Reviews
Review of 'The "New Man" in Radical Right Ideology and Practice, 1919-1945'Review of The “New Man” in Radical Right Ideology and Practice, 1919-1945, ed. Jorge Dagnino, Matthew Feldman, and Paul Stocker (London: Bloomsbury, 2018), published in Reviews in History, review no. 2386, April 2020.
During the interwar period, the figure of the ‘New Man’ constituted a powerful symbol of the promise and potential of a thorough-going political and anthropological revitalisation of society, which could effectively counteract widely-perceived notions of crisis and decline in the aftermath of the Great War.Read more...
Review of 'The Oxford Illustrated History of the Third Reich'Review of The Oxford Illustrated History of the Third Reich, ed. Robert Gelatelly (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017), published in History: The Journal of the Historical Association 104, Issue 362, October 2019, 783-5.
With the editorship of a new illustrated history of the Third Reich aimed at a popular readership comes both great responsibility and great opportunity – a challenge to which Robert Gellately, one of those historians who has done most to shape the historiography of Nazi Germany recently, has risen with aplomb.Read more...
Review of Martin Gutmann, 'Building a Nazi Europe'Review of Building a Nazi Europe: The SS's Germanic Volunteers by Martin Gutmann (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017), in History: The Journal of the Historical Association 106, Issue 369, December 2020, pp. 143-5.
Martin R. Gutmann’s monograph lucidly demonstrates that nationality need be no bar to conniving in atrocity, or the will to participate in Nazism’s violent and genocidal vision for a new Europe.Read more...
Review of 'Making Prussians, Raising Germans' by Jasper HeinzenReview of State-Building after Civil War, 1866-1935, by Jasper Heinzen (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017), in German History 35 (3), September 2018, pp. 454-6.
Jasper Heinzen’s first monograph aims to reframe historical interpretations of ‘1866 and all that’, focusing on the ramifications of civil war within Germany, rather than privileging external conflicts with Italy and Austria. What consequences did enduring tensions between Prussian imperial and provincial particularist ambitions have for Germany's eventual stability?Read more...
Classics and National SocialismReview of Klio und die Nationalsozialisten: Gesammelte Schriften zur Wissenschafts und Rezeptionsgeschichte (Wiesbaden: Harassowitz, 2017), published in The Classical Review 69 (2), October 2019, pp. 666-7.
Volker Losemann’s work has rightly been hailed as pioneering in its efforts to bring to light the ideological distortions and academic opportunism to which Classical and ancient historical scholarship were subjected during the Third Reich. Read more...
Review of 'German Philhellenism' by Damian ValdezReview of Damian Valdez, German Philhellenism: The Pathos of the Historical Imagination from Winckelmann to Goethe (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), in Journal for Eighteenth-Century Studies 40 (1), March 2017, pp. 138-9.
Damian Valdez’s monograph provides a keen dissection of the clashing currents of idealism and historicism which shaped German thought on ancient Greece during the eighteenth century, placing idealism – and particularly idealists such as Goethe, Herder, Schlegel and Winckelmann – squarely within their respective contexts.Read more...
Greek Tragedy in GermanyReview of Erika Fischer-Lichte's Tragedy's Endurance: Performances of Greek Tragedies and Cultural Identity in Germany since 1800 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017), in The Classical Review 68 (1), April 2018, pp. 274-6.
This monograph provides a salutary reminder of the ways in which every age and nation has tended to remake the ancient Greeks in its own image. Yet it is also a celebration of Greek tragedy’s ability to withstand all the manifold fragmentations and instances of critical or interpretative violence to which it has been subjected over the millennia.Read more...
Review of 'Feeling and Classical Philology' by Constanze GüthenkeReview of Constanze Güthenke, Feeling and Classical Philology: Knowing Antiquity in German Scholarship, 1770-1920 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020), Journal of Hellenic Studies 142, November 2022, pp. 461-2.
What are the implications of ‘the erotics of pedagogy’ in a post-Weinstein world? Constanze Güthenke’s new monograph does not explicitly answer this question – but it does contribute to an ongoing disciplinary debate about the (potentially toxic) discourse of scholarly passion which has long and silently underpinned the ideal of Altertumswissenschaft.Read more...
Review of 'The Greco-German Affair in the Euro Crisis' by Claudia Sternberg et al.Review of Claudia Sternberg (et al.), The Greco-German Affair in the Euro Crisis: Mutual Recognition Lost (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018), published on the UCL European Studies Blog, 29 October 2018.
This timely, concise, richly illustrated and highly readable survey by Claudia Sternberg, Kira Gartzou-Katsouyanni, and Kalypso Nicolaïdis provides a nuanced approach to the recent vicissitudes of the Greco-German relationship.Read more...
Review of 'Die Altertumswissenschaften an der Universität Frankfurt 1914-1950'Review of Roland Färber and Fabian Link (eds), Die Altertumswissenschaften an der Universität Frankfurt 1914-1950, (Basel: Schwabe Verlag, 2019), Germania: Anzeiger der Römisch-Germanischen Kommission des Deutschen Archäologischen Instituts 100, 2022, pp. 455-6.
Roland Färber and Fabian Link’s edited collection of essays on the history of classical studies and Altertumswissenschaft at the University of Frankfurt during the first half of the 20th century is a highly unusual volume.