History Flakes - The Berlin History Podcast

Last ep of Season 4 Everyone!

Yeah it’s long…she was a big deal!
Part two sees us follow Rosa to Berlin from Zurich, with her doctorate in hand and a fig leaf marriage for a German passport. The partnership with Leo Jogiches has become long distance (rocky) and she’s flourishing out on her own, developing long lasting and important friendships with the likes of Clara Zetkin and Karl Kautsky. Rosa Luxemburg’s dreams for the working class are big and bold and beautiful, recognising the decimation of human dignity that industrialised capitalism and militarism have unleashed. Rosa meets a devastating and violent end in January 1919, but her legacy and writings are vindicated with every fresh global crisis. 

Meanwhile the SPD party of Germany won’t stop growing, and there will be big bureaucratic changes and opportunities for the politically ambitious.
…also an oddly prescient rant about the demise of the Starmer premiership of the UK at the time of recording, early summer 2026, but look sorry not sorry, been carrying this around for a while. 

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🎟️ You can get in touch and book a tour of Berlin with Jonny: www.whitlams-berlin-tours.com.

Or now Pip: https://www.piproper.com/

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You can find Jonny online on YouTube, Instagram, BlueSky, and TikTok!

You can find Pip on Instagram

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Mixed and Produced by Alex Griffiths
https://www.instagram.com/alexgriffiths_music/
https://alexgriffiths.bandcamp.com/

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Sources:

Revolutionary Berlin: A Walking Guide, Nathaniel Flakin

Red Rosa, A Graphic Biography of Rosa Luxemburg, Kate Evans

The Socialist Manifesto, Bhaskar Sunkara

Rosa Luxemburg: Letters to Karl and Luise Kautsky from 1896 to 1918, Luise Kautsky, Translated: Louis P. Lochner: Marxist Internet Archive

Comrade and Lover: Rosa Luxemberg's Letters to Leo Jogiches
Elzbieta Ettinger

Love, Money, and Career in the Life of Rosa Luxemburg
Deborah Hertz

In Our Time Podcast: Rosa Luxemburg

Online Resource Rosa Luxemburg Stiftung: https://www.rosalux.de/en/

That’s right! Part 1! And you’d better enjoy this one, because it’s the most fun we’re gonna have on this topic! Imagine, you’re a young woman, charming, witty, a political genius with an unbridled passion for life and your fellow human beings. You make it to Switzerland, one of the only places women can study and meet the love/biggest political influence /worst pain in the arse of your life. He’s rich and good looking. Coalescing here are countless political refugees from multiple different countries, struggling to throw off the yolk of autocratic oppression, and you can switch between multiple different languages to engage with them. Something unstoppable seems to be swelling throughout Europe, an irrefutable appetite for massive change. And you have the intellectual acumen, unstoppable energy and resounding humanity that this cause will need to propel it into the twentieth century. God…can’t we just stay here?

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🎟️ You can get in touch and book a tour of Berlin with Jonny: www.whitlams-berlin-tours.com.

Or now Pip: https://www.piproper.com/

Don't forget to subscribe for more Berlin history every two weeks!

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You can find Jonny online on YouTube, Instagram, BlueSky, and TikTok!

You can find Pip on Instagram

++++++

Mixed and Produced by Alex Griffiths
https://www.instagram.com/alexgriffiths_music/
https://alexgriffiths.bandcamp.com/

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Sources:

Revolutionary Berlin: A Walking Guide, Nathaniel Flakin

Red Rosa, A Graphic Biography of Rosa Luxemburg, Kate Evans

The Socialist Manifesto, Bhaskar Sunkara

Rosa Luxemburg: Letters to Karl and Luise Kautsky from 1896 to 1918, Luise Kautsky, Translated: Louis P. Lochner: Marxist Internet Archive

Comrade and Lover: Rosa Luxemberg's Letters to Leo Jogiches
Elzbieta Ettinger

Love, Money, and Career in the Life of Rosa Luxemburg
Deborah Hertz

In Our Time Podcast: Rosa Luxemburg

Online Resource Rosa Luxemburg Stiftung: https://www.rosalux.de/en/

Jumping off from Jonny’s brilliant discussion with historian Samuel Clowes Huneke about his book I Will Not Abandon You: Queer Women in Nazi Germany (2026), we talk about some of the stand out stories from this time and the strangely invisible, sometimes very dangerous status queer women occupied under the Third Reich.

Jonny and Sam chat on youtube watch here!

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🎟️ You can get in touch and book a tour of Berlin with Jonny: www.whitlams-berlin-tours.com.

Or now Pip: https://www.piproper.com/

Don't forget to subscribe for more Berlin history every two weeks!

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You can find Jonny online on YouTube, Instagram, BlueSky, and TikTok!

You can find Pip on Instagram

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Mixed and Produced by Alex Griffiths
https://www.instagram.com/alexgriffiths_music/
https://alexgriffiths.bandcamp.com/

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Sources: 

Samuel Clowes Huneke, I Will Not Abandon You: Queer Women in Nazi Germany (2026)

Legendary pioneering film director, original bad boy auteur, visionary…bit of a dick. Fritz Lang’s personal life was almost as dramatic as his films. He’s in Paris for the febrile pre-war days of 1914, showing real acts of bravery on the Galician front. Driving to work at the UFA studios on the days of the Spartacist Uprisings and conveniently dodging Goebbels in 1933.

Not the most reliable narrator, particularly when it comes to his first wife and his departure from Berlin in 1933, but if there were ever a man of his time, it’s Fritz Lang. His work would span the turbulent era from silent to sound, and later from Europe to the US. Obsessive and dictatorial on set, he directed some of the most recognisable films of the Weimar era, Metropolis and M.

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🎟️ You can get in touch and book a tour of Berlin with Jonny: www.whitlams-berlin-tours.com.

Or now Pip: https://www.piproper.com/

Don't forget to subscribe for more Berlin history every two weeks!

++++++

You can find Jonny online on YouTube, Instagram, BlueSky, and TikTok!

You can find Pip on Instagram

++++++

Mixed and Produced by Alex Griffiths
https://www.instagram.com/alexgriffiths_music/
https://alexgriffiths.bandcamp.com/

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Sources:

Podcasts: In our time: Fritz Lang

You Must Remember This, Karina Longworth

Books: Fritz Lang The Nature of the Beast by Patrick Mcgilligan
Fritz Lang and Goebbels: Myth and Facts by Gösta Werner

Documentary: From Caligari to Hitler

Matti Geyer is here!!
And we’re talking about The biggest boy band 20th-century Germany had to offer!

The Comedian Harmonists, move over 5ive, get out of the way N’sync.
Who could forget ‘Mein Kleine Grune Kaktus’ (my small green cactus) 
‘Veronica der Lent ist da’…a song about Lent. The sexiest time of year 

Who’s the cute one? Which one loves his mamma? Most importantly who’s the bad boy?! (It’s…the Bass!).  All against the backdrop of the Third Reich and World War Two, wowzer!

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🎟️ You can get in touch and book a tour of Berlin with Jonny: www.whitlams-berlin-tours.com.

Or now Pip: https://www.piproper.com/

Don't forget to subscribe for more Berlin history every two weeks!

++++++

You can find Jonny online on YouTube, Instagram, BlueSky, and TikTok!

You can find Pip on Instagram

++++++

Mixed and Produced by Alex Griffiths
https://www.instagram.com/alexgriffiths_music/
https://alexgriffiths.bandcamp.com/

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Roll up Roll up and welcome to Circus Busch! Sometimes it’s always there, in a permanent building along the Spree, that may or may not be used for significant meetings by various shades of the political spectrum, but this is Germany everybody, the context is gonna be colourful! Sometimes the circus is travelling to other places, like Paris in 1940 and everyone there is really happy to see you. Honest.

We talk about the broader context of the history of The Circus in twentieth-century Europe and focus in on some specific families, like the Althoffs, the Blumfelds, and the Grand Dame of Circus Busch herself, Paula. We talk about some of the shadier elements of what it meant to be the person in charge of a huge money making institution, with incredibly diverse people at it’s core, and how some of the fascinating lives of some of those involved contracted and expanded against the backdrop of the twentieth century.

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🎟️ You can get in touch and book a tour of Berlin with Jonny: www.whitlams-berlin-tours.com.

Or now Pip: https://www.piproper.com/

Don't forget to subscribe for more Berlin history every two weeks!

++++++

You can find Jonny online on YouTube, Instagram, BlueSky, and TikTok!

You can find Pip on Instagram

++++++

Mixed and Produced by Alex Griffiths
https://www.instagram.com/alexgriffiths_music/
https://alexgriffiths.bandcamp.com/

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Sources:

Online resources: http://www.divergingfates.eu/index.php/2017/02/22/historical-context/

https://www.vam.ac.uk/articles/the-story-of-circus#slideshow=58613815&slide=0

Berlin Circus Festival Interview with Gisela and Dietmar Winkler: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jsFyQcsXrng

Articles:

Dean Carnegie: slow Travel Berlin, Houdini and the Circus Busch

Sabine Hanke, Worlds of the ring: Nation and empire in the British and German circus

Moving the German army into the Soviet Union could probably be described as one of the more difficult tasks of the 20th Century, or ever really. You may need to get up as early as 6am, no seriously I think at least 8am… not even 10am?! Jonny shares with us some of what he learned heading out to the Wolf’s Lair. Hitler’s WWII bunker complex and residence where he is definitely doing all the things a great leader does. Reading newspapers and getting pissed off, training the dog to do tricks. Calling Eva Braun to tell her how shit everyone else is. 

We talk about this massive complex and what it was supposed to symbolise to the German people and to Hitler himself as it became clear the very angry dog had caught it’s own tail and now has very little idea what to do with it.

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🎟️ You can get in touch and book a tour of Berlin with Jonny: www.whitlams-berlin-tours.com.

Or now Pip: https://www.piproper.com/

Don't forget to subscribe for more Berlin history every two weeks!

++++++

You can find Jonny online on YouTube, Instagram, BlueSky, and TikTok!

You can find Pip on Instagram

++++++

Mixed and Produced by Alex Griffiths
https://www.instagram.com/alexgriffiths_music/
https://alexgriffiths.bandcamp.com/

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Source:
Vor dem Untergang: Hitlers Jahre in der 'Wolfsschanze', Felix Bohr

In this special episode we talk with Jack El-Hai, journalist and author of The Nazi and the Psychiatrist, recently adapted into feature film Nuremberg with Russell Crowe and Rami Malek.

We talk about the importance of the trial to the allies in the aftermath of the second world war, and who was Dr. Douglas Kelley the cheif psychiatrist assigned to the first months of the Nuremburg trials.

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 💸 Donations keep us running.

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🎟️ You can get in touch and book a tour of Berlin with Jonny: www.whitlams-berlin-tours.com.

Or now Pip: https://www.piproper.com/

Don't forget to subscribe for more Berlin history every two weeks!

++++++

You can find Jonny online on YouTube, Instagram, BlueSky, and TikTok!

You can find Pip on Instagram

++++++

Mixed and Produced by Alex Griffiths
https://www.instagram.com/alexgriffiths_music/
https://alexgriffiths.bandcamp.com/

Why do bad things happen to hot people?!

Welcome all, we are talking about the one and only Queen Luise of Prussia, wife, mother, babe. Although she's often difficult to find under the centuries of cultural and national baggage loaded on top of her, we do our best to unpack her life from minor aristocracy to Queen of small-ish kingdom that happens to be between a power crazed Frenchman and Moscow...and then you've got to sit through dinner with him?! You should smile more love.

Watch out for the C-bomb half way through if you're in the car with the kids...but they should know that Napoleon really was a massive CURMUDGEONLY warmonger and misogynist.

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 💸 Donations keep us running.

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🎟️ You can get in touch and book a tour of Berlin with Jonny: www.whitlams-berlin-tours.com.

Or now Pip: https://www.piproper.com/

Don't forget to subscribe for more Berlin history every two weeks!

++++++

You can find Jonny online on YouTube, Instagram, BlueSky, and TikTok!

You can find Pip on Instagram

++++++

Mixed and Produced by Alex Griffiths
https://www.instagram.com/alexgriffiths_music/
https://alexgriffiths.bandcamp.com/
 
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📚 Sources:

Samantha Sproviero: Queen Louise of Prussia: Gender, Power, and Queenship during the Sattelzeit Era.

Constance Wright, Beautiful enemy; a biography of Queen Louise of Prussia

Heinrich Merz, Louise, Queen of Prussia

Review of Collected letters: Loretana de Libero, "Königin Luise von Preußen. Briefe und Aufzeichnungen 1786–1810

ROYAL HOUSEWIVES AND FEMALE TYRANTS: Gender and Sovereignty in Works by Benedikte Naubert and Luise Mühlbach Elisabeth Krimmer

Welcome Back everybody!

We kick off season 4 with a look at doping in the GDR. How can we prove we’re the most awesome non-democratic socialist state of all time?! MEDALS of course. But which sports and athletes will yield the biggest margin of growth that can be state administered and controlled? Who knows what when? And how many acronyms can one episode contain? 

We’ve left Seson 3’s focus on the WAR, but…this is actually still pretty sad. Join us to talk about the GDR’s obsession with winning medals on an international stage and some of the shocking sad effects it would have on it’s athletes (mostly female).

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 💸 Donations keep us running.

Click below to support the show 

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🙂 Donate €5

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🎟️ You can get in touch and book a tour of Berlin with Jonny: www.whitlams-berlin-tours.com.

Or now Pip: https://www.piproper.com/

Don't forget to subscribe for more Berlin history every two weeks!

++++++

You can find Jonny online on YouTube, Instagram, BlueSky, and TikTok!

You can find Pip on Instagram

++++++

Mixed and Produced by Alex Griffiths
https://www.instagram.com/alexgriffiths_music/
https://alexgriffiths.bandcamp.com/
 
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📚 Source: Sport under Communism Behind the East German ‘Miracle’ by Mike Dennis and Jonathan Grix