New Books in Western European Studies

Joseph Suss Oppenheimer became the “court Jew” of Carl Alexander, Duke of Wurttemberg in 1733. When Carl Alexander died, Oppenheimer was put on trial and condemned to death for his “misdeeds,” and on February 4, 1738, was hanged in front of a large crowd just outside Stuttgart. He was not allowed to give testimony at his own trial and left no written record of the case; we know little of his biography. Yet he remains an iconic figure to this day, not only as emblematic of the relationship between Jew and the early modern state, but together with Alfred Dreyfus and Shakespeare’s Shylock, in the long history of anti-semitism as well. While previous authors have chosen to limit themselves to barebones-facts or resorted to fictional accounts of Oppenheimer’s biography and trial, in The Many Deaths of Jew Suss: The Notorious Trial and Execution of an Eighteenth-Century Court Jew (Princeton University Press, 2017), Yair Mintzker reinvestigates the case of the “Jew Suss” in light of new sources, as well as by incorporating the lives of four contemporary voices, eyewitness accounts that act as mirrors in which we can grow to see more of Oppenheimer himself. Fascinatingly, rather than presenting a unified narrative, these four voices often come into conflict with one another. The judge-inquisitor Philip Friedrich Jager; university professor and convert from Judaism, Christoph David Bernard; Mordechai Schloss, who wrote the only contemporary Jewish account of the case; and, finally, David Fassman, Oppenheimer’s first biographer. While Oppenheimer’s case stands as the narrative thread that brings these four voices together, the thick description of each life exposes overlapping worlds tied together by politics, culture, and theology. And here, the “Jew Suss” acts as a prism to better see the context of 18th-century Germany. Professor Yair Mintzker is professor of history at Princeton University and winner of the National Jewish Book Award in 2017 . Moses Lapin is a graduate student in the departments of History and Philosophy at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, his life can be accurately described as a Rashamon. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies

In 1900 the Catholic Church stood staunchly against religious freedom and the secular state. By the 1960s, that position was reversed and Catholics began advocating for particularly Catholic forms of modernity. How did this happen? How did the world’s largest religious organization become modern? James Chappel traces answers to these questions in his recent book, Catholic Modern: The Challenge of Totalitarianism and the Remaking of the Church (Harvard University Press, 2018). It tells the story of how radical ideas emerged in the 1930s and exercised enormous influence after World War II in Catholicism and in European politics more broadly. James Chappel is Assistant Professor of History at Duke University. Hillary Kaell co-hosts NBIR and is Associate Professor of Religion at Concordia University in Montreal, Canada. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies

Kathryn Woolard is Professor Emerita and Research Professor of Anthropology at the University of California, San Diego. She has authored seminal works on language ideology and the sociolinguistic situation in Catalonia, including the present book Singular and Plural: Ideologies of Linguistic Authority in Twenty-First Century Catalonia (Oxford University Press, 2016) which won the 2017 Society for Linguistic Anthropology Edward Sapir Book Prize. Bringing together two of her longstanding areas of research interest in this book, Woolard develops a framework for analyzing ideologies of linguistic authority and applies it to the evolving political situation in Catalonia. In this interview, Woolard discusses the key theoretical and contextual elements of the book, broadly following its three-part structure. First, the concepts of linguistic authenticity, anonymity, sociolinguistic naturalism are introduced, and Woolard sets out the changing ideological grounding of linguistic authority there over the course of twenty years of fieldwork in Catalonia. Next, Woolard’s theoretical framework is applied to the case of a popular satirical television program which catalyzed the sociolinguistic rehabilitation of a Catalonian president whose Castilian Spanish was better than his Catalan. Finally, Woolard discusses her early and recent fieldwork in a Catalan-medium high school, and her experiences of following up on research informants first interviewed twenty years ago. This is a typically rich and fascinating volume from a pioneer of linguistic anthropology. Positioned as a corrective against the banal nationalism of mainstream media discourse about Spain and Catalonia, the book calls on us to rethink our ideologies of language, nationalism and cosmopolitanism, which have become so polarized in the West in recent years. Kathryn Woolard wrote a post for Indiana University’s Communication, Media and Performance Anthropology blog (08/14/2017) in which she discusses ideas we talked about in the podcast. You can find it here. John Weston is an Yliopistonopettaja (Associate Lecturer) at the Department of Language and Communication Studies at the University of Jyvaskyla. His research focuses on the relationships between language variation, knowledge and ethics. He can be reached at j.weston@qmul.ac.uk.   Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies

Though he never enjoyed the fame of his contemporaries Mozart and Haydn, Antonio Rosetti was a successful composer whose works received a wide audience. In his book, The Career of an Eighteenth-Century Kapellmeister: The Life and Music of Antonio Rosetti (University of Rochester Press, 2014), Sterling Murray provides readers with both an account of Rosetti’s career and a style study of his compositions. As a young man Rosetti found employment as a double bass player at the southern German court of Kraft Ernst, Prince of Oettingen-Wallerstein. There he began composing a wide range of instrumental music for the court, eventually rising to the position of kapellmeister for the courts Hofkapelle. A sojourn in Paris in 1781-82 enhanced Rosetti’s growing reputation by providing opportunities for publishing his music while exposing him to a wider range of styles, an experience which was soon reflected in his compositions. While financial concerns led to his relocation to the court of Mecklenburg-Schwerin in 1789, his death three years later cut short his career, leaving his achievements subject to the vicissitudes of taste and the changes in musical styles. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies

Benedito/Baruch/Benedict Spinoza (1623-1677) lived at the crossroads of Dutch, scholastic, and Jewish worlds. Excommunicated from the Jewish community of Amsterdam at 23, his works would later be put on the Catholic Church’s Index of Forbidden Books. He was a heretic. And yet, he was and continues to be seen by many as perhaps the hero of the early modern period. A figure alienated by the structures that defined his life, Spinoza has been understood, by Jews and non-Jews alike, to have expressed a powerful self-definition that echoes to the present day, where biographies, plays, “guides”, and academic works continue to abound. In place of a simplistic origin story or master narrative of a modernity that begins with Spinoza, The First Modern Jew: Spinoza and the History of an Image (Princeton University Press, 2012), tells the story of how Spinoza came to be understood as a cultural hero, a reception history of his image at many crucial junctures in Modern Jewish history. Rather than probing his philosophy or strictly philosophic influence, Schwartz studies a malleable “Spinoza” as a symbol that captures the ways in which Jews have sought to understand and define themselves. Beginning in 17th-century Amsterdam before moving to 18th-century Berlin, 19th-century Eastern Europe, and Israel and America in the 20th century, The First Modern Jew is a chronological narrative of modern Jewish history that moves seamlessly between a larger thematic thread and local histories of both the famous (Moses Mendelssohn, David Ben-Gurion, and Yitzhak Bashevis Singer) and the forgotten (Berthold Auerbach, Salomon Rubin, and Yosef Klausner). In so doing, it probes the porous boundary between history and memory: the history of Spinoza and the history of the memory of Spinoza. And thereby we can see Spinoza as the “first modern Jew,” both because he was often projected as such and because he was a means by which people have asked the quintessential modern question: what does it mean to be me? Professor Daniel B. Schwartz is an associate professor of history and the director of the Judaic Studies program at George Washington University. Moses Lapin is a graduate student in the departments of History and Philosophy at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, he is a crypto-Spinozist and his hero is Blinky the Ghost. 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, Autodidacticism, Artistry, Media Practice (Autodidaktik, Artistik, Medienpraktik [Vandenhoeck and Ruprecht, 2016]), Julia Kerscher, postdoc at the University of Tubingen examines the historical development of appearances of dilettantism by analyzing works of Karl Philipp Moritz, Carl Einstein and Thomas Bernhard. She uncovers how the discussion about dilettantism is linked with the question of what is considered to be art and what should be excluded. Moreover, she shows how in the 20th-century dilettantism has turned from a negative into a positive concept and how the arrival of the electronic media in our age can be debated against the backdrop of the dilettantism discourse. Altogether, the book deals with historically changing designs of anthropology, aesthetics and writing styles. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies

How did the Nazi regime respond to protest? How did Hitler’s desire for popular authority shape the relationship between state and society? Nathan Stoltzfus challenges the idea that the Third Reich relied on terror to survive in his new book Hitler’s Compromises: Coercion and Consensus in Nazi Germany (Yale University Press, 2016). By examining how Hitler maintained his popularity with tactical compromises in the face of protest, Nathan shows how the dictatorship sought to gradually change norms and convince Germans to believe in Nazism. Nathan Stoltzfus is the Dorothy and Jonathan Rintels Professor of Holocaust Studies at Florida State University. He has been a Fulbright and IREX scholar in West and East Germany and an H. F. Guggenheim Foundation scholar. His work has appeared in the Atlantic Monthly, Die Zeit, Der Spiegel, and The Daily Beast. Ryan Stackhouse is a historian of modern Europe specializing in Germany and political policing under dictatorship. His research exploring Gestapo enforcement practices toward different social groups is nearing completion under the working title Policing Hitler’s Critics. He also co-hosts the Third Reich History Podcast and can be reached at john.ryan.stackhouse@gmail.com or @Staxomatix. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies

Historical debates about the actions of the Roman Catholic Church in relationship to the Third Reich have never been restricted to academic presses and journals like so many other topics. Rather several groups of partisans in both Germany and the United States actively followed them in popular books, magazines, and newspapers since the late 1940s. In his new book, The Battle for the Catholic Past in Germany, 1945-1980 (Cambridge University Press, 2017), Mark Edward Ruff explores seven divisive controversies that exploded over the church’s relationship to National Socialism during the early decades of the Federal Republic in West Germany. Ruff questions why so many early controversies ensnared German Catholics after World War II when there was a much higher rate of collaboration between the Protestant majority and the regime. He argues that public acrimony over the Concordat between the Third Reich and the Vatican in 1933 and the legacy of Pius XII emerged mainly as a proxy war between secular elites, leftwing Catholics, and the church establishment over the political dominance of the Christian Democratic Union in the 1950s and 1960s and the place of religion in modern democracies. Despite so much argumentation, empirical research, and open hostility, it seems that nobody ever changed their mind once their opinions formed on these matters. Combining rigorous research with accessible writing, Ruff authored a book that many listeners will enjoy. Michael E. OSullivan is Associate Professor of History at Marist College where he teaches courses about Modern Europe. He will publish Disruptive Power: Catholic Women, Miracles, and Politics in Modern Germany, 1918-1965 with University of Toronto Press in August 2018. 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 Singing Turk: Ottoman Power and Operatic Emotions on the European Stage from the Siege of Vienna to the Age of Napoleon (Stanford University Press, 2016), Larry Wolff takes us into that distinctly European art form, the opera, to show us the reflection of European ideas of Ottoman Turkey in the modern period. Beginning in 1683 when Ottoman guns shook the walls of Vienna, through a long eighteenth century, and up to Napoleon’s military supremacy in the nineteenth, when Turkish conquest of Europe was “no longer really imaginable” (402), the singing Turk in one form or another, dazzled, terrified, and enchanted European audiences from Vienna, to Venice, to Paris. Professor Wolff’s discussion of the music—its creation, its reception, and its context—is richly entertaining and accessible to the layman. It also reveals important currents in political and cultural thought during the Enlightenment in a Europe with ever-broader horizons. Professor Wolff moves between decades and opera houses, to argue that, rather than being some simplistic oriental foil, the operatic Turk ultimately allows the European audience to see its own humanity in a trans-Mediterranean alter ego, and composers and librettists to resolve the two in harmony with plenty of drama and humor along the way. The reader of the Singing Turk is advised to listen along on YouTube to the operas, other compositions, and Turkish military orchestra that appear in The Singing Turk. Professor Wolff has also collected quite a few of these on a website, http://www.singingturk.com/. In our podcast, Professor Wolff also discusses twenty-first century implications of this long cultural, political, and diplomatic relationship. Furthermore, he explains one of the opera’s more peculiar romantic roles of (now mercifully defunct), that of the castrato (adult performer castrated in boyhood) and why such an actor never played the Turkish eunuch. Professor Wolff is Silver Professor, Professor of History, and Director of Mediterranean Studies at New York University. He specializes in the history of Eastern Europe, the Habsburg Monarchy, the Enlightenment, and the history of childhood, writing from an intellectual, cultural, literary—and now musical—perspective. His work considers East and West and the dialectic relationship between the two, as he did with his Inventing Eastern Europe: The Map of Civilization in the Mind of the Enlightenment (1994). The Singing Turk is his seventh book. Krzysztof Odyniec is a historian of the Early Modern Spanish Empire specializing on culture, diplomacy, and travel. He completed his PhD in 2017 at UC Berkeley where he is now a Visiting Scholar; he also teaches at Los Medanos College and Berkeley City College. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies

The First World War was not limited the trenches on the Western Front. Nor was the system of internment camps it spawned. In his new book, Colonial Captivity during the First World War: Internment and the Fall of the German Empire, 1914-1919 (Cambridge University Press, 2017), Mahon Murphy looks at the experiences of German colonial settlers interned by the Entente Powers, particularly the British, during World War I. Challenging Europe-centric interpretations of the conflict and internment, Murphy uses a wide range of sources, illustrating both the global integrated camp network, and how experiences of internment varied according to social class, gender and race. He also explores the effects of internment on Germans’ national identity, and how their experiences of post-colonial, Weimar Germany led many to believe that true Germanness was only to be found in the colonies. A must read for anyone interested in the global dimensions of internment and First World War. Anyone in London on 19 March is cordially invited to attend the launch of the book at the London School of Economics. Speakers include William Mulligan and David Stevenson. Information available here. Darren O’Byrne is a PhD student in History at Cambridge University, where he is researching the Ministerial Bureaucracy’s role under National Socialism. He can be contacted at obyrne.darren@gmail.com or on twitter at @darrenobyrne1.   Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies