New Books in Western European Studies

If Edith Sheffer‘s excellent Burned Bridge: How East and West Germans Made the Iron Curtain (Oxford UP, 2011) has a single lesson, it’s that dividing a country is not as easy as you might think. You don’t just draw a line and tell people that it’s now the “border,” for in order for borders to be borders, they have to be seen as such. Sheffer shows that for quite a number of years after 1945, the Germans in Neustadt and Sonneberg–closely situated towns in, respectively, the American and Soviet zones of occupation–didn’t really know whether the border was a border and, if so, what kind of border it was or should be. “It”–whatever it was–was shifting, lawless, contested, resented, profitable, and sometimes deadly. The Grenze at Burned Bridge was really a kind of anarchical region dividing people who were in no way different from one another but who were compelled to behave as if they were by two occupying powers. The degree to which they were so compelled differed and this made all the difference in the end (the end being 1990, the year of reunification). Years of Nazi propaganda had taught Germans to fear Communist Russians. So when the Soviets arrived in Sonneberg and began to rape and pillage, their fears were realized and they fled. When Soviets (with the help of East German Communists) imposed Stalinism and all that went with it, their fears were doubled and they fled. And when Soviet order reduced once prosperous Sonneberg to a mere economic shadow of Wirtschaftwunder-era Neustadt, their fears were tripled and they fled. For the Soviets and their East German toadies, this “defection” was embarrassing, so they made what was an ill-defined, porous border zone into a militarized, nearly sealed wall. For anyone familiar with Soviet border policy in the 1930s, what they did in Germany is not surprising. What is surprising (at least to me) is the Americans’ and Neustadters’ response to the influx of Easterners, namely, something between ambivalence and hostility. The former wanted order on the border and the latter wanted security from the Eastern “mob.” Both took active measures to keep the Ossis out, all the while issuing pronouncements about the necessity of Wiedervereinigung. The Soviets are responsible for the division of Germany, but, as Edith shows, they had help. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies

We’ve dealt with the question of how racial categories and conceptions evolve on New Books in History before, most notably in our interview with Nell Irving Painter. She told us about the history of “Whiteness.” Today we’ll return to the history of racial ideas and listen to Andrew Curranexplain the history of “Blackness.” Doubtless Europeans have noted that different humans from different parts of the globe lookdifferent for millennia. But it was only relatively recently, as Curran explains in The Anatomy of Blackness: Science and Slavery in an Age of Enlightenment (Johns Hopkins UP, 2011), that they took a serious interest inexplaining these differences in a manner we would call “scientific.” There are two major reasons for this tardiness. First, metaphysical and biblical schemes provided the primary context for the interpretation of the human until the mid eighteenth century. Second, the most important scientific communities in Europe-those of France and England-only began to examine the African in earnest at the same time that their plantation- and slave-based colonies in the Caribbean came on line in the seventeenth century. “Colonial expansion” and “Scientific Revolution” ran together, it seems, and it is in their confluence that we see the origins of modern color-based racial discourse. That discourse, as Curran shows, was first worked out in what are sometimes called “Travel Accounts,” books that look for all the world like ethnographies. Europeans wrote thousands of them about every corner of the globe (Full disclosure: long ago I wrote a book about early European ethnographies of Old Russia). These books, in turn, provided grist (or “data”?) for the scientific mills of “naturalists” back home. At the same time these naturalists were looking outward for the origins of human difference, other scientifically-minded types were looking inwards. They were medical doctors, and more particularly anatomists. They wondered why, in the mechanical sense, black skin was black, and so they took black skin apart looking for mechanisms. And of course these twin discourses, ethnographic and medical, were intertwined with a third–that centered on the ethics of the then booming Atlantic slave-trade. Europeans wondered what science could tell them about the rightness or wrongness of African slavery. This is an important contribution to an important topic. But it is also a model of how intellectual history should be done. Curran moves well beyond the parade of Big Thinkers that have long dominated the history of ideas. He reads them, to be sure, but he also reads what they read. By this technique, he moves deeper and deeper into the culture of ethnography, anatomy, and slavery in search of  the origins and forms of “Blackness.”   Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies

This past summer Germany hosted the 2011 FIFA Women’s World Cup. The 32 matches drew more than 800,000 fans, while the total number of foreign tourists visiting Germany increased by nine per cent over the previous summer. The German government’s commissioner for tourism proudly declared that the success of the Women’s World Cup “strengthened the global image of Germany as a cosmopolitan and family-friendly travel destination with excellent infrastructure,” making the country the “world champion of hospitality.” As the statement shows, German officials are highly conscious of their nation’s “brand,” and the effectiveness of that brand in drawing tourists. The same can be said of other nations that host major international sporting events. Think of the attention to the “new South Africa” in 2010 or the “new China” in 2008. Organizers of these events do not simply plan a schedule of competitions; they seek to present an attractive image of their country to visitors at the stadiums and viewers watching on television. This concern with national image was at the center of planning for the 1972 Summer Olympics in Munich. When the organizers made their bid to host the games, only two decades had passed since the end of the Nazi state. Germany still had a big image problem, something that the planners hoped to remedy with the Munich games. Kay Schiller and Christopher Young examine this effort to re-craft the German brand in The 1972 Munich Olympics and the Making of Modern Germany (University of California Press, 2010), named the best book for 2011 by both the British and North American societies for sports history. As Kay and Chris discuss, the West German planners were alert to everything from the graphic design of the venue posters to the legacies of the 1936 Berlin Olympics. The aim was to create a Gesamtkunstwerk–a complete work of art–that would depict their country as modern, welcoming, and non-ideological. And in Kay and Chris’ judgment, they were largely successful: the Munich games were a model of planning and executing a major international event. But then came the fifth of September. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies

“Before reggae there was rock steady, and before that, ska,” writes Cedella Marley in the foreword to Heather Augustyn’s 2010 book Ska: An Oral History (McFarland, 2010). By way of interviews with dozens of ska musicians, Augustyn traces the history of the music from its Jamaican roots, through its 2Tone revival in 1970’s and 80’s England, to its current regional popularity in the United States. She interviewed Derrick Morgan, Doreen Shaffer, Laurel Aitken, Toots Hibert, Judge Dread, Roddy Radiation, Dave Wakeling, Pauline Black, Kix Thompson, and Buster Bloodvessel to name just a few. The book provides a solid understanding of ska as a music with roots in American jazz and soul mixed with the indigenous music of the Carribean. Augustyn’s interviews also highlight the importance of Jamaica’s status as a former colony in the creation of English ska as well as providing an insight into the music’s reflection of British and Jamaican race and class relations. Most importantly, Ska gives voice to many of the artists responsible for the creation of one of the most enduring musical genres of the last fifty years. Heather Augustyn is a correspondent for The Times of Northwest Indiana. Her work has appeared in numerous publications, including The Village Voice, In These Times, and The Humanist. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies

When I was in college in the 1980s, I liked to listen to Iggy Pop (aka James Newell Osterberg, Jr.). I was always mystified, however, by his song “Five Foot One,” with its odd and catchy refrain “I wish life could be/Swed-ish mag-a-zines!” What in the heck did that mean? I’d never seen a “Swed-ish mag-a-zine.” Thanks to Elizabeth Heineman‘s wonderful book Before Porn Was Legal: The Erotica Empire of Beate Uhse (University of Chicago Press, 2011), now I understand. You see, the last and perhaps most significant Swedish contribution (if that’s what it was) to Western Civilization was legalized hardcore porn. In the early 1970s the Swedes (and their porn-allies, the Danes) flooded European markets with the stuff. The Scandinavians were making a killing. As Lisa explains, the “Swedish Invasion” put the queen of the German erotica industry, Beate Uhse, in something of a bind – but it also came at a moment of great opportunity. In the first two decades after World War II, the Luftwaffe pilot-turned erotica entrepreneur had built a sex empire legitimized by the idea that erotica helped married, heterosexual couples have more fulfilling relationships. After all, the bread and butter of the industry were condoms (for customers who could hardly afford babies, given wartime devastation) and basic how-to manuals (for customers suffered from dire sexual ignorance). And the demand was there: by the early 1960s, fully half of West German household had patronized a mail-order erotica firm. But by the end of that decade, pornography – both homegrown and imported – was the backbone of the industry. So what, exactly, was the social mission of the erotica industry in this brave new world? In the end, the market decided with more than a little help from liberalism: German men wanted porn and the West German courts and Parliament couldn’t think of a reason not to let them have it. And so it is that you can buy porn on every high street in Germany, often in a Beate Uhse Erotik-Shop (Warning: really NSFW). This is a terrifically interesting book. Read it. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies

As we close in on the centennial of the First World War, no doubt there will be a flood of new interpretations and “hidden histories” of the conflict. Many books will certainly promise much, but in the end deliver little. Fortunately this is not the case with Michael Neiberg‘s latest book Dance of the Furies: Europe and the Outbreak of World War I (Harvard University Press, 2011). In this important new view of the opening months of the war, Neiberg offers a fresh look at the July Crisis, how it was perceived across Europe, and the first two months of the war. Rather than focusing on the same old voices of the European literati and political elites, Neiberg shows us how the average person considered the march to war. In the process he reveals a number of startling insights that challenge the war’s standard historical orthodoxy, revealing that many of our assumptions about the collective and individual responses to the July Crisis are based on misperception and poor assumptions. Rather than a continent primed for war through a network of military alliances, unfettered military bureaucracies, and a cultural predisposition that viewed war as the great test of nations and men, he reveals a society that genuinely believed peace was possible until the very last moment, and which only accepted war as a last alternative, and which would be defensive in nature. This insight and so many others earn Dance of the Furies the label of “revisionist history” in the best possible sense. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies

Most modern sports have some creation myth that usually links them to an almost-sacred place of origin. Baseball has its Cooperstown. Golf its St. Andrews. Basketball its Springfield College. If you are a football fan, whether of the All Blacks or the Springboks, the Magpies or the Swans, the Longhorns or the Stampeders, your ancestral shrine is a centuries-old boarding school in the West Midlands of England. It was at this place in 1823, according to legend, that schoolboy William Webb Ellis first caught a football and ran with it. The game that developed after this violation of the rules took the name of young Webb Ellis’ school: Rugby. The branches of rugby football spread widely in the 19th century and took on distinctive shapes, so that every sport today in which players run with and toss an oval ball, as opposed to dribbling and kicking a round one, can trace its history back to Webb Ellis’ forward rush. The legend of William Webb Ellis is just one subject that Tony Collins addresses in A Social History of English Rugby Union (Routledge, 2009). The book is a masterly work of scholarship that earned the Lord Aberdare Literary Prize for Sports History in 2010. Tony unfolds the history of rugby union from its origins at Rugby and other elite schools of the 19th century, through its expansion into Britain’s industrial cities and overseas empire, and down to its current status as a worldwide sport that draws big crowds, bigger television audiences, and even bigger revenues. But the larger and more important story is what the sport’s history reveals about England in the 19th and 20th centuries. Even if you are not a fan of rugby, you will learn a lot from this book about England and its empire, the nation at war, and the social and cultural changes of the postwar decades. As Tony explains in the interview, a study of rugby is particularly useful for viewing larger historical issues. The two codes of rugby–“rugby union” and “rugby league”–are distinguished not only by different rules and styles of play but also by different social, cultural, and political outlooks. If you don’t know the first thing about union and league, don’t worry: Tony gives us a lesson. But whether you know of rugby only from Matt Damon in Invictus or you’re a veteran player, you’ll appreciate Tony’s insights into the game, the history of modern England, and the reasons that the history of sports matters. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies

Konrad H. Jarausch, whose varied and important works on German history have been required reading for scholars for several decades, has published Reluctant Accomplice: A Wehrmacht Soldier’s Letters from the Eastern Front (Princeton University Press, 2011), a collection of his father’s missives from Poland and Russia during the early years of the Second World War, now translated into English. As you can imagine, this was an intensely personal project, and one that says almost as much about the postwar generation of “fatherless children” like Jarausch as it reveals about men like his father (also named Konrad) who found themselves in the cauldron of war. Jarausch seems to resist the comparison but I liken this work to Victor Klemperer’s diaries, I Shall Bear Witness, that were published with great fanfare almost fifteen years ago. The circumstances of the two men were vastly different (Klemperer was converted Jew, married to an “Aryan,” living in Dresden during the years of Nazi rule). But both men were deeply humanist members of Germany’s educated middle class (Bildungsburgertum) who saw their fellow Germans go insane and take the nation they loved down the path of moral and physical ruin. This work is of special interest to military historians because the elder Jarausch documents areas of activity rarely touched upon by other Wehrmacht memoirists and writers. Too old to serve in the combat arm, Jarausch spent his time in rear areas in Poland and the Soviet Union, training recruits and guarding prisoners. In clear and often touching prose, Jarausch documents both the drudgery and the deadly dilemmas of service in Hitler’s army. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies

Being a historian is a bit of a slog: years in graduate school, more years in dusty libraries and archives, and even more years teaching students who sometimes don’t seem interested in learning what you have to teach. But the job does have its pleasures, and one of the greatest–and surely the guiltiest–is watching people screw history up. Not a day goes by when we don’t see someone get it wrong, dead wrong, or so wrong that it’s not even wrong. To us, history is firmly anchored in authenticated sources that have been subjected to intense scrutiny and debate by people who know what they are talking about. To most other folks (though surely none of the people reading these words), history is something a dimly remembered teacher taught you, something you saw on the “History Channel,” or something someone told you once. This kind of history is not anchored in anything other than popular ideas and attitudes, which themselves are constantly changing. In this light, it’s not particularly surprising that when most people talk about history, they don’t get things quite right. When people make historical mistakes, we historians earnestly knit our brows and solemnly bemoan the deficit of historical knowledge. Privately we sometimes chuckle. I’ve done this myself, and I have to tell you I feel bad about it. I can only imagine, then, that Christopher Krebs had an absolute blast writing A Most Dangerous Book: Tacitus’s Germania from the Roman Empire to the Third Reich (Norton, 2011), for it is an epic tale of getting it wrong, history-wise. Beginning about half a millennium ago, people began to say all kinds of wrongheaded things about Tacitus’s thin volume: that Tacitus was writing about “Germans” (he wasn’t); that he knew a lot about “Germans” (he didn’t); that he uniformly praised “Germans” (nope); that the traits he ascribes to “Germans” can be found among modern German-speakers (wrong again). Were it not for the fact that these “interpretations” emboldened evil people (especially the Nazis) to do evil things (too numerous to recount), this exercise in bad history would be funny. But, as Krebs points out, it’s really not very funny at all. It’s a reminder that we professional historians have a duty to make sure we get what we say about the past straight, or else. Christopher Krebs is clearly fulfilling his duty in this important, readable, and very witty book. It deserves a wide audience. That means you. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies

Matthias Strohn‘s The German Army and the Defense of the Reich: Military Doctrine and the Conduct of the Defensive Battle, 1918-1939 (Cambridge University Press, 2011) is an important challenge to the existing literature on interwar German military doctrine. The stunning German victories in 1939 and 1940 have usually been attributed to their practice of “Blitzkrieg” (Lightning War). The inventive use of armored divisions and airpower allowed the Wehrmacht to sweep its enemies from the battlefield with relatively low casualties (on the German side, at least) and with little negative impact on the German homefront or domestic economy. James Corum, Robert Citino (a recent interviewee) and others have traced the roots of this combined arms doctrine in the interwar period, focusing on the “stormtroop” innovations World War One and the advocacy of mobility above all else by planners like Hans von Seeckt. But Strohn believes that this understandable fixation on the roots of Blitzkrieg has blinded us to the practical importance of defensive doctrine in the 100,000 man Reichswehr. With no hope of challenging France (a fact brought painfully to life in the 1923 occupation of the Ruhr) and little prospect for success even against the Polish army, German strategists (Joachim von Stulpnagel more than Seeckt) concentrated on defensive doctrine, hoping to survive an initial attack long enough to organize (perhaps) a guerrilla campaign or to die gloriously in arms. Based on extensive archival research, Strohn’s book should provoke a conversation among scholars of the German army that will refresh the debate about interwar doctrine. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies