New Books in Western European Studies

In her new book, Selling under the Swastika: Advertising and Commercial Culture in Nazi Germany (Stanford University Press, 2013), Pamela Swett, Professor of History at McMaster University is the first comprehensive examination of commercial advertising in the Third Reich. Swett argues that advertisements played a much greater role in normalizing the Third Reich then previously thought. She highlights how advertisers at all levels enjoyed a great deal of freedom to sell their products, while using the National Socialist message not because they were forced, but because consumers were attuned to it. Swett’s book is a fascinating look at the advertising and consumer industries during the Third Reich. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies

One of the defining characteristics of the Nazi regime that ruled Germany from 1933 until 1945 was its attention to presentation as a means of winning support. In Marketing the Third Reich: Persuasion, Packaging and Propaganda (Routledge, 2017), Nicholas O’Shaughnessy details the centrality of political marketing to how the Nazis governed Germany, showing how vital it was to its success. As he explains, for all of the fear generated by the Gestapo and other tools of the authoritarian state, the basis of their rule was the construction of a broad consensus through domination of the media. At the center of this effort was Adolf Hitler himself, both as an architect of it and as the main figure in its imagery. As O’Shaughnessy demonstrates, the Nazi leadership created a brand that they spent enormous effort developing and protecting. Through a pioneering use of both “new” (radio, cinema, television) and “old” (newspapers, posters, oratory) media, the Nazis crafted a message that both sold their ideology to their contemporaries and contributed to the endurance of its imagery decades after the regime itself collapsed in the onslaught of a world war. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies

The categories religion and race share a common genealogy. The modern understanding of these terms emerges within the European enlightenment but grasping their gradual production requires us to investigate further. In Modern Religion, Modern Race (Oxford University Press, 2016), Theodore Vial, Professor at Iliff School of Theology, argues that the intersection of religion and race can be better understood by looking at the work of nineteenth-century German romantics. In the post-enlightenment period religion becomes a racialized category. Vial examines the writings of Friedrich Schleiermacher, Friedrich Max Muller, and Johann Gottfried Herder in order to outline the linked nature of race and religion as social categories. He puts their definitions and positions to work to determine the conceptual framework these authors deploy for theorizing difference. In our conversation we discuss Immanuel Kant on race, Schleiermacher as theologian and scholar of religion, the symbolic power of Max Muller within contemporary Religious Studies, the role of language and nation in the construction of religion and race, W. E. B. Du Bois, theological anthropology, analyzing Australian aborigines, and the legacy of nineteenth-century German constructions of race and religion for Religious Studies today. Kristian Petersen is an Assistant Professor of Religious Studies at the University of Nebraska Omaha. He is the author of Interpreting Islam in China: Pilgrimage, Scripture, and Language in the Han Kitab (Oxford University Press, 2017). He is currently working on a monograph entitled The Cinematic Lives of Muslims, and is the editor of the forthcoming volumes Muslims in the Movies: A Global Anthology (ILEX Foundation) and New Approaches to Islam in Film (Routledge). You can find out more about his work on his website, follow him on Twitter @BabaKristian, or email him at kjpetersen@unomaha.edu. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies

It seemed that everyone wanted Bosnia in the late nineteenth century: Serbian and Croatian nationalists; Ottoman, Habsburg, Muslim and Yugoslav movements. At the same time, they all felt frustration with the Bosnian peasants for not living up to their nationalist and political imaginations. In Whose Bosnia? National and Political Imagination in the Balkans (Cornell University Press, 2015),Edin Hajdarpasic makes a number of arguments about how we understand nationalism and political movements in contested spaces. By exploring how these different movements defined Bosnia and Bosnians, crafted narratives of suffering and engaged youth, he argues that nationalism was a productive, open-ended force even in the face of seeming failures to achieve the nationalists’ goals. Hajdarpasic discusses these themes, as well as “nation-compulsion” which he defined as “a set of political and moral imperatives that one grapples with as part of becoming and maintaining oneself as a proper patriot.” Edin Hajdarpasic is Associate Professor of History at Loyola University Chicago, where he teaches courses in Western Civilization; the modern Balkans; nineteenth-century Europe; and the Habsburg and Ottoman Empires. 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 a generation of Germany’s best and brightest become radicalized? What convinced young intellectuals to join the SS and perpetrate genocide in pursuit of a racial utopia? Find out in our conversation with Christian Ingrao about his book Believe and Destroy: Intellectuals in the SS War Machine (Polity Press, 2015). Christian traces the experiences of the war youth generation from defining events in childhood, through their student activism, into the Reich Security Main Office, and abroad where they could finally realize their ideas. The resulting portrait reveals how a generation of intellectuals came to believe, and how those beliefs led them to destroy. Christian Ingrao is the former director of the Institute of Contemporary History (IHTP) and their current director of research. He teaches at the Catholic University of the West (Angers). His most recent book La promesse de l’Est : Esperance nazie et genocide, 1939-1943 (Le Seuil, 2016) explores Nazi dreams of victory and visions of the Thousand Year Reich. Ryan Stackhouse is a historian of Europe who specializes in modern Germany and political policing under dictatorship. His debut chapter in Interrogation in War and Conflict suggested that terror remains overstated in our understanding of routine investigation practices in Nazi Germany. Ryan’s research exploring Gestapo enforcement practices toward different social groups is nearing completion under the working title Policing Hitler’s Critics. He also cohosts the Third Reich History Podcast. He tweets @Staxomatix and can be reached at john.ryan.stackhouse@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

At the close of the nineteenth century, Europe was teeming with apocalyptic dreams of destruction and renewal. In Nietzsche’s Orphans: Music, Metaphysics, and the Twilight of the Russian Empire (Yale University Press, 2015), Rebecca Mitchell traces how in late imperial Russia, music came to be seen as a transcendent force that offered salvation from the era’s atmosphere of decadence and decline. At the turn of the century, Nietzsche’s The Birth of Tragedy became a major inspiration for cultural elites looking for a solution to the problems of modernity. Nietzsche’s Russian orphans adapted the adamantly amoral German writer to suit their context, combining his belief in the transformative power of music with the visions of Orthodox philosopher Vladimir Solovev. Russian music lovers launched a search for the national Orpheus, alternately advancing Aleksander Scriabin, Nikolai Medtner, and Sergei Rachmaninoff as the chosen one. These figures differed in their engagement with musical metaphysics. While Scriabin reveled in his role of prophet and endeavored to create a musical Mystery that would mark the end of history, Rachmaninoff largely avoided philosophical musings; in a conversation with the Medtner brothers, he preferred to discuss Italian pasta. Rachmaninoff’s mass popularity was met with disapproval by some of Nietzsche’s orphans, who thought that his melancholic works reveled in the problems of the age rather than solving them. Their dreams for national salvation through music disintegrated amidst the chaos of war and revolution, and major composers including Rachmaninoff emigrated. However, Mitchell argues that their ideas found new life in the Bolshevik state, the Russian diaspora, and the post-Soviet search for national identity. Joy Neumeyer is a journalist and PhD candidate in History at the University of California, Berkeley. Her dissertation project explores the role of death in Soviet culture. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies

Pieter Judson established himself as one of the top scholars of the East Central Europe with his first two books Exclusive Revolutionaries (University of Michigan Press, 1996) and Guardians of the Nation (Harvard University Press, 2006). His latest book, The Habsburg Empire: A New History (Harvard University Press, 2016) provides scholars with the first major general history of the Empire since a new wave of scholarship began chipping away at the myths built up in various national historiographies. Not only does his book offer a reappraisal of Habsburg history that incorporate concepts like national indifference, but more than previous histories it gets out of the purely political realm to look at economic changes. In so doing beyond offering a new more nuanced understanding of how and why Austria-Hungary fell apart, he also suggests the the twenty years before 1848 were much more interesting than the conventional narrative has allowed. It was a pleasure to speak with Pieter again about this book. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies

In Serbia under the Swastika: A World War II Occupation (University of Illinois Press, 2017), Alexander Prusin delineates the Nazi occupation of Yugoslavia during World War II. He starts from the medium-term background, reaching back to the unification of Yugoslavia, and covers both the chronological process and its wide thematic breadth, with issues ranging from collaborationism to resistance. The book is important, therefore, both for historians of Yugoslavia and Southeastern Europe and to historians of World War II and the Holocaust in general. Orel Beilinson is a historian of nineteenth- and twentieth-century Eastern Europe, particularly the Russian Empire, Soviet Union and Yugoslavia. His research interests include the encounter of communism, religion, and modernity; the social history of law and religion under communism; and the comparative history of communism. He can be reached at orelb@mail.tau.ac.il.   Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies

Andrew Smith‘s Terror and Terroir: The Winegrowers of the Languedoc and Modern France (Manchester University Press, 2016) is a political history of wine radicalism. Focused on the producers rather than the consumers of what Roland Barthes famously referred to as the nation’s “totem-drink,” Terror and Terroir examines wine politics and activisms in the Languedoc following the Second World War. In a first chapter, Smith looks closely at the memory and legacy of the “Grand Revolt of 1907,” a series of major protests that became a cornerstone of winegrower mythology in the post-45 period. Tracing the evolution of the winegrowers’ movement in the region from the mid-1940s to the late 1950s, the book looks at a variety of groups and organizations that sought to represent the interests of producers. After 1961, the Comite Regional d’Action Viticole (CRAV) dominated the scene. Over the course of the next two decades, the CRAV engaged in a variety of forms of direct action that came to a head with the “Gunfight” at Montredon in 1976. Thinking carefully about the political violence of this and other milestone moments, the book also looks at the intersection of the Occitan and radical viticulture movements; the impact of changes at the national level on regional lives and politics; and the effects of the major forces of modernization, European integration, and globalization. Drawing on a range of material from national and regional archives and press sources to oral history interviews, Terror and Terroir combines complex and compelling storytelling with careful historical and political analysis of a movement that mobilized thousands of French citizens over decades. The book has much to offer readers interested in the histories of wine and political radicalism (in equal measure!). Roxanne Panchasi is an Associate Professor in the Department of History at Simon Fraser University. A historian of French culture and politics in the twentieth century, her current research focuses on the representation of nuclear weapons and testing in France and its empire since 1945. She lives and reads in Vancouver, Canada. If you have a recent title to suggest for the podcast, please send an email to: panchasi@sfu.ca. *The music that opens and closes the podcast is an instrumental version of Creatures, a song written by Vancouver artist/musician Casey Wei (performing as hazy). To hear more, please visit https://agonyklub.com/. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies

When Charles de Gaulle issued his famous call in June 1940 for the French people to continue fighting Nazi Germany, among those within Occupied France who took up the cause was his young niece Genevieve. In The General’s Niece: The Little Known de Gaulle Who Fought to Free Occupied France (Chicago Review Press, 2017), Paige Bowers tells the story of her life, one lived in perilous times. The daughter of Charles’s oldest brother Xavier, when war broke out Genevieve found herself buffeted by the dislocations that resulted. In the aftermath of the German conquest, she moved from small acts of individual defiance to full participation in the burgeoning Resistance movement, where she helped to educate her countrymen about her previously obscure uncle. Though her possession of the de Gaulle name often drew unwanted attention from the Occupation authorities, she found daring ways to use it to her advantage. Genevieve’s arrest in June 1943 led to her detention in the Ravensbruck concentration camp, an experience which as Bowers shows fueled her postwar activities on behalf of her fellow Resistance detainees, as well as her subsequent activism to fight to end chronic poverty. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies