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
Sep 30
Operation Sparrow: The Incredible True Story of the North American Spies Who Tricked Hitler and Won the War with Jason Bell (Hanover Square Press, 2026)
Historians have always known that the success of the Allied invasion of Normandy on D-Day in June 1944 depended on deceiving the Germans about where the invasion would take place. Jason Bell’s book, Operation Sparrow: The Incredible True Story of the Spies Who Tricked Hitler and ... Show More
31m 45s
Sep 11
Charles Lachman, "They Shall Not See the Dawn: The Manhunt for the Third Reich's Most Wanted" (Diversion Books, 2026)
May 1945. The Reich is in ruins. Hitler is dead. Yet for the US Army’s Counter Intelligence Corps, the real war has just begun. They Shall Not See the Dawn: The Manhunt for the Third Reich's Most Wanted (Diversion Books, 2026) by Charles Lachman is the true historical thriller f ... Show More
32m 56s
Sep 5
Agnes Mueller, "Holocaust Migration in German Jewish Literatures" (Cambridge UP, 2026)
In Holocaust Migration in German Jewish Literatures (Cambridge UP, 2026), analysing the past two decades of literature on Holocaust memory and migration stories, Agnes Mueller engages with writers such as W.G. Sebald, Thomas Bernhard, Edgar Hilsenrath, Benjamin Stein, Mirna Fu ... Show More
57m 9s
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
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