Reviews

Review of Philanthropy, Civil Society, and the State in German History, 1815-1989, by Thomas Adam (Rochester, NY: Camden House, 2016), in the Modern Language Review 112 (3), July 2017, pp. 738-40.

The aim of this survey of philanthropy and its entangled relationship with the State in Germany is twofold. Firstly, Adam emphasises the indispensability of private donations and endowments to the maintenance of social and civic institutions in the spheres of education, culture, and poor relief. 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...

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 essay, published in the International Journal of Play 5 (3), 2016 (special issue on Histories of Play, edited by Kate Darian-Smith and Simon Sleight), pp. 343-345.Featuring George Eisen's Children and Play in the Holocaust: Games Among the Shadows (1988); Nicholas Stargardt's Witnesses of War: Children’s Lives under the Nazis (2006); Heidi Rosenbaum's “Und trotzdem war’s ’ne schöne Zeit”: Kinderalltag im Nationalsozialismus (2014), and Bastian Fleermann and Benedikt Mauer (eds) Kriegskinder: Kriegskindheiten in Düsseldorf 1939–1945 (2015).Read more...

An informal blog review considering the flaws in Jörg Muth's portrayal of the Prussian Cadet Corps in chapter 3 of his monograph Command Culture: Officer Education in the U.S. Army and the German Armed Forces, 1901-1940, and the Consequences for World War II (Denton: University of North Texas Press, 2011).Read more...