New Books in Western European Studies

An exploration of the much-derided English suburbs through rap music.There are many different Englands. From the much-romanticized rolling countryside, to the cosmopolitanism of the inner cities (embraced by some as progressive, multicultural enlightenment and derided by others as the playground of a self-righteous metropolitan elite), or the disparagingly named "left behind" communities which, post-Brexit, have so interested political parties and pundits, demographers and statisticians.But there is also an England no one cares about. The England of semi-detached houses and clean driveways for multiple cars devotedly washed on Sundays, of "twitching curtains" and Laura Ashley sofas; of cul-de-sacs to nowhere and exaggerated accents; of late night drives to petrol stations on A roads, fake IDs tested in Harvesters, and faded tracksuits and over-gelled hair in Toby Carverys; of questionable hash from a "mate of a mate" and two-litre bottles of White Lightning from Budgens consumed in a kids playground. Much derided. Unglamorous, ordinary; cultural vacuity and small "c" conservatism. A hodgepodge. An--apparently--middling, middle-of-the-road middle-England of middle-class middle-mindedness.Part poetry anthology, part academic study into placemaking, and part autoethnography, The England No One Cares About (Goldsmith Press, 2024) innovatively brings together academic discussions of the ethnographic potential of lyrics, scholastic representations of suburbia, and thematic analysis to explore how rap music can illuminate the experiences of young men growing up in suburbia. This takes place by exploring the author's own annotated lyrics from his career as a musician known as Context where he was referred to by the BBC as "Middle England's Poet Laureate."George Musgrave studies the psychological experiences and working conditions of creative careers. He collaboratively undertook a major research project entitled Can Music Make You Sick? and cowrote a bestselling book on the subject. He has worked on ethical decision-making by music managers and wellbeing in the gig economy, and his research has been featured on BBC News, Pitchfork, Mixmag, GQ, The Financial Times, BBC Introducing, The Grammys, and Billboard among others. He is also a musician, signed with EMI/Sony/ATV.George on Twitter.Bradley Morgan is a media arts professional in Chicago and author of U2's The Joshua Tree: Planting Roots in Mythic America. He manages partnerships on behalf of CHIRP Radio 107.1 FM and is the director of its music film festival. His forthcoming books are Frank Zappa's America: Music, Satire, & the Battle Against the Christian Right (LSU Press, Spring 2025) and U2: Until the End of the World (Palazzo Editions, Fall 2025).Bradley on Twitter. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies

With the passing of those who witnessed National Socialism and the Holocaust, the archive matters as never before. However, the material that remains for the work of remembering and commemorating this period of history is determined by both the bureaucratic excesses of the Nazi regime and the attempt to eradicate its victims without trace. Dora Osborne's book What Remains: The Post-Holocaust Archive in German Memory Culture (Camden House, 2020) argues that memory culture in the Berlin Republic is marked by an archival turn that reflects this shift from embodied to externalized, material memory and responds to the particular status of the archive "after Auschwitz." What remains in this late phase of memory culture is the post-Holocaust archive, which at once ensures and haunts the future of Holocaust memory.Drawing on the thinking of Freud, Derrida, and Georges Didi-Huberman, this book traces the political, ethical, and aesthetic implications of the archival turn in contemporary German memory culture across different media and genres. In its discussion of recent memorials, documentary film and theater, as well as prose narratives, all of which engage with the material legacy of the Nazi past, it argues that the performance of “archive work” is not only crucial to contemporary memory work but also fundamentally challenges it.Lea Greenberg is a scholar of German studies with a particular focus on German Jewish and Yiddish literature and culture; critical gender studies; multilingualism; and literature of the post-Yugoslav diaspora. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies

Katharine Sykes joins Jana Byars to talk about her new book, Symbolic Representation in Early Medieval England (Oxford University Press, 2024). In the early Middle Ages, the conversion of the early English kingdoms acted as a catalyst for significant social and cultural change. One of the most visible of these changes was the introduction of a new type of household: the monastic household. These reproduced through education and training, rather than biological means; their inhabitants practised celibacy as a lifelong state, rather than as a stage in the life course. Because monastic households depended on secular households to produce the next generation of recruits, previous studies have tended to view them as more mutable than their secular counterparts, which are implicitly regarded as natural and ahistorical. Katharine Sykes charts some of the significant changes to the structure of households between the seventh to eleventh centuries, as ideas of spiritual, non-biological reproduction first fostered in monastic households were adopted in royal households in the tenth and eleventh centuries, and as ideas about kinship that were generated in secular households, such as the relationship between genealogy and inheritance, were picked up and applied by their monastic counterparts. In place of binary divisions between secular and monastic, biological and spiritual, real and imagined, Sykes demonstrates that different forms of kinship and reproduction in this period were intimately linked. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies

Earlier histories of the Cold War haven’t exactly been charitable toward the peace activists and pacifists who led peace initiatives. Pacifists in the United States were either simplistic and naïve, or they were fellow travelers of the Soviet Union. Peace proposals coming from the Soviet Union were nothing more than propaganda. Activists in Europe, meanwhile, were treated as a kind of curiosity in the broader Cold War, but their role was to highlight the growing tensions between the superpowers. This left an important question unanswered: what exactly was the significance of this peace activism that emerged after 1945? Did it amount to anything?Petra Goedde’s The Politics of Peace: A Global Cold War History (Oxford University Press, 2019) fills in the important history of peace movements during the Cold War. Goedde discusses the different movements that existed in the United States and Europe from 1945 until the early 1970s. She looks at different facets of these peace movements. Much of it is centered on opposition to nuclear weapons, but Goedde’s analysis extends into the realm of decolonization, environmentalism, and gender. She concludes by noting some of the long-term impacts of peace activism, including the formation of the Green Party in Germany and the adoption of certain policies by foreign policy realists such as Richard Nixon.Zeb Larson is a recent graduate of The Ohio State University with a PhD in History. His research deals with the anti-apartheid movement in the United States. To suggest a recent title or to contact him, please send an e-mail to zeb.larson@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

Returning to the New Books Network is Doug Greene, here to discuss his book The New Reformism and the Revival of Karl Kautsky (Routledge, 2024). Split into three main parts, the book first surveys Kautsky’s own life and thought, starting with his early interest in socialist politics and turn towards Marxism, followed by a slow but steady turn away from revolution and towards reform, believing parliamentary procedures were the best road to social transformation. The second part looks at the works of Rosa Luxemburg, Vladimir Lenin and Leon Trotsky, all of whom offer critical responses to Kautsky’s reformism, and the reassertion of the importance of revolutionary thought to any Marxist project. The third and final part looks at the contemporary works of Lars Lih, Eric Blanc and Mike Macnair and their attempts to make Kautsky’s reformist practice the central pillar of the contemporary left. Throughout, Greene argues that the real lesson Kautsky offers is the dead-end of reformism to any revolutionary project.Some other relevant readings on this topic include Doug Greene | Why Kautsky Was Wrong (and Why You Should Care) Doug Greene | Why Kautsky Was Wrong (LeftVoice interview) Harrison Fluss | The Prophet Avec Lacan Douglas Greene is a historian in Boston. He is also the author of the books A Failure of Vision: Michael Harrington and the Limits of Democratic Socialism and Stalinism and the Dialectics of Saturn: Anticommunism, Marxism, and the Fate of the Soviet Union. His writing has appeared in a number of outlets. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies

For people in medieval England, the parish church was an integral part of their community. In Going to Church in Medieval England (Yale University Press, 2021), Nicholas Orme describes how parish churches operated and details the roles they played in the lives of their parishioners. While there was a considerable variety of experience over the centuries and between the parishes throughout England, the basic practices in them largely remained the same. These were supervised by a range of people, both lay and clerical, who staged the Mass and managed the church’s everyday operations. Their activities touched on the lives of the members of the community in a variety of ways, from regular attendance at daily and weekly services to celebrations marking the seasons and the great events of life: birth, coming of age, marriage, and comfort in sickness and death. And while the English Reformation transformed the relationship between England and the Roman Catholic Church, Orme shows how some of the changes associated with it were already underway before it began, while much of what went on in parish churches remained as before. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies

Is Orwell still relevant today? In Orwell’s Ghosts Wisdom and Warnings for the 21st Century (Norton, 2024), Laura Beers, a Professor of History at American University examines the life and writing of Orwell to offer lessons for contemporary politics and society. The book examines the influences that shaped Eric Blair’s nom de plume, as well as showing how his ideas offer vital insights for the project of equality and social justice today. The book is even handed in its analysis, placing Orwell as a writer and thinker of his time and place, as much as he is relevant today. Moreover, the book offers an important critical perspective on his views about gender and feminism, reminding the reader of the importance of a nuanced perspective even for this hugely significant figure. A fascinating read as well as a vital political intervention, the book will be essential reading across humanities, social science and for anyone interested in politics too. 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 waning days and immediate aftermath of World War II, Nazi diplomats and spies based in Spain decided to stay rather than return to a defeated Germany. The decidedly pro-German dictatorship of General Francisco Franco gave them refuge and welcomed other officials and agents from the Third Reich who had escaped and made their way to Iberia. Amid fears of a revival of the Third Reich, Allied intelligence and diplomatic officers developed a repatriation program across Europe to return these individuals to Germany, where occupation authorities could further investigate them. Yet due to Spain's longstanding ideological alliance with Hitler, German infiltration of the Spanish economy and society was extensive, and the Allies could count on minimal Spanish cooperation in this effort.In Hunting Nazis in Franco's Spain (LSU Press, 2014), David Messenger deftly traces the development and execution of the Allied repatriation scheme, providing an analysis of Allied, Spanish, and German expatriate responses. Messenger shows that by April 1946, British and American embassy staff in Madrid had compiled a census of the roughly 10,000 Germans then residing in Spain and had drawn up three lists of 1,677 men and women targeted for repatriation to occupied Germany. While the Spanish government did round up and turn over some Germans to the Allies, many of them were intentionally overlooked in the process. By mid-1947, Franco's regime had forced only 265 people to leave Spain; most Germans managed to evade repatriation by moving from Spain to Argentina or by solidifying their ties to the Franco regime and Span-ish life. By 1948, the program was effectively over.Drawing on records in American, British, and Spanish archives, this first book-length study in English of the repatriation program tells the story of this dramatic chapter in the history of post--World War II Europe. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies

Drawing together the evidence of archaeology, palaeoecology, climate history and the historical record, this first environmental history of Scotland explores the interaction of human populations with the land, waters, forests and wildlife.Where Men No More May Reap or Sow: The Little Ice Age: Scotland 1400–1850 (Birlinn, 2024) by Dr. Richard D. Oram spans 450 years that saw profound transformation in Scotland’s environment. It begins in the fifteenth century, when the ‘Golden Age’ of the early 1200s was but a fading folk memory in a land gripped by the gathering grimness of a ‘little ice age’. Colder, wetter, stormier weather became the new normal, interspersed with brief episodes of warmer but still moist conditions, all of which brought huge challenges to a society on the knife-edge of subsistence.Viewing the religious and political upheavals of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries against the cycles of disease and dearth that were ever-present into the later 1700s, the book explores the slow adoption and application of the ideas of ‘Improvement’ and the radical disruption of Scotland’s environment that ensued. Reformation, revolution and rebellion were the background noise to efforts to subsist and succeed through a hostile age, in which Scotland’s environment was an adversary to be tamed, mastered and made ‘polite’. As the last, bitter decades of the ‘little ice age’ were ground out in foreign wars, forced clearances and potato famines, Scotland prepared itself to embrace the Industrial Age.This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose new book focuses 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

Our current culture seems to be increasingly divided on countless issues, including those affecting the church. But for centuries, theological disagreements, political differences, and issues relating to church leadership have made it challenging for Christians to foster unity and love for one another.In When Christians Disagree: Lessons from the Fractured Relationship of John Owen and Richard Baxter (Crossway, 2024), author Tim Cooper explores this polarization through the lives of two oppositional figures in church history: John Owen and Richard Baxter. Cooper highlights their individual stories while showing how their contrasting life experiences, personalities, and temperaments led to their inability to work together. After exploring these lessons from the past, readers will gain insights into their own relationships, ultimately learning how to love and live in harmony with their fellow believers despite their disagreements. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies