Press Series

Daniel Siemens, Writing against HitlerL Hermann Budzislawski and the Making of Twentieth-Century Socialism (January 2025)

In Writing against Hitler, Daniel Siemens reconstructs the history of the struggles of socialist intellectuals in Germany from the 1930s through the post–World War II era by focusing on the life of one influential member of that group, Hermann Budzislawski (1901–78). In the 1930s, Budzislawski was a journalist who served as the editor in chief of the prominent antifascist journal Die neue Weltbühne. After the German occupation of France, he worked in exile in the United States until 1948, when he moved to East Germany. He became influential in training a new generation of journalists and worked as a politician.

“Siemens is a remarkable researcher who brings important gifts of imagination and archival persistence to his work. These qualities are evident in Writing against Hitler, an original study of one of the twentieth century’s most remarkable Zelig-like figures.”
—Benjamin Hett, author of The Nazi Menace: Hitler, Churchill, Roosevelt, Stalin, and the Road to War

Kobi Kabalek, Rescue and Remembrance: Imagining the German Collective After Nazism (January 2025)

In Rescue and Remembrance, 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 order to trace Germans’ notions of collective morality. In many countries outside Germany, people speak of a small number of known Holocaust rescuers to claim the pro-Jewish sentiment of broad segments of their country’s population during World War II, thereby projecting an image of national moral virtue. By contrast, current German scholarship and commemoration present rescuers as a small minority; their examples condemn the majority by showing what Germans could have done but did not do.

“A complex and multifaceted understanding of the commemoration of ‘rescue’ in postwar Germany. This is an important contribution to our understanding of memory—and historiography—as a heterogenous, dynamic tool for understanding and shaping the present. Kabalek shows admirable tolerance for historical gray areas—for accepting ambiguity and flexibility not only in history but also in its actors and their deeds.”
—Stefanie Schüler-Springorum

Kathryn L. Brackney, Surreal Geographies: A New History of Holocaust Consciousness (August 2024)

Surreal Geographies recovers a forgotten archive of Holocaust representation. Examining art, literature, and film produced from the immediate postwar period up to the present moment, Kathryn L. Brackney investigates changing portrayals of Jewish victims and survivors. In so doing, she demonstrates that the Holocaust has been understood not only through the documentary realism and postmodern fragmentation familiar to scholars but also through a surreal mode of meaning making. From an otherworldly “Planet Auschwitz” to the spare, intimate spaces of documentary interviews, Brackney shows that the humanity of victims has been produced, undermined, and guaranteed through evolving scripts for acknowledging and mourning mass violence.

Renée Poznanski, Propaganda and Persecution: French Resistance and the "Jewish Question" (January 2024)

In Propaganda and Persecution Renée Poznanski argues that Jews in France suffered a double persecution: one led by the Vichy government, the other imposed by the Nazis. Marginalization and exclusion soon led to internment and deportation to terrifying places. Meanwhile, a propaganda war developed between the Resistance and the official voice of Vichy. Poznanski draws on a breathtaking array of sources, especially clandestine publications and French-language BBC transmissions, to show how the Resistance both fought and accommodated the deeply entrenched antisemitism within French society. Her close readings of propaganda texts against public opinions probe ambiguities and silences in Resistance writing about the persecution of the Jews and, in parallel, the numerous and detailed denunciations that could be read in the Jewish clandestine press.

“Renée Poznanski is one of the finest scholars of our time on the subject of France during the Holocaust and World War II. Her central question here—How much did the French Resistance care about Jews and antisemitism?—is timely, and she presents a mountain of evidence to support her thesis.”
—Ethan Katz, University of California, Berkeley

Natalie Scholz, Redeeming Objects: A West German Mythology (December 2023)

Redeeming Objects traces the afterlives of things. Out of the rubble of World War II and the Holocaust, the Federal Republic of Germany emerged, and with it a foundational myth of the “economic miracle.” In this narrative, a new mass consumer society based on the production, export, and consumption of goods would redeem West Germany from its Nazi past and drive its rebirth as a truly modern nation. Turning this narrative on its head, Natalie Scholz shows that West Germany’s consumerist ideology took shape through the reinvention of commodities previously tied to Nazism into symbols of Germany’s modernity, economic supremacy, and international prestige.

"An immensely rich and yet concisely written analysis, Redeeming Objects invites the reader to savour each page. Scholz’s text lingers at the symbiotic intersection of history and memory,
deftly combining nuanced theoretical interpretation with rigorous archival research. This interdisciplinarity is woven lightly but effectively throughout the text, suggesting alternative methods of reading and rereading deceptively familiar narratives..”
—Jessica Cretney, De Montfort University

Darcy Buerkle, Skye Doney eds., Contemporary Europe in the Historical Imagination (June 2023)

George L. Mosse (1918–99) was one of the most influential cultural and intellectual historians of modern Europe. In Contemporary Europe in the Historical Imagination, an international assembly of leading scholars explore Mosse’s enduring methodologies in German studies and modern European cultural history. Considering Mosse’s life and work historically and critically, Contemporary Europe in the Historical Imagination begins with his intellectual biography and goes on to reread his writings in light of historical developments since his death, and to use, extend, and contend with Mosse’s legacy in new contexts he may not have addressed or even foreseen.

“Mosse’s pathbreaking work on fascism, masculinity, Judaism, war, and genocide still reverberates a half century after his death. The wide-ranging, topical, and persuasive essays in this volume show how the intellectual seeds Mosse planted as a scholar and teacher continue to bear fruit.”
—Daniel Magilow, University of Tennessee, Knoxville

Erica Moretti, The Best Weapon for Peace: Maria Montessori, Education, and Children's Rights (July 2021)

The Italian educator and physician Maria Montessori (1870–1952) is best known for the teaching method that bears her name. She was also a lifelong pacifist, although historians tend to consider her writings on this topic as secondary to her pedagogy. In The Best Weapon for Peace, Erica Moretti reframes Montessori's pacifism as the foundation for her educational activism, emphasizing her vision of the classroom as a gateway to reshaping society. Montessori education offers a child-centered learning environment that cultivates students' development as peaceful, curious, and resilient adults opposed to war and invested in societal reform.

Lorenzo Benadusi, Respectability and Violence: Military Values, Masculine Honor, and Italy’s Road to Mass Death (August 2021)

Translated by Zakiya Hanafi

In the aftermath of national unification in the 1860s, the Italian army was tasked with molding generations of men from warring regions and different social strata into obedient citizens of a centralized state. Integrating large numbers of the educated middle classes into the young kingdom’s armed forces proved decisive in establishing the army as the “main school” and backbone for mass nationalization. In Respectability and Violence Lorenzo Benadusi examines the intersection of Italian military and civil society over the last century as they coalesced in the figure of the gentleman-officer—an idealized image of an altruistic, charming, and competent ruling class that could influence the choices, values, and behavior of the “new Italians.”

Annette Becker, Messengers of Disaster: Raphael Lemkin, Jan Karski, and Twentieth-Century Genocides (November 2021)

Translated by Käthe Roth

Leading up to World War II, two Polish men witnessed the targeted extermination of Jews under Adolf Hitler and the German Reich before the reality of the Holocaust was widely known. Raphael Lemkin, a Jewish lawyer who coined the term “genocide,” and Jan Karski, a Catholic member of the Polish resistance, independently shared this knowledge with Winston Churchill and Franklin D. Roosevelt. Having heard false rumors of wartime atrocities before, the leaders met the messengers with disbelief and inaction, leading to the eventual murder of more than six million people. Messengers of Disaster draws upon little-known texts from an array of archives, including the International Committee of the Red Cross in Geneva and the International Tracing Service in Bad Arolsen.

Emilio Gentile, Fascination with the Persecutor: George L. Mosse and the Catastrophe of Modern Man (December 2021)

Translated by John and Anne Tedeschi
Foreword by Stanley Payne

In 1933, George L. Mosse fled Berlin and settled in the United States, where he went on to become a renowned historian at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. Through rigorous and innovative scholarship, Mosse uncovered the forces that spurred antisemitism, racism, nationalism, and populism. His transformative work was propelled by a desire to know his own persecutors and has been vital to generations of scholars seeking to understand the cultural and intellectual origins and mechanisms of Nazism. This translation makes Emilio Gentile’s groundbreaking work, Fascination with the Persecutor: George L. Mosse and the Catastrophe of Modern Man available to English language readers.

Alessandra Tarquini, A History of Italian Fascist Culture, 1922-1943 (February 2022)

Translated by Marissa Gemma

Alessandra Tarquini’s A History of Italian Fascist Culture, 1922–1943 is widely recognized as an authoritative synthesis of the field. The book was published to much critical acclaim in 2011 and revised and expanded five years later. This long-awaited translation presents Tarquini’s compact, clear prose to readers previously unable to read it in the original Italian. Tarquini sketches the universe of Italian Fascism in three broad directions: the regime’s cultural policies, the condition of various art forms and scholarly disciplines, and the ideology underpinning the totalitarian state. She details the choices the ruling class made between 1922 and 1943, revealing how cultural policies shaped the country and how intellectuals and artists contributed to those decisions.

Mary Gluck, The Invisible Jewish Budapest: Metropolitan Culture at the Fin de Siècle (2016)

Budapest at the fin de siècle was famed and emulated for its cosmopolitan urban culture and nightlife. It was also the second-largest Jewish city in Europe. In The Invisible Jewish Budapest, Mary Gluck delves into the popular culture of Budapest’s coffee houses, music halls, and humor magazines to uncover the enormous influence of assimilated Jews in creating modernist Budapest between 1867 and 1914. She explores the paradox of Budapest in this era: because much of the Jewish population embraced and promoted a secular, metropolitan culture, their influence as Jews was both profound and invisible.

"Gluck’s book provides a rich cultural history of Budapest, Budapest Jewry and paradoxical identity debates. Sumptuous literary artefacts and images add much-needed flavour to a deep analysis of the urban life and soul of Budapest until roughly the First World War. It is a masterpiece of cultural history and deserves its place alongside other influential works on fin de siècle Europe."

—James Koranyi, The English Historical Review, 133(564) (2018): 1343-45.

Till van Rahden, Jews and Other Germans: Civil Society, Religious Diversity, and Urban Politics in Breslau, 1860-1925 (September 2008)

Translated by Marcus Brainard

Jews and Other Germans is the first social and cultural history to probe the parameters of Jewish integration in the half century between the founding of the German Empire in 1871 and the early Weimar Republic. Questioning received wisdom about German-Jewish assimilation and the pervasiveness of anti-Semitism in Imperial Germany, van Rahden’s prize-winning book restores some of the complexity and openness of relations between Protestants, Catholics, and Jews before World War I.

Closely analyzing the political, social, and cultural life in a major German city, van Rahden shows that Jews were a part of a broad urban community that encompassed diversity within unity, at once offering them a large measure of equality while permitting them to remain meaningfully Jewish. Jews and Other Germans also substantially revises the chronology of anti-Semitism in Germany, showing that Jews only began to experience exclusion from Breslau’s social world during World War I.

"No book about the long nineteenth century can possibly expect to have the last word about how Jews ended up in Auschwitz. But the fact that van Rahden’s detailed descriptions of how Jews and non-Jews interacted in imperial Germany strongly diverge from the tenor of life during the Third Reich firmly supports his assertion that the path to Auschwitz did not begin in imperial Germany."

—Rebecca Ayako Bennette, Journal of Interdisciplinary History, 40(1) (2009): 106-07.

Michael Wildt, An Uncompromising Generation: The Nazi Leadership of the Reich Security Main Office (2010)

Translated by Tom Lampert

In An Uncompromising Generation, Michael Wildt follows the journey of a strikingly homogenous group of young academics—who came from the educated, bourgeois stratum of society—as they started to identify with the Nazi concept of Volksgemeinschaft, which labeled Jews as enemies of the people and justified their murder.

Wildt's study traces the intellectual evolution of key members of the Reich Security Main Office (RSHA) from their days as students until the end of World War II. Established in 1939, this office fused together the Gestapo, the Criminal Police, and the Sicherheitsdienst (Security Service) of the SS. Far from being small cogs in a big bureaucratic machine, Wildt finds that the people who made up the RSHA constructed the concepts and operated the apparatus that carried out the Holocaust.

"This is a difficult book to fault, for Wildt makes an eloquent and compelling case…a supremely fresh, well-researched, well-written (and translated) exemplar of German perpetrator scholarship, which is to be recommended to as wide a readership as possible."

—Christopher Dillon, Holocaust Studies, 16(3) (2012): 175-78.

Stanley Payne, David J. Sorkin, John Tortorice eds., What History Tells: George L. Mosse and the Culture of Modern Europe (November 2003)

Foreword by Walter Laqueur

What History Tells presents an impressive collection of critical papers from the September 2001 conference "An Historian's Legacy: George L. Mosse and Recent Research on Fascism, Society, and Culture." This book examines his historiographical legacy first within the context of his own life and the internal development of his work, and secondly by tracing the many ways in which Mosse influenced the subsequent study of contemporary history, European cultural history and modern Jewish history.

"What emerges from these essays is an intellectual biography of a man who did not set out to be a historian of something; rather, he drew eagerly on innovative methodologies from multiple fields while pursuing his many interests with vigor. This intellectual openness and flexibility proved to be a tremendous advantage. It took him, for example, outside the field of history to areas such as anthropology, long before anthropological theory became fashionable among historians."

- H. Glenn Penny, H-German (2004)

„What History Tells ist ein gelungener Versuch, die Unterschiede und Gemeinsamkeiten zwischen den vielen Forschungsgebieten von George L. Mosse herauszuarbeiten und einmal mehr zu zeigen, wie vordenkerisch und einflußreich sein Werk war.“

—Marcel Rotter, Associate Professor an der University of Mary Washington

Christopher Browning, Collected Memories: Holocaust History and Postwar Testimony (November 2003)

In Collected Memories, Christopher R. Browning addresses some of the most heated controversies that have arisen from the use of postwar testimony: Hannah Arendt's uncritical acceptance of Adolf Eichmann's self-portrayal in Jerusalem; the conviction of Ivan Demjanuk (accused of being Treblinka death camp guard "Ivan the Terrible") on the basis of survivor testimony and its subsequent reversal by the Israeli Supreme Court; the debate in Poland sparked by Jan Gross's use of both survivor and communist courtroom testimony in his book Neighbors; and the conflict between Browning himself and Daniel Goldhagen, author of Hitler's Willing Executioners, regarding methodology and interpretation in the use of pre-trial testimony.

Despite these controversies and challenges, Browning delineates the ways in which the critical use of such problematic sources can provide telling evidence for writing Holocaust history. He examines and discusses two starkly different sets of "collected memories"—the voluminous testimonies of notorious Holocaust perpetrator Adolf Eichmann and the testimonies of 175 survivors of an obscure complex of factory slave labor camps in the Polish town of Starachowice.

„Der Wert dieses schmalen Bändchens liegt nicht allein in den dort publizierten Forschungsergebnissen, sondern vor allem in der hier beispielhaft vorgeführten Methode des Umgangs mit der schwierigen, aber für den Holocaust-Historiker unverzichtbaren Quellengattung der postwar testimony. Nicht nur Studenten, auch der gestandene Praktiker wird Collected Memories mit Gewinn lesen.“

—Joachim Neander, Autor von „Hat in Europa kein annäherndes Beispiel“: Mittelbau-Dora – ein KZ für Hitlers Krieg

Michele Sarfatti, The Jews in Mussolini's Italy: From Equality to Persecution (February 2007)

Translated by John and Anne C. Tedeschi

Often overshadowed by the persecution of Jews in Germany, the treatment of Jews in fascist Italy comes into sharp focus in this volume by Italian historian Michele Sarfatti. Using thorough and careful statistical evidence to document how the Italian social climate changed from relatively just to irredeemably prejudicial, Sarfatti begins with a history of Italian Jews in the decades before fascism—when Jews were fully integrated into Italian national life—and provides a deft and comprehensive history from fascism's rise in 1922 to its defeat in 1945.

"This erudite study goes further than all others to lay bare the road to Auschwitz that Fascism tried to pave for the Jews in Italy"

—James T. Mellone, History: Reviews of New Books, 35(2) (2007): 69.

Raphael Gross, Carl Schmitt and the Jews: The "Jewish Question," the Holocaust, and German Legal Theory (July 2007)

Translated by Joel Golb
Foreword by Peter C. Caldwell

German jurist and legal theorist Carl Schmitt (1888–1985) significantly influenced Western political and legal thinking in the last century, yet his life and work have also stirred considerable controversy. While his ideas have been used and diffused by prominent philosophers on both the left and the right, such as Jürgen Habermas and Leo Strauss, his Nazi-era past, especially his active efforts to remove Jewish influence from German law, has cast a cloud over his life and oeuvre. Still, his many supporters have generally been successful in claiming that Schmitt's was an "antisemitism of opportunity," a temporary affectation to gain favor with the Nazis.

In Carl Schmitt and the Jews, available in English for the first time, historian Raphael Gross vigorously repudiates this "opportunism thesis." Through a reading of Schmitt's corpus, some of which became available only after his death, Gross highlights the importance of the "Jewish Question" on the breadth of Schmitt's work. According to Gross, Schmitt's antisemitism was at the core of his work—before, during, and after the Nazi era. His influential polarities of "friend and foe," "law and nomos," "behemoth and Leviathan," and "Katechon and Antichrist" emerge from a conceptual template in which "the Jew" is defined as adversary, undermining the Christian order with secularization. The presence of this template at the heart of Schmitt's work, Gross contends, calls for a major reassessment of Schmitt's role within contemporary cultural and legal theory.

Emilio Gentile, La Grande Italia: The Myth of the Nation in the Twentieth Century (2008)

Translated by Suzanne Dingee and Jennifer Pudney

La Grande Italia traces the history of the myth of the nation in Italy along the curve of its rise and fall throughout the twentieth century. Starting with the festivities for the fiftieth anniversary of the unification of Italy in 1911 and ending with the centennial celebrations of 1961, Emilio Gentile describes a dense sequence of events: from victorious Italian participation in World War I through the rise and triumph of Fascism to Italy’s transition to a republic.

Gentile’s definition of “Italians” encompasses the whole range of political, cultural, and social actors: Liberals and Catholics, Monarchists and Republicans, Fascists and Socialists. La Grande Italia presents a sweeping study of the development of Italian national identity in all its incarnations throughout the twentieth century. This important contribution to the study of modern Italian nationalism and the ambition to achieve a “great Italy” between the unification of Italy and the advent of the Italian Republic will appeal to anyone interested in modern European history, Fascism, and nationalism.

"A student of the great historian Renzo de Felice, Gentile's best known work is The Sacralization of Politics in Fascist Italy (1993; translated in 1996), which clearly reflects the influence of George L. Mosse's views on nationalism as a secular religion…It provides a clear, balanced, and well-informed account of the changing place of national appeals and aspirations in Italian political discourse."

—James J. Sheehan, The American Historical Review, 115.1 (2010): 315-16.

Karel Plessini, The Perils of Normalcy: George L. Mosse and the Remaking of Cultural History (2013)

A taboo-breaker and a great provocateur, George L. Mosse (1918–99) was one of the great historians of the twentieth century, forging a new historiography of culture that included brilliant insights about the roles of nationalism, fascism, racism, and sexuality. Jewish, gay, and a member of a culturally elite family in Germany, Mosse came of age as the Nazis came to power, before escaping as a teenager to England and America. Mosse was innovative and interdisciplinary as a scholar, and he shattered in his groundbreaking books prevalent assumptions about the nature of National Socialism and the Holocaust. He audaciously drew a link from bourgeois respectability and the ideology of the Enlightenment—the very core of modern Western civilization—to the extermination of the European Jews.

In The Perils of Normalcy, Karel Plessini draws on all of Mosse’s published and unpublished work to illuminate the origins and development of his groundbreaking methods of historical analysis and the close link between his life and work. He redefined the understanding of modern mass society and politics, masterfully revealing the powerful influence of conformity and political liturgies on twentieth-century history. Mosse warned against the dangers inherent in acquiescence, showing how identity creation and ideological fervor can climax in intolerance and mass murder—a message of continuing relevance.

"Plessini makes clear Mosse's commitment to a definition of intellectual work as a sorting out of the present's problems."

Thomas C. Wolfe, American Ethnologist, 41(4) (2014): 787-88.

George L. Mosse, Nazi Culture (October 2003)

What was life like under the Third Reich? What went on between parents and children? What were the prevailing attitudes about sex, morality, religion? How did workers perceive the effects of the New Order in the workplace? What were the cultural currents—in art, music, science, education, drama, and on the radio?

Professor Mosse's extensive analysis of Nazi Culture—groundbreaking upon its original publication in 1966—is now offered to readers of a new generation. Selections from newspapers, novellas, plays, and diaries as well as the public pronouncements of Nazi leaders, churchmen, and professors describe National Socialism in practice and explore what it meant for the average German.

By recapturing the texture of culture and thought under the Third Reich, Mosse's work still resonates today—as a document of everyday life in one of history's darkest eras and as a living memory that reminds us never to forget.

"Most important of all, the younger generation in Germany, the United States, and the world must learn the truth in their textbooks and in their classrooms. These young people do not know the full story of German's deadly flirtation with Nazi nihilism. Professor Mosse's book helps keep the record alive."

—Louis L. Snyder, “A Short Trip Down the Styx,” in Saturday Review (May 21, 1966), 28.

Dan Diner, Cataclysms: A History of the Twentieth Century from Europe's Edge (January 2008)

Translated by William Templer, Joel Golb

Cataclysms is a profoundly original look at the last century. Approaching twentieth-century history from the periphery rather than the centers of decision-making, the virtual narrator sits perched on the legendary stairs of Odessa and watches as events between the Baltic and the Aegean pass in review, unfolding in space and time between 1917 and 1989, while evoking the nineteenth century as an interpretative backdrop.

Influenced by continental historical, legal, and social thought, Dan Diner views the totality of world history evolving from an Eastern and Southeastern European angle. A work of great synthesis, Cataclysms chronicles twentieth century history as a "universal civil war" between a succession of conflicting dualisms such as freedom and equality, race and class, capitalism and communism, liberalism and fascism, East and West.

Diner's interpretation rotates around cataclysmic events in the transformation from multinational empires into nation states, accompanied by social revolution and "ethnic cleansing," situating the Holocaust at the core of the century's predicament. Unlike other Eurocentric interpretations of the last century, Diner also highlights the emerging pivotal importance of the United States and the impact of decolonization on the process of European integration.

"we are immersed in the world of multiple, crosscutting conflicts of ethnicity, nationality, and race, much of it fought out (literally) in Europe’s eastern borderlands. E. H. Carr’s “twenty-year crisis” becomes for Diner a century-long crisis, the violence still present, still being worked out in memory battles."

—Eric D. Weitz, The American Historical Review, (2009) 114(5): 1522-1523.

Lorenzo Benadusi, The Enemy of the New Man: Homosexuality in Fascist Italy (April 2012)

Translated by Suzanne Dingee and Jennifer Pudney

In this first in-depth historical study of homosexuality in Fascist Italy, The Enemy of the New Man brings to light immensely important archival documents regarding the sexual politics of the Italian Fascist regime. Lorenzo Benadusi adds new insights to the study of the complex relationships of masculinity, sexuality, and Fascism; he explores the connections between new Fascist values and preexisting Italian traditional and Roman Catholic views on morality; he documents both the Fascist regime’s denial of the existence of homosexuality in Italy and its clandestine strategies and motivations for repressing and imprisoning homosexuals; he uncovers the ways that accusations of homosexuality (whether true or false) were used against political and personal enemies; and above all, he shows how homosexuality was deemed the enemy of the Fascist “New Man,” an ideal of a virile warrior and dominating husband vigorously devoted to the “political” function of producing children for the Fascist state.

"This book's great strengths are its meticulous archival research and its provision of new perspectives on the fascist regime's construction of masculinity…this is an interesting and well-researched book that makes a strong case for the intrinsic historical interest of the relationship between sexuality and the state, whether fascist or otherwise."

—Mark Seymour, The American Historical Review, 118(1) (2013): 276-77.

Martin Jay, Reason After Its Eclipse: On Late Critical Theory (2016)

In Reason after Its Eclipse, Martin Jay tackles a question as old as Plato and still pressing today: what is reason, and what roles does and should it have in human endeavor? Applying the tools of intellectual history, he examines the overlapping, but not fully compatible, meanings that have accrued to the term “reason” over two millennia, homing in on moments of crisis, critique, and defense of reason.

After surveying Western ideas of reason from the ancient Greeks through Kant, Hegel, and Marx, Jay engages at length with the ways leading theorists of the Frankfurt School—Horkheimer, Marcuse, Adorno, and most extensively Habermas—sought to salvage a viable concept of reason after its apparent eclipse. They despaired, in particular, over the decay in the modern world of reason into mere instrumental rationality. When reason becomes a technical tool of calculation separated from the values and norms central to daily life, then choices become grounded not in careful thought but in emotion and will—a mode of thinking embraced by fascist movements in the twentieth century.

Is there a more robust idea of reason that can be defended as at once a philosophical concept, a ground of critique, and a norm for human emancipation? Jay explores at length the communicative rationality advocated by Habermas and considers the range of arguments, both pro and con, that have greeted his work.

"few scholars would be capable of such a momentous effort. In a book of enormous erudition, rare theoretical acuity, and finely tuned critical intelligence, Jay has brilliantly accomplished a necessary and urgent revision of the history of reason, Habermas’s distinctive contribution to this history, and the Frankfurt School’s legacy in the wake of reason’s eclipse."

—Robert Doran, Journal of the Philosophy of History, 14(1) (2018): 93-103.

Nicolas Berg, The Holocaust and the West German Historians: Historical Interpretation and Autobiographical Memory (2014)

Translated by Joel Golb

In The Holocaust and the West German Historians, which was first published in Germany, provoked both acclaim and controversy. In this “history of historiography,” Nicolas Berg addresses the work of German and German-Jewish historians in the first three decades of post-World War II Germany. He examines how they perceived—and failed to perceive—the Holocaust and how they interpreted and misinterpreted that historical fact using an arsenal of terms and concepts, arguments and explanations.

"This thought-provoking book, based on extremely extensive research in published and archival sources, offers readers a view of the German historical profession’s perspective on the systematic persecution of Jews both inside and outside Germany… The book is not easy reading, but it engages a major issue in a manner that is fair even when its judgments are harsh."

—Gerhard L. Weinberg, The Journal of Interdisciplinary History, 46(3) (2016): 448-49.

Michael Marrus, Some Measure of Justice: The Holocaust Era Restitution Campaign of the 1990s (October 2009)

Foreword by William A. Schabas

Can there ever be justice for the Holocaust? During the 1990s—triggered by lawsuits in the United States against Swiss banks, German corporations, insurance companies, and owners of valuable works of art—claimants and their lawyers sought to rectify terrible wrongs committed more than a half century earlier. Some Measure of Justice explores this most recent wave of justice-seeking for the Holocaust: what it has been, why it emerged when it did, how it fits with earlier reparation to the Jewish people, its significance for the historical representation of the Holocaust, and its implications for justice-seeking in our time.

Writings on the subject of Holocaust reparations have largely come from participants, lawyers, philosophers, journalists, and social scientists specializing in restitution. In Some Measure of Justice Michael Marrus takes up the issue as a historian deeply involved with legal issues. He engages with larger questions about historical understanding and historical interpretation as they enter the legal arena. Ultimately this book asks, What constitutes justice for a great historic wrong? And, Is such justice possible?

"Marrus has provided a concise, thought-provoking, and readable book on the issues surrounding restitution for Holocaust-era suffering…The true strengths of the book are those cases that demonstrate the amount of political and legal maneuvering involved in the campaign, and its meaning for those involved. This book is a strong contribution to literature on reparations. More important is Marrus's analysis of the relationship between history and law, and the meaning of justice for those who survived Nazi persecution."

—Monika Flaschka, H-German (2011).

Jan Assmann, Of God and Gods: Egypt, Israel, and the Rise of Monotheism (2008)

For thousands of years, our world has been shaped by biblical monotheism. But its hallmark—a distinction between one true God and many false gods—was once a new and radical idea. Of God and Gods explores the revolutionary newness of biblical theology against a background of the polytheism that was once so commonplace.

Jan Assmann, one of the most distinguished scholars of ancient Egypt working today, traces the concept of a true religion back to its earliest beginnings in Egypt and describes how this new idea took shape in the context of the older polytheistic world that it rejected. He offers readers a deepened understanding of Egyptian polytheism and elaborates on his concept of the “Mosaic distinction,” which conceives an exclusive and emphatic Truth that sets religion apart from beliefs shunned as superstition, paganism, or heresy.

Without a theory of polytheism, Assmann contends, any adequate understanding of monotheism is impossible. This work will be of great interest to anyone seeking to understand the relationship between God and gods.

"This book is, in many ways, a wonderful survey of concepts and considerations about ancient religions. In it, various forms of theism, especially in ancient Egypt, come to life. Assmann’s brilliance in Egyptology shines in several chapters."

—Mark S. Smith, "Theism and Violence in the Ancient World: The Argument of Jan Assmann," Sefared (2009) 69(1): 229-235.

Alessio Ponzio, Shaping the New Man: Youth Training Regimes in Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany (2016)

Despite their undeniable importance, the leaders of the Fascist and Nazi youth organizations have received little attention from historians. In Shaping the New Man, Alessio Ponzio uncovers the largely untold story of the training and education of these crucial protagonists of the Fascist and Nazi regimes, and he examines more broadly the structures, ideologies, rhetoric, and aspirations of youth organizations in Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany.

Ponzio shows how the Italian Fascists’ pedagogical practices influenced the origin and evolution of the Hitler Youth. He dissects similarities and differences in the training processes of the youth leaders of the Opera Nazionale Balilla, Gioventù Italiana del Littorio, and Hitlerjugend. And, he explores the transnational institutional interactions and mutual cooperation that flourished between Mussolini’s and Hitler’s youth organizations in the 1930s and 1940s.

"Shaping the New Man offers a rich treatment of Fascist and Nazi youth training and institutions, grounded in meticulous archival research. Ponzio also assumes no prior knowledge of either regime’s history, making this an excellent choice for both undergraduate and graduate reading lists."

—Joan L. Clinefelter, The Journal of the History of Childhood and Youth, 10(1) (2017): 137-38.