Exchanges: A Cambridge UP Podcast

Over 2.5 million Germans died as a result of World War I, or about 4% of the German population at the time. Somewhere between 7 and 9 million Germans died as a result of World War II, or between 8% to 11% of the German population at the time.* It’s hardly any wonder, then, that in the first half of the twentieth century the Germans were preoccupied with death and how to deal with it–it was all around them.Monica Black‘s impressive Death in Berlin: From Weimar to Divided Germany (Cambridge University Press, 2011) explains how they did it. She focuses on remembrances of various sorts (funerals, monuments, eulogies, etc.) and the ways in which they were shaped by German tradition, transient ideology, and exigency. As Monica demonstrates, Germans themselves changed “German Way of Death” radically over this short period as they attempted to deal with a whole variety of competing pressures, values and interests. This is a fascinating book as it shows how the dead, though gone, are really (and particularly in the German case) still with us.*To put German losses in perspective, 117,000 Americans died in World War I (.13% of the population) and 418,000 Americans died in World War II (.37% of the population).

We’re all familiar with the film cliche of the little band of soldiers who in ordinary life never would have had met, but who learn to appreciate each other in the battles of World War II. All white, of course: African Americans would have to wait till the integration of the armed forces. But still, there’s a kind of earnest 1940s diversity in those movies: maybe a wide-eyed kid from the farm, a privileged college boy, and a Jewish guy from Brooklyn. With some subplot about a faithful girlfriend, or maybe an unfaithful one, back home.In the Red Army, the situation was a little different. There, the women were snipers, tank drivers, combat pilots, machine gunners, and the like: skilled purveyors of lethal violence, serving side by side with men (and sometimes above them, as their commanding officers). This was the first Soviet generation, educated in co-educational schools where everyone participated in paramilitary exercises and no one took home economics. When the long-awaited war with Germany came, women of this cohort took for granted that they would take up arms.Anna Krylova‘s book, Soviet Women in Combat: A History of Violence on the Eastern Front (Cambridge University Press, 2010), tells their story. Drawing on diaries, memoirs, letters, oral histories, and state records, Krylova reveals a world in which neither men nor women considered the “woman soldier” to be an oxymoron. And she reveals how this history was thoroughly marginalized after the war.Anna Krylova is associate professor of history at Duke University, and her book is the 2011 winner of the Herbert Baxter Adams Prize of the American Historical Association. It’s a great read for anyone interested in the Second World War – and it’s a thoughtful lesson in the possibilities for reimagining gender. 

Many of us try to be thoughtful about the ways that we incorporate (or try, at least, to incorporate) different modes of evidence into our attempts to understand the past: objects, creatures, words, ideas. Rowan Flad's Salt Production and Social Hierarchy in Ancient China: An Archaeological Investigation of Specialization in China's Three Gorges (Cambridge UP, 2011) stands as a beautiful case study of what it can look like to do so. Flad juxtaposes texts, bamboo slips, ceramic sherds, animal remains, and other lines of evidence to offer an exceptionally rich account of the technology of salt production in early China, offering glimpses at comparative archeological practices, ideas of spatiality, and the diversity of uses of animals in early China along the way. Reading the book inspired, for me, new ways of thinking about the conceptual role of fragments in the work of the historian, and our conversation was similarly inspiring.

Stephen White‘s Understanding Russian Politics (Cambridge University Press, 2011) begins simply enough: “Russia is no longer the Soviet Union.” While this is a well-known fact, the details of Russia’s postcommunist transition — the emergence of a party system and presidential government, as well as the dismantling of the planned economy...

As a young, patriotic American, I was torn by the boycott of the 1980 Summer Olympics in Moscow. On the one hand, I knew already as an eleven-year-old, long before Ronald Reagan had uttered the phrase, that the Soviet Union was the Evil Empire. Their invasion of Afghanistan in December...

It is not every historian who would offer readers an attempt to explain human nature. In A History of Communications: Media and Society from the Evolution of Speech to the Internet (Cambridge University Press, 2011), Marshall Poe does just that. At the same time, Poe guides readers through the history of communications media from the origin of speech through the culture of the Internet, and provides us with a carefully-articulated theoretical framework for explaining why successive media arose when and where they did, and how they have shaped the way people understand and organize themselves. The book is structured with extraordinary care, but doesn’t let that structure overwhelm the vibrant collection of examples, tales, and (occasionally quite funny) anecdotes along the way. Poe’s writerly voice is wonderfully engaging and colloquial, and he has given us a volume that is full of opportunities for critical reflection on the possibilities of interdisciplinary scholarship across the arts and sciences.Give the interview a listen. In addition to being an account of an ambitious project with potentially wide-ranging implications for many fields, it’s also a rare opportunity to hear the interviewer interviewed.

