Reviews

Review of Johanna Hanink's The Classical Debt: Greek Antiquity in an Era of Austerity (Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2017), in Reviews in History.

At the height of the Greek financial crisis, reports from colleagues based in Athens painted a sorry picture of citizens who had fallen upon hard times desperately rummaging in dustbins to supplement their dwindling larders. The statistics told an even grimmer story – between 2010 and 2011, suicide rates in Greece rose by 40 per cent.Read more...

Review of Wilhelm Müller und der Philhellenismus, edited by Marco Hillemann and Tobias Roth (Berlin: Frank & Timme, 2015), in German Quarterly 90 (4), Fall 2017, pp. 496-7.

At first glance, the graffito-bedizened photograph of an Athenian street which graces this volume’s cover appears bafflingly irrelevant – only once we peer more closely does the Greek street-sign in one corner (‘HODOS MULLEROU’ or ‘Müller Street’) become apparent, giving the reader some clue as to the essay collection’s scope and intentions.Read more...

Review 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 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...

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 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 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 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 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 The Image of the Soldier in German Culture, 1871-1933 by Paul Fox (London: Bloomsbury, 2018, published in Central European History 53 (3), September 2020, pp. 664-5.

Paul Fox’s recent study, which takes a longue-durée approach to popular representations of Prusso-German militarism, tracing continuities from the mid-nineteenth century to the interwar period, purports to break substantial new ground.Read more...