. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies

In his new book, The Deepest Border: The Strait of Gibraltar and the Making of the Hispano-African Border(Stanford, 2019), Sasha D. Pack considers the Strait of Gibraltar as an untamed in-between space—from “shatter zone” to borderland. Far from the centers of authority of contending empires, the North African and Southern Iberian coast was a place where imperial, colonial, private, and piratical agents competed for local advantage. Sometimes they outmaneuvered each other; sometimes they cooperated.Gibraltar entered European politics in the Middle Ages, and became a symbol of the Atlantic Empire in the Early Modern period (the Pillars of Hercules of Emperor Charles V are featured on the Spanish flag to this day), but Pack’s study focuses on the nineteenth century. Europe’s new imperialism, Britannic naval supremacy, the age of steam, the ever-present danger of cholera, all mark the change of a Spanish-Moorish border into a multilateral one. So too does the multicultural mix of Europeans and North Africans, Muslims, Jews, Catholics, and Protestants who brought a spirit of convivencia (mutual toleration) into the region, unlike the nineteenth- and twentieth- century homogenizing nationalism that was at play elsewhere.In the middle of this theater, Dr. Pack follows the careers of adventuresome entrepreneurs, who manipulated the weak enforcement of conflicting laws in overlapping jurisdictions for their own gain. He calls these characters “slipstream potentates” because they maneuvered creatively in the wakes of great ships of state on their courses in the seas of international politics. (Other historians have called them “the last Barbary pirates.”) They bring color and detail to this already gripping narrative of international politics in Spain and North Africa in the century between Napoleon and Franco.Sasha D. Pack is Associate Professor of History at the University of Buffalo. He studies Modern Europe, Spain and Portugal, and the Mediterranean, focusing on transnational and political history.Krzysztof Odyniec is a historian of the Early Modern Spanish Empire specializing in culture, diplomacy, and travel. He completed his PhD in 2017 at UC Berkeley where he is now a Visiting Scholar and a Fellow in the Berkeley Connect in History program. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies

Murad Idris, a political theorist in the Woodrow Wilson Department of Politics at the University of Virginia, explores the concept of peace, the term itself and the way that it has been considered and analyzed in western and Islamic political thought. War for Peace: Genealogies of a Violent Ideal in Western and Islamic Thought (Oxford University Press, 2018) traces the concept of peace, and the way it is often insinuated with other words and concepts, over more than 2000 years of political thought. Idris begins with Plato’s Laws as one of the early sources to consider the tension that seems to be constant in terms of the pursuit of violence in order to attain peace.War for Peace provides some important framing in thinking about peace, in large measure because the research indicates how rare it is for peace itself to be solitary, it is almost always lassoed to other words and concepts, and functions either as a binary opposition (e.g.: war and peace) or as part of a dyad combination (e.g.: peace and justice). We are urged to think about peace and the valence that is given to the word and the ideal—since the moral and the political understandings of peace are often entangled and part of what Idris is doing in his careful and thoughtful research is to tease out the political concept, apart from the often religious and moral ideal. This rich and complex analysis integrates a broad group of theorists—Plato, al-Farabi, Aquinas, Erasmus, Gentili, Grotius, Ibn Khaldun, Hobbes, Kant, and Sayyid Qutb)—all of whom were examining the role of peace within politics and political thought. And Idris structures these thinkers into chronological and theoretical groupings, to explore the ways in which they were responding to each other, across time, but also to understand how different thinkers were connecting peace to other concepts. War for Peace: Genealogies of a Violent Ideal in Western and Islamic Thought may leave the reader anxious but also enlightened in considering this idea and its perplexing place within the history of political thought.Lilly J. Goren is professor of political science at Carroll University in Waukesha, WI. She is co-editor of the award winning book, Women and the White House: Gender, Popular Culture, and Presidential Politics (University Press of Kentucky, 2012), as well as co-editor of Mad Men and Politics: Nostalgia and the Remaking of Modern America (Bloomsbury Academic, 2015). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies

The term “Heimat,” referring to a local sense of home and belonging, has been the subject of much scholarly and popular debate following the fall of the Third Reich. Countering the persistent myth that Heimat was a taboo and unusable term immediately after 1945, Geographies of Renewal uncovers overlooked efforts in the aftermath of the Second World War to conceive of Heimat in more democratic, inclusive, and pro-European modes. It revises persistent misconceptions of Heimat as either tainted or as a largely reactionary idea, revealing some surprisingly early identifications between home and democracy. Jeremy DeWaal further traces the history of efforts to eliminate the concept, which first emerged during the Cold War crisis of the early 1960s, and reassesses why so many on the political left sought to re-engage with Heimat in the 1970s and 1980s. This revisionist history intervenes in larger contemporary debates, asking compelling questions surrounding the role of the local in democracy, the value of community, and the politics of place attachments. Guest: Jeremy DeWaal (he/him), is Lecturer in European History at the University of Exeter. His research focuses on German cultural history, spatial history, memory, and the history of emotions. DeWaal’s work on Heimat and democracy has been supported by the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation, the German Academic Exchange Service, the Central European History Society, and the Berlin Programme at the Free University of Berlin. Host: Jenna Pittman (she/her), a Ph.D. student in the Department of History at Duke University. She studies modern European history, political economy, and Germany from 1945-1990. Scholars@Duke: https://scholars.duke.edu/pers... Linktree: https://linktr.ee/jennapittman Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies