Uwe Schütte's Kraftwerk: Future Music from Germany (Penguin, 2021) is not your typical rock star biography. Eschewing gossipy interpersonal details, Schütte instead contextualizes Kraftwerk within contemporaneous debates about German cultural identity in the wake of Nazi atrocities. Kraftwerk's intellectual and artistic debts to Weimar era movements like Bau ... Show More
Aug 20
Claudia Kreklau, "The Making of Modern Eating: How the German Middle Class Forged the Way We Eat, 1780–1910" (Berghahn, 2026)
Nineteenth-century Germany invented the way we eat. Women experimenting in households, French chefs fleeing guillotines, and one of the most rapidly evolving food industries in the world forged recognizably modern eating practices between 1780 and 1910. While central Europeans me ... Show More
43m 55s
Jul 28
On Who Blew Up Nord Stream: A Conversation with Author Bojan Pancevski
The September, 2022 attack on the Nord Stream pipelines transporting Russian gas to Germany was perhaps the greatest single act of sabotage in modern history. In The Nord Stream Conspiracy: The Inside Story of the Explosions that Shook the World (Henry Holt, 2026), Bojan Pancevsk ... Show More
1 h
Jul 17
Susanne Paola Antonetta, "The Devil's Castle: Nazi Eugenics, Euthanasia, and How Psychiatry's Troubled History Reverberates Today" (Catapult, 2025)
The Devil’s Castle: Nazi Eugenics, Euthanasia, and How Psychiatry's Troubled History Reverberates Today (Catapult, 2025) delves into the forgotten history of eugenics and links it to present-day psychiatry to explain how we as a culture continue to get mind care so wrong. In The ... Show More
1h 2m
Mar 2024
Jonas Tinius, "State of the Arts: An Ethnography of German Theatre and Migration" (Cambridge UP, 2023)
State of the Arts: An Ethnography of German Theatre and Migration (Cambridge UP, 2023) is a bold and wide-ranging account of the unique German public theatre system through the prism of a migrant artistic institution in the western post-industrial Ruhr region. State of the Arts a ... Show More
53m 28s
Aug 2024
Building a People's Art: Vietnam, Socialist Realism and Cultural Revolution
Ruehl Muller joins Breht to discuss his upcoming book, put out by Iskra Books, titled "Building a People's Art: Selected Works of Trường Chinh and Tố Hữu". Together, they discuss Vietnamese Socialist Realism, Maoist China, Cultural Revolution, dialectics, the death drive, fascism ... Show More
1h 44m
Sep 2023
Beyond the Wall: What Life Was Really Like in East Germany
When the Iron Curtain fell in 1990, East Germany ceased to be. For over forty years, from the ruin of the Second World War to the cusp of a new millennium, the German Democratic Republic presented a radically different Germany than what had come before and what exists today. Soci ... Show More
43m 10s
Aug 2018
Simone Wesner, “Artists’ Voices in Cultural Policy: Careers, Myths and the Creative Profession after German Unification” (Palgrave MacMillan, 2018)
Why is the artist’s voice missing from cultural policy? In Artists’ Voices in Cultural Policy: Careers, Myths and the Creative Profession after German Unification (Palgrave Macmillan, 2018), Dr. Simone Wesner, a lecturer in arts management at Birkbeck, University of London, explo ... Show More
45m 10s
Apr 2023
Haunted Bauhaus: Occult Spirituality, Gender Fluidity, Queer Identities, and Radical Politics
In this podcast we discuss visibility, haunting and fascism with art historian and theorist Elizabeth Otto. Otto's book Haunted Bauhaus explores the marginalized histories of occult spirituality, gender fluidity and queer identity within the Bauhaus; offering fresh insight into o ... Show More
32m 25s
Dec 2020
Laurent Fintoni, "Bedroom Beats & B-Sides: Instrumental Hip-Hop & Electronic Music at the Turn of the Century" (Velocity Press, 2020)
In Bedroom Beats & B-Sides: Instrumental Hip-Hop & Electronic Music at the Turn of the Century (Velocity Press, 2020), Laurent Fintoni explores the rise of a new generation of bedroom producers at the turn of the century through the stories of various instrumental hip-hop and ele ... Show More
56m 35s