New Books in German Studies

By: Marshall Poe
  • Summary

  • Interviews with Scholars of Germany about their New Books Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/german-studies
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Episodes
  • Linguistic Diversity as a Bureaucratic Challenge
    Nov 15 2024
    How do street-level bureaucrats in Austria’s public service deal with linguistic diversity? In this episode of the Language on the Move podcast, Ingrid Piller speaks with Dr Clara Holzinger (University of Vienna) about her PhD research investigating how employment officers deal with the day-to-day communication challenges arising when clients have low levels of German language proficiency. For additional resources, show notes, and transcripts, go here. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/german-studies
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    43 mins
  • Maksim Goldenshteyn, "So They Remember: A Jewish Family’s Story of Surviving the Holocaust in Soviet Ukraine" (U Oklahoma Press, 2022)
    Nov 13 2024
    When we think of Nazi camps, names such as Auschwitz, Bergen-Belsen, and Dachau come instantly to mind. Yet the history of the Holocaust extends beyond those notorious sites. In the former territory of Transnistria, located in occupied Soviet Ukraine and governed by Nazi Germany's Romanian allies, many Jews perished due to disease, starvation, and other horrific conditions. Through an intimate blending of memoir, history, and reportage, So They Remember: A Jewish Family’s Story of Surviving the Holocaust in Soviet Ukraine (U Oklahoma Press, 2022) illuminates this oft-overlooked chapter of the Holocaust. In December 1941, with the German-led invasion of the Soviet Union in its sixth month, a twelve-year-old Jewish boy named Motl Braverman, along with family members, was uprooted from his Ukrainian hometown and herded to the remote village of Pechera, the site of a Romanian death camp. Author Maksim Goldenshteyn, the grandson of Motl, first learned of his family's wartime experiences in 2012. Through tireless research, Goldenshteyn spent years unraveling the story of Motl, his family members, and his fellow prisoners. The author here renders their story through the eyes of Motl and other children, who decades later would bear witness to the traumas they suffered. Until now, Romanian historians and survivors have served as almost the only chroniclers of the Holocaust in Transnistria. Goldenshteyn's account, based on interviews with Soviet-born relatives and other survivors, archival documents, and memoirs, is among the first full-length book to spotlight the Pechera camp, ominously known by its prisoners as Mertvaya Petlya, or the "Death Noose." Unfortunately, as the author explains, the Pechera camp was only one of some two hundred concentration sites spread across Transnistria, where local Ukrainian policemen often conspired with Romanian guards to brutalize its prisoners. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/german-studies
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    1 hr and 31 mins
  • Anne Berg, "Empire of Rags and Bones: Waste and War in Nazi Germany" (Oxford UP, 2024)
    Nov 11 2024
    Paper, bottles, metal scrap, kitchen garbage, rubber, hair, fat, rags, and bones--the Nazi empire demanded its population obsessively collect anything that could be reused or recycled. Entrepreneurs, policy makers, and ordinary citizens conjured up countless schemes to squeeze value from waste or invent new purposes for defunct or spent material, no matter the cost to people or the environment. As World War II dragged on, rescued loot--much of it waste--clogged transport routes and piled up in warehouses across Europe. Historicizing the much-championed ideal of zero waste, Anne Berg shows that the management of waste was central to the politics of war and to the genesis of genocide in the Nazi Germany. Destruction and recycling were part of an overarching strategy to redress raw material shortages, procure lebensraum, and cleanse the continent of Jews and others considered undesirable. Fostering cooperation between the administration, the party, the German Army, the SS, and industry, resource extending schemes obscured the crucial political role played by virtually all German citizens to whom salvaging, scrapping, and recycling were promoted as inherently virtuous and orderly behaviors. Throughout Nazi occupied-Europe, Jews, POWs, concentration camp inmates, and enemy civilians were forced to recycle the loot, discards, and debris of the Nazi race war. In the end, the materials that were fully exploited and the people who had been bled dry were cast aside, buried, burned, or left to rot. Nonetheless, waste reclamation did not have the power to win the war. Illuminating how the Nazis inverted the economy of value, rescuing discards and murdering people, Empire of Rags and Bones: Waste and War in Nazi Germany (Oxford UP, 2024) offers an original perspective on genocide, racial ideology, and World War II. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/german-studies
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    1 hr and 1 min

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