New Books in Western European Studies

The Diplomatic Enlightenment: Spain, Europe, and the Age of Speculation (Brill, 2021) reconfigures the study of the origins of the Enlightenment in the Spanish Empire. Challenging dominant interpretations of the period, this book shows that early eighteenth-century Spanish authors turned to Enlightenment ideas to reinvent Spain’s role in the European balance of power. And while international law grew to provide a legal framework that could safeguard peace, Spanish officials, diplomats, and authors, hardened by the failure of Spanish diplomacy, sought instead to regulate international relations by drawing on investment, profit, and self-interest. The book shows, on the basis of new archival research, that the Diplomatic Enlightenment sought to turn the Spanish Empire into a space for closer political cooperation with other European and non-European states and empires.Edward Jones Corredera is a Senior Research Fellow at the Max Planck Institute for Comparative Public Law and International Law and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts. He completed his doctoral studies at the University of Cambridge in 2020.Alexandra Ortolja-Baird is Lecturer in Digital History and Culture at the University of Portsmouth. She tweets at @timetravelallie. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies

Today I talked to Ulrich Gutmair about his book The First Days of Berlin: The Sound of Change (John Wiley and Sons, 2021).Berlin in the early 1990s, right after the fall of the Berlin Wall: this is the place to be. Berlin-Mitte, the central district of the city, with its wastelands and decaying houses, has become the centre of a new movement. Artists, musicians, squatters, club owners, DJs and ravers are reclaiming the old city centre and bringing it back to life. This interregnum between two systems – the collapse of the old East Germany, the gentrification of the new Berlin – lasts only a few years. West Berliners, East Berliners and new residents from abroad join together to create music, art and fashion, to open bars and clubs and galleries, even if only for a few weeks. In the months following the fall of the Wall, there is a feeling of new beginnings and immense possibilities: life is now, and to be in the here and now feels endless. The phrase ‘temporary autonomous zone’ is circulating, it describes the idea – romantic and naive but, in the circumstances, not absurd – that, at a certain moment in history, you can actually do whatever you want.Ulrich Gutmair moved to West Berlin as a student in autumn 1989: two weeks later the Wall came down. He spent the next few years studying during the day in the West and exploring the squats, bars and techno clubs in the East at night. He fell in love with House and Techno and raved at Tresor, Elektro, Bunker and many other places that in the meantime have almost disappeared from collective memory. Ten years later he decided to write a book about that period in between, when one regime was brought down and a new one wasn’t yet established. When utopia was actually a place to inhabit for a moment.Craig Sorvillo is a PhD Candidate at the University of Florida. He can been contacted on twitter @craig_sorvillo or via email at craig.sorvillo@gmail.com Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies

Sarah Farmer's Rural Inventions: The French Countryside After 1945 (Oxford University Press, 2020) is a history of national, regional, and local transformations during the period known as the Trente Glorieuses in France from 1945 to 1975. Rural communities and landscapes did not disappear during these years, but existed in complex relationship to urban populations, spaces, economies, and culture. "Modernization" was also a phenomenon in the countryside in various ways and the myth of an unchanging peasant world was just that. Examining state infrastructural and agricultural plans and projects; a rising French and international interest in second, "country" homes; utopian rural experiments and environmental activisms; peasant autobiographies; and (sometimes) nostalgic representations of rural life and landscapes in photographs and other visual sources, the book considers a range of objects and perspectives from/on the French countryside. Packed with compelling stories, actors, and arguments about some of the fundamental contradictions that structured French society during this period, the book challenges us to question our assumptions about what we mean when we say or think "rural" and "postwar" together.Roxanne Panchasi is an Associate Professor of History at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver, Canada who specializes in twentieth and twenty-first century France and its empire. If you have a recent title to suggest for the podcast, please send her an email (panchasi@sfu.ca). 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, Democracy, Nazi Trials, and Transitional Justice in Germany, 1945-1950 (Cambridge University Press, 2020), Dr. Devin O. Pendas examines how German courts conducted Nazi trials in the immediate postwar context. His work combines close readings of legal discourses in conjunction with very human stories to present a narrative of both irony and tragedy. In a masterful comparison of all four occupation zones, this book successfully musters historical data to challenge and overturn standard conceptualizations of “transitional justice.” It thus belongs definitively in the repertoire of legal scholars, political scientists, historians, and international relations theorists.Eric Grube is a PhD candidate in the Department of History at Boston College. He studies modern German and Austrian history, with a special interest in right-wing paramilitary organizations across interwar Bavaria and Austria."Casualties of War? Refining the Civilian-Military Dichotomy in World War I", Madison Historical Review, 2019. "Racist Limitations on Violence: The Nazi Occupation of Denmark", Essays in History, 2017. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies

In her new book, The Jews of Denmark in the Holocaust: Life and Death in Theresienstadt Ghetto (Routledge, 2020), Silvia Goldbaum Tarabini Fracapane uses previously unexplored personal accounts and archival documentation in order to examine life and death in the Theresienstadt ghetto, seen through the eyes of the Jewish victims from Denmark. The book covers an important aspect of the experience of Danish Jews during the Holocaust, one that has long stood in the shadow of the hegemonic story regarding the rescue of the Danish Jews in October 1943. Silvia Goldbaum Tarabini Fracapane’s book covers all aspects of the Danish Jews’ experience with Theresienstadt, from their deportation through their relationships and life in the ghetto to their return to Denmark and their postwar lives.Silvia Goldbaum Tarabini Fracapane is a historian and an independent scholar. She obtained her PhD in modern history from Technical University Berlin, and she has an MA in comparative literature from University of Copenhagen. Her research focuses primarily on everyday life in the Theresienstadt ghetto seen from the perspective of Danish ghetto inmates.Christian Axboe Nielsen is associate professor of history and human security at Aarhus University in Denmark. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies

In The Information Revolution in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge University Press, 2021), Dr. Paul Dover argues that changes in the generation, preservation and circulation of information, chiefly on newly available and affordable paper, constituted an 'information revolution'. In commerce, finance, statecraft, scholarly life, science, and communication, early modern Europeans were compelled to place a new premium on information management. Dr. Dover argues that “paper, as never before, became the transactional medium; the repository of personal, communal, and institutional memory; the avenue of communication; the lifeblood of bureaucracies; and the foundation and residue of learning. Early modern Europeans, whether or not they sought to, and whether or not they were pleased with or trusted the new reality, put paper inscribed with text at the centre of their lives.” He argues that these developments had a profound and transformative impact on European life.The book focuses on “two related and simultaneous developments in early modern Europe: the great increase in information created and circulating in European society, largely rendered on paper, and the accompanying efforts to manage and make sense of it, also chiefly via paper.” The huge expansion in paper records and the accompanying efforts to store, share, organize and taxonomize them are intertwined with many of the essential developments in the early modern period, including the rise of the state, the Print Revolution, the Scientific Revolution, and the Republic of Letters.This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose doctoral work focused on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies

States of Liberation: Gay Men Between Dictatorship and Democracy in Cold War Germany (U Toronto Press, 2022) traces the paths of gay men in East and West Germany from the violent aftermath of the Second World War to the thundering nightclubs of present-day Berlin. Following a captivating cast of characters, from gay spies and Nazi scientists to queer politicians and secret police bureaucrats, States of Liberation tells the remarkable story of how the two German states persecuted gay men - and how those men slowly, over the course of decades, won new rights and created new opportunities for themselves in the heart of Cold War Europe. Relying on untapped archives in Germany and the United States as well as oral histories with witnesses and survivors, Huneke reveals that communist East Germany was in many ways far more progressive on queer issues than democratic West Germany.Samuel Clowes Huneke is assistant professor of history at George Mason University.Steven Seegel is Professor of Slavic and Eurasian Studies at The University of Texas at Austin. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies

Challenging persistent geopolitical asymmetries in feminist knowledge production, this collection depicts collisions between concepts and lived experiences, between academic feminism and political activism, between the West as generalizable and the East as the concrete Other. Borderlands in European Gender Studies (Routledge, 2020) narrows the gap between cultural analysis and social theory, addressing feminist theory’s epistemological foundations and its capacity to confront the legacies of colonialism and socialism. The contributions demonstrate the enduring worth of feminist concepts for critical analysis, conceptualize resistance to multiple forms of oppression, and identify the implications of the decoupling of cultural and social feminist critique for the analysis of gender relations in a post-socialist space.Jill Massino is a scholar of modern Eastern Europe with a focus on Romania, gender, and everyday life. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies

In Soldiers of God in a Secular World: Catholic Theology and Twentieth-Century French Politics (Harvard University Press, 2021), Sarah Shortall examines the twentieth-century transformation of Roman Catholicism by tracing the origins and evolution of the so-called nouvelle théologie. Developed in the interwar years by French Jesuits and Dominicans, “new theology” reimagined the Church’s relationship to public life, encouraging political activism, engaging with secular philosophy, and inspiring doctrinal changes adopted by the Second Vatican Council in the 1960s. By recoding political statements in the ostensibly apolitical language of doctrine, priests were able to enter into debates over fascism and communism, democracy and human rights, and colonialism and nuclear war.Piotr H. Kosicki is Associate Professor of History at the University of Maryland, College Park. He is the author of Catholics on the Barricades (Yale, 2018) and editor, among others, of Political Exile in the Global Twentieth Century (with Wolfram Kaiser). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies

Patricia Tilburg's Working Girls: Sex, Taste, and Reform in the Parisian Garment Trades, 1880-1919 (Oxford University Press, 2019) is at once a cultural, gender, urban, and labour history of the Belle Epoque era. The midinette is the central figure the book chases across serval chapters. Named for the lunch hour when thousands of female garment workers spilled into the streets of Paris each day, this female garment worker became a symbol of French taste and skill, the embodiment of productive labour and the pleasures of the modern capital. Represented by a range of observers during the period as young, cheerful, attractive, and sexually available, the midinette became the subject of (male) fantasy and philanthropy, her image working to assuage anxieties about a rapidly changing world.The lived experiences and activisms of the women workers who inspired these projections play significant roles throughout the book. Using a wide array of sources--state and police documents, municipal and philanthropic archival collections, press, fiction, music, letters, and more--the author ensures that the conditions of their working lives, their voices and demands, do not get lost in the swirl of ideas surrounding them. A cultural history that moves deftly between the material and the metaphoric, Working Girls is a pleasure to read, and I so enjoyed speaking with its author.  Roxanne Panchasi is an Associate Professor of History at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver, Canada who specializes in twentieth and twenty-first century France and its empire. If you have a recent title to suggest for the podcast, please send her an email (panchasi@sfu.ca). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies