NonFiction

Immediately after the Second World War, National Socialist war criminals were taken into custody by many Western European countries. Given the Federal Republic of Germany’s links to the West, the majority were released. In Italy and the Netherlands alone, five Germans remained in police custody: SS man Herbert Kappler as the Gestapo commander responsible for the Ardeatine massacre, and the...

After the First World War, Munich became the scene of unusual political constellations: in November 1918, Kurt Eisner became the first ever Jewish prime minister of a German state, while in April 1919, Jewish writers like Gustav Landauer, Ernst Toller and Erich Mühsam became involved with the Bavarian Soviet Republic. The Jewish community was rather conservative, and even the Orthodox members...

The Haitian Revolution (1791-1804) was the only successful insurrection of slaves and founded the third constitutional state of the modern world with the Republic of Haiti. Despite that, it often disappears behind the American and the French Revolutions in the history books and in philosophy.

Following postcolonial and feminist political theory, Jeanette Ehrmann presents an...

The atomic bomb and the Cold War, but also the German currency reform and that country‘s first soccer Wold Championship (called the »Miracle of Bern«); these are the hallmarks of...

History unfolds in time. But how? As progress, in an upward trajectory? Or as a cycle, with similar patterns and temporal rhythms forever reoccurring? In a departure from these long-established...

If we had a device for measuring the intensity of collective feelings, at the moment it would be in the red: in most of our political debates rational arguments and mutual respect have given way to fury, hate, and anxiety.

Uffa Jensen traces the origins of the politics of rage back into the 19th century and explains how these feelings of rejection function. In so...

The traditional interpretation of history influenced by Protestantism regarded »Luther’s deed« as a liberation from the »dark powers« of the papal church and an »end of the Middle Ages«. However,...

Commemorating those »violently killed« is a core part of political culture. With his groundbreaking work on the »cult of the dead«, Reinhart Koselleck has opened up a new field of research: European memorial landscapes in all their historical, aesthetic and political complexity. Whether they are sacrifices for the fatherland or victims of wars and tyranny,...

Why were so many Germans willing to play an active role in the annihilation of the European Jews under the Nazis? This book takes a new explanatory approach with its theory of »ordinary...

Clamorous sounds, unruly behavior, and colorful fashions: the sonic vocabulary used by contemporaries to describe the new youth scene in the mid-20th century mark a cultural dividing point. Aesthetic conflicts culminated in street riots and produced police measures, censorship, and laws. Spectacular court cases against youths led to negative social clichés of male urban youth: the American...

A doctor in Hamburg sets out on a search for Turkish battle drugs; three travellers to East India concoct an »unheard-of« elixir in a pharmacy on Java; Leibniz, the philosopher, tries to find the earliest Chinese scripts; Spaniards in Potosí, Peru, are forced to witness devil worship in the mines; a Jesuit missionary encounters an eastern Hermeticism in Isfahan; a heterodox...

In the 1970s many western European states were gripped by unprecedented structural transformation: the factories of the old industries disappeared, millions of jobs were lost, previously booming...