This week’s podcast is an interview with David Stahel. I will be talking to him about his 2009 work, Operation Barbarossa and Germany’s Defeat in the East (Cambridge University Press, 2009). One of our previous guests, Matthias Strohn, recommended the book, and I am glad he did. Stahel’s book is an important contribution to our understanding of German planning for and execution of Operation Barbarossa. Stahel highlights the many flaws and paradoxes intrinsic to German thinking about war in the East, not least of which was the deception perpetrated by Halder, who masked the centrality of the drive on Moscow to his own plans in order to avoid confrontation with Hitler. By late August 1941, Stahel argues, the German failure decisively to defeat the Soviet regime (even while winning significant victories at places like Minsk and Smolensk) spelled doom for the Wehrmacht.Nor is Stahel resting on his laurels. By the time I conducted the interview, his second work had just hit the shelves. In Kiev 1941: Hitler’s Battle for Supremacy in the East (Cambridge University Press, 2011), Stahel analyzes in detail the critical battle on the southern front. After talking with Stahel late last year, that one is on my reading list as well. And Typhoon is on its way after that.

It might be a surprise to non-metaphysicians to discover the extent to which it is questionable whether the familiar objects we see and interact with – the dogs, trees, iPods, and so on – really exist. And yet, these familiar objects are actually very strange. For example, we take for granted that very same object can change all of its properties, and all of its matter, and yet somehow remain the same object. but how can that be? By analogy, if I swap all the ingredients in a recipe with a bunch of other ingredients, and then change all the steps, would it make sense to say that I’ve followed the recipe? But if it doesn’t make sense, then what should we say about the nature of ordinary objects?Crawford (Tim) Elder, Professor of Philosophy at the University of Connecticut, critically discusses and replies to the alternatives in his new book Familiar Objects and Their Shadows (Cambridge University Press, 2011). There’s the ontological relativist, who denies that ordinary objects exist independently of human minds, and the explosivist, who readily agrees there are ordinary objects, but who also thinks there are many extraordinary objects – for example, trout-turkeys, which start out as a trout and then at a later stage in life are turkeys. There’s also the exdurantist, who thinks objects are just chains of temporal stages; the causal exclusionist, who claims that ordinary objects don’t in fact satisfy our best criteria for existence; the composition skeptic, who says there are (for example) no dogs, just a bunch of atoms arranged dogwise, and, finally the universal mereologist, who thinks any parts compose a sum – including the sum of your dog, your bed and the Eiffel Tower. In his tightly argued book, Professor Elder takes on these opponents of the view that ordinary objects exist much as we think they do and that they, along with their parts, are pretty much all that does exist.

“Every once in a while Nature gives us insight into the human condition by providing us with a unique case whose special properties illumine the species as a whole. Christopher is such an example.”Christopher has a startling talent for language learning, thrown into sharper relief by his concurrent disabilities. Autistic, apraxic, visuo-spatially impaired, and with a severely low non-verbal IQ, he has been feeding his linguistic fascination by collecting languages and has now mastered more than twenty. Neil Smith and his colleagues have been working with Christopher for over twenty years, and The Signs of a Savant: Language Against the Odds (Cambridge University Press, 2011) is their second to detail their work and Christopher’s progress, following on from The Mind of a Savant, published in 1995.The book documents Christopher’s experiences of learning British Sign Language. Like other languages, BSL has a full grammatical system on which its vocabulary hangs, but unlike spoken languages, it relies on physical coordination, and the integration of handshapes, arm movements, body postures and facial expressions, all of which pose problems for Christopher.The results of Christopher’s BSL lessons are analyzed in detail, and the book culminates in a new insights into the nature of the mind and where language fits within the complex system of human cognition.I talk with Neil Smith about savantism, about sign language and about the mind. He also tells me about his first (accidental) steps in linguistics, how they took him to Africa and back to London, and how he is the only author not only to have published a case study on his own son’s acquisition of languages, but also his grandson’s.

Many of us know that Nazi regime tried to control Germans’ fertility: some people should reproduce more, according to the National Socialists, and some should reproduce less or not at all. Policies like coercive sterilization for the supposedly “unfit” were the flip side to benefits for “racially fit” Germans who propagated. But the fact is, many states the world over have tried to exert control over their citizens’ reproductive practices. Even with radical differences in government, the notion that the state’s health depends in part on its citizens’ fertility can be remarkably stubborn.In her book, The Politics of Fertility in Twentieth-Century Berlin (Cambridge University Press, 2010), Historian Annette Timm takes us to “the belly of the beast”: to Germany’s capital, Berlin. But her interest isn’t so much in the ideology of reproductive politics as in its implementation. What programs did the German state – and the municipality of Berlin – establish to enhance the “health of the nation”? How did these programs survive over no fewer than five regimes: the liberal Weimar state (1918-33), Nazism, foreign occupation, and finally Communist rule in the East and liberal democracy in the West? How did they respond to economic and demographic crises, like the wave of rapes and the influx of homeless refugees at the end of the Second World War? How did new medical technologies, like penicillin and the birth control pill, help to steer this history?Anyone who follows reproductive politics and the politics of health care today knows that these issues are still with us. Annette Timm’s book helps us to put them into perspective.