How to Dodge a Cannonball is a razor-sharp satire that dives into the heart of the Civil War, hilariously questioning the essence of the fight, not just for territory, but for the soul of America. How to Dodge a Cannonball (Henry Holt, 2025) is funnier than the Civil War should ever be. It follows Anders, a teenage idealist who enlists and reenlist…

Mutual Perceptions and Images in Japanese-German Relations, 1860-2010 (Brill, 2017) examines the mutual images formed between Japan and Germany from the mid-nineteenth to twenty-first centuries, and the influence of these images on the development of bilateral relations. Unlike earlier research on Japanese-German relations, which focused on the sim…

An award-winning writer captures a year that defined the modern world, intertwining historical events around the globe with key moments from her personal history. The year 1947 marks a turning point in the twentieth century. Peace with Germany becomes a tool to fortify the West against the threats of the Cold War. The CIA is created, Israel is abou…

Dr. Antonio J. Muñoz's Hitler’s War Against the Partisans During The Stalingrad Offensive: Spring 1942 to the Spring of 1943 (Frontline Books, 2025) explores the brutal and widespread partisan warfare on the Eastern Front during 1942-1943, detailing the Axis forces' anti-partisan efforts and the impact on the Soviet war effort. From the start of th…

Racializing Caste: Anthropology Between Germany and India and the Legacy of Irawati Karve (1905-1970) (De Gruyter, 2025) analyzes how racial knowledge has circulated in transnational entanglements, particularly between Germany and India, into the research on human variation in India, racializing the understanding of caste and ethnicity. It focuses …

The Violence of Reading: Literature and Philosophy at the Threshold of Pain (Palgrave Macmillan, 2024) expounds the scene of reading as one that produces an overwhelmed body exposed to uncontainable forms of violence. The book argues that the act of reading induces a representational instability that causes the referential function of language to c…

Carolin Duttlinger is Professor of German Literature and Culture at the University of Oxford (UK) and Co-Director of the Oxford Kafka Research Centre, where she is currently leading a three-year UKRI-funded research project,Kafka's Transformative Communities. She has published widely on German literature from the eighteenth century to the present; …

What happens when migrants are rejected by the host society that first invited them? How do they return to a homeland that considers them outsiders? Foreign in Two Homelands: Racism, Return Migration, and Turkish-German History explores the transnational history of Turkish migrants, Germany's largest ethnic minority, who arrived as 'guest-workers' …

NBN host Hollay Ghadery speaks with author Jack Wang about his novel, The Riveter (HarperVia, 2025). In the vein of All the Light We Cannot See, a cross-cultural love story set against the dramatic backdrop of the Allied invasion of Europe during WWII. Vancouver, 1942. Josiah Chang arrives in the bustling city ready to make a new life for himself. …

Julia Sneeringer's book provides a concise overview of developments in the Federal Republic of Germany from the end of the Second World War and Germany's division, to the unification of East and West Germany in 1990. Within the framework of key political and economic moments, it illuminates how West Germans experienced social, economic, and cultura…

Keeping details straight while writing a chronologically organized series is difficult enough. Focusing four full-length novels on the events of a single group experience in a single year, with back stories and future developments for a small group of heroines, each of whom has a chance to tell her own story of the central event and its consequence…

It is indisputable that Marx began his intellectual trajectory as a philosopher, but it is often thought that he subsequently turned away from philosophy. In Karl Marx and the Actualization of Philosophy (Cambridge University Press, 2025), Christoph Schuringa proposes a radically different reading of Marx's intellectual project and demonstrates tha…

Furious economic growth and social change resulted in pervasive civic conflict in Imperial Germany. Roger Chickering presents a wide-ranging history of this fractious period, from German national unification to the close of the First World War. Throughout this time, national unity remained an acute issue. It appeared to be resolved momentarily in t…

Adi Nester is an Assistant Professor of German and Jewish Studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Her first monograph, Unsettling Difference: Bible, Music Drama, and the Critique of German Jewish Identity, appeared with Cornell University Press. The book studies the discourse of Jewish difference in the first half of the twentie…

A detailed history of Nazi anti-partisan warfare on the Eastern Front during Operation Barbarossa. From the start of the war on the Eastern Front, Hitler's Ostheer, his Eastern Army, would wage a vernichtungskrieg, or war of annihilation, in the East. Never before had such a wide-reaching campaign been fought. Preparations for Germany's invasion of…

For decades Frank X Walker has reclaimed essential American lives through his pathbreaking historical poetry. In this stirring new collection, he reimagines the experiences of Black Civil War soldiers—including his own ancestors—who enlisted in the Union army in exchange for emancipation. Moving chronologically from antebellum Kentucky through Reco…

Today I interviewed Jan Borowicz about Perverse Memory and the Holocaust: A Psychoanalytic Understanding of Polish Bystanders (Routledge, 2024). "The assumptions of my book rely on a simple thesis: indifference to violence is impossible and that the primal scene for Polish culture is the experience of Nazism. In Poland we have still a humanitarian …

Sébastien Tremblay is a historian specialized in queer, global, and conceptual history. Born in Montreal / Tiohtià:ke, he received his PhD at the DFG Graduate School 'Global Intellectual History' at the Friedrich-Meinecke-Institute in 2020. He is currently a Postdoc at the Department for History and Didactics of History at the University of Flensbu…

In the late sixteenth century, a German Lutheran scholar named Martin Crusius compiled an exceptionally rich record of Greek life under Ottoman rule. Although he never left his home in the university town of Tübingen, Crusius spent decades annotating books and manuscripts, corresponding with the Greek Orthodox Patriarch, and interviewing Greek Orth…

In Nazi Billionnaires: The Dark History of Germany's Wealthiest Dynasties (Mariner Books, 2022), journalist David de Jong presents a groundbreaking investigation of how the Nazis helped German tycoons make billions off the horrors of the Third Reich and World War II—and how America allowed them to get away with it. In 1946, Günther Quandt—patriarch…

Bitter War of Memory: The Babyn Yar Massacre, Aftermath, and Commemoration (Purdue UP, 2025) discusses the Holocaust in Kyiv and the efforts to memorialize the Babyn Yar massacre. Babyn Yar is one of the largest Holocaust sites in the Soviet Union and modern Ukraine, where the Nazis and their collaborators killed virtually all the Jews who remained…

The Chelmno Death Camp: History, Biographies, Remembrance (Ibidem Press, 2019) is a comprehensive account of the Chelmno death camp. Chelmno was not only the first Nazi death camp, it also set a horrific example in establishing gas vans as the first mass use of poison gas to kill Jews. Chris Webb and Artur Hojan cover the construction and the devel…

Rosie was always told her red hair was a curse, but she never believed it. She often dreamed what it would look like under a white veil with the man of her dreams by her side. However, her life takes a harrowing turn in 1944 when she is forced out of her home and sent to the most gruesome of places: Auschwitz. Upon arrival, Rosie's head is shaved a…

The Anabaptists, alongside the Lutheran and Reformed churches, were the third major current in the sixteenth century Reformation movements. From their beginnings, the Anabaptists were highly diverse and yet they shared some central beliefs and practices for which they were quickly persecuted – for example, defenselessness and nonresistance, the ref…

Joanna Miller’s The Eights (G. P. Putnam's Sons, 2025) follows four women attending the University of Oxford in 1920. They are not the first female university students in the United Kingdom, or even the first who can hope to attain a degree, but they are the first class of women who can, if they fulfill all the requirements, attain a university deg…

At the height of the Holocaust twenty-five young inmates of the infamous Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp—mainly Jewish women and girls—were selected to design, cut, and sew beautiful fashions for elite Nazi women in a dedicated salon. It was work that they hoped would spare them from the gas chambers. This fashion workshop—called the Upper Ta…

Michael David Fox's Crucibles of Power: Smolensk under Stalinist and Nazi Rule (Harvard UP, 2025) provides a local, close-up look at the everyday workings of Nazi and Soviet power, in a particular region. It discusses such themes as the Soviet Terror of the late 1930's and the trauma of the collectivization of agriculture, earlier in the decade, as…

In Burying the Enemy: The Story of Those who Cared for the Dead in Two World Wars (Yale University Press, 2025), Tim Grady recounts here a detailed history of the fate of combatants who died on enemy soil in England and Germany in World Wars I and II. The books draws on a rich archive of personal family experiences, and describes the often touching…

Music was an integral part of statecraft and identity formation in the Third Reich. Structured thematically and semiotically around the Wagnerian tetralogy of the Ring cycle, Hitler’s Twilight of the Gods: Music and the Orchestration of War and Genocide in Europe (U Toronto Press, 2025) provides a sonic read of the Second World War and the Holocaus…

In this NBN episode, host Hollay Ghadery speaks with debut Toronto author Tim Welsh about his novel, Ley Lines, published by Guernica Editions, 2025. Set in the waning days of the Klondike Gold Rush, Ley Lines begins in the mythical boom town of Sawdust City, Yukon Territory. Luckless prospector Steve Ladle has accepted an unusual job offer: accomp…

Political Theorist Fernanda Gallo (Homerton College, University of Cambridge) has a fascinating new book, Hegel and Italian Political Thought: The Practice of Ideas, 1832-1900 (Cambridge UP, 2024), about how Georg Hegel’s philosophical thought made its way to Italy and how it was integrated into the various schools of thought within Italy. This is …

Sona Falstaff, a hospital nurse in Bombay, has things more or less where she wants them. Yes, she faces a certain discrimination, positive and negative, because of her mixed heritage, which makes her a “half-half” in the lingo of 1930s India. She lives in a poor section of the city, and she must work to support herself and her aging mother. India i…

Oberbrechen: A German Village Confronts Its Nazi Past (Oxford UP, 2024) is a new title in OUP's Graphic History Series that chronicles the events of the Holocaust and its aftermath in a small village in rural Germany. Based on meticulous research and using powerful visual storytelling, the book provides a multilayered narrative that explores the ex…

In Citizen Marx: Republicanism and the Formation of Karl Marx’s Social and Political Thought (Princeton UP, 2024), Bruno Leipold argues that, contrary to certain interpretive commonplaces, Karl Marx’s thinking was deeply informed by republicanism. Marx’s relation to republicanism changed over the course of his life, but its complex influence on his…

Poems by and biographies of inmates of the Dachau Concentration Camp, testimonies to the persistence of the humanity and creativity of the individual in the face of extreme suffering. The concentration camp at Dachau was the first established by the Nazis, opened shortly after Hitler came to power in 1933. It first held political prisoners, but lat…

Although most perished, hundreds of thousands of Central European Jews escaped the Holocaust; tens of thousands of these Jewish refugees ended up in East Asia, Southeast Asia, or South Asia. Taking a global and transnational approach, German-Speaking Jewish Refugees in Asia, 1930-1950 (Routledge, 2025) examines the cultural, political, and socioeco…

This compelling family history spans from the 1890s to the 21st century, weaving personal stories into the broader fabric of German history to reveal a deeply moving account of survival, courage, and resilience. At the heart of this narrative is Paul Bernstein, a Jewish WWI veteran who was awarded for his bravery but ultimately perished in Auschwit…

The German Democratic Republic, or East Germany, was the frontline in the Cold War, packed with hundreds of thousands of Soviet and East German troops armed with the latest Warsaw Pact equipment, lined up along the 1,400 km Inner German Border. However, because of the repressive East German police state, little human intelligence about these forces…

Afterthought: A Family Story (Indiana University Bloomington Libraries Publishing, 2025) by Dr. Heather Akou focuses on the life of her grandmother, Lila Slaback, who grew up in a dysfunctional, working-class family in La Crosse, Wisconsin, in the 1930s. In her short adult life, she gave birth to seven children with at least four different men and …

Most people in North America have probably at least heard the name W. E. B. Dubois. In the early twentieth century, DuBois—the first African-American to earn a Ph.D. from Harvard—published and spoke extensively about his vision of equality through education. In particular, he edited The Crisis, the monthly magazine of the NAACP, while also writing …

In Well Worth Saving (Yale University Press, 2019), Professor Laurel Leff explores how American universities responded to the sudden and urgent appeals for help from scholars trapped in Nazi-dominated Europe. Although many scholars were welcomed into faculty or research positions in the US, thousands more tried to find a way over and failed. Those …

Over the past two decades, natural things—especially those collected, exchanged, studied, and displayed in museums, such as animals, plants, minerals, and rocks—have emerged as fascinating protagonists for historical research. Nature on Paper: Documenting Science in Prussia, 1770-1850 (U Pittsburgh Press, 2024) follows a different, humbler set of o…

In Rescue and Remembrance: Imagining the German Collective After Nazism (U Wisconsin Press, 2025), Kobi Kabalek examines how the rescue of Jews during the Holocaust has been understood and represented in Germany from the Nazi period to the present. In many regions outside Germany, a small number of known Holocaust rescuers are often held up as exem…

Forged in Genocide traces the early history of colonial capitalism in Namibia with a central focus on migrants who came to be key to the economy during and as a result of the German genocide of the Herero and Nama (1904-1908). It posits that Namibia, far from being a colonial backwater of the early 20th century, became highly integrated into the la…

East Central Europe Since 1989 (Routledge, 2025) examines politics, economics, media, religious institutions, transitional justice, gender inequality, and literature, highlighting the overt functions, latent functions, and side effects associated with each sphere. Communism in East Central Europe had cracks from the beginning, as uprisings in East …

A complex array of individual responses to the abuse of power by the state is represented in this book in three horrific episodes in the history of East-Central Europe. The three events followed each other within a span of about ten years: the deportation and murder of Hungarian Jews in Nazi death and labor camps; the Arrow Cross terrorist rule in …

Raphael Klonimus battles deep regret. Haunted by losing Laila, he sees himself as a coward for letting her slip away. But fate offers him a second chance. He whisks Laila away to a secluded castle, determined to reignite their passionate love. A single, soul-stirring kiss sparks hope, yet Raphael knows their journey to happiness will be challenging…

Hitler’s Hunting Squad in Southern Europe: The Bloody Path of Fritz Schubert through Occupied Crete and Macedonia (Pen and Sword, 2024) traces the violent path of Fritz Schubert and his Greek 'hunting squad' across occupied Crete and Macedonia, offering a complete translation (by Stratis A. Porfyratos) of Thanasis Fotiou's comprehensive study on th…

The Nazis and their collaborators buried over 100,000 victims at Babyn Yar, a ravine in modern-day Ukraine. Most of the individuals were Jewish, making this area one of the most infamous mass murder sites in history. The Ravine of Memory: Babyn Yar Between the Holocaust and the Great Patriotic War (Purdue UP, 2025) starts when the travesty ends, te…

A New Orient: From German Scholarship to Middle Eastern Studies in Israel (Brandeis UP, 2024) explores the fascinating history of Zionist and Israeli "Oriental Studies" (mizrahanut), particularly the study of Islam, Arabic, and the Middle East, as a field deeply rooted in the academic traditions of early 20th-century German universities. Drawing on…