The pig played a fundamental role in the German Democratic Republic's attempts to create and sustain a modern, industrial food system built on communist principles. By the mid-1980s, East Germany produced more pork per capita than West Germany and the UK, while also suffering myriad unintended consequences of this centrally planned practice: manure pollution, animal disease, and rolling food shortages.

In Communist Pigs: An Animal History of East Germany's Rise and Fall (University of Washington Press, 2020), historian Thomas Fleischman uncovers three types of pig that played roles in this history: the industrial pig, remade to suit the conditions of factory farming; the wild boar, whose overpopulation was a side effect of agricultural development rather than a conservation success story; and the garden pig, reflective of the regime's growing acceptance of private, small-scale farming within the planned economy.

Fleischman chronicles East Germany's journey from family farms to factory farms, explaining how communist principles shaped the adoption of industrial agriculture practices. More broadly, Fleischman argues that agriculture under communism came to reflect standard practices of capitalist agriculture, and that the pork industry provides a clear illustration of this convergence. His analysis sheds light on the causes of the country's environmental and political collapse in 1989 and offers a warning about the high cost of cheap food in the present and future.

Thomas Fleischman is an assistant professor of history at the University of Rochester.

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Entrenched in the myth of being victim of the Nazi aggression, Austrian elites pursued a politics of memory that symbolically shook off any responsibility for the emergence, development and consequences of National Socialism. Authors of the vast majority of films produced early after 1945 were not interested in dealing with the recent Nazi past of their country. There were, however, exceptions. Through detailed analysis of the narratives, stylistic patterns and reception of films that were set during or immediately after World War II, Remembering National Socialism in Austrian Post-war Film" (1945-1955) (Brill, 2025) explains how cinema corroborated Austrian national self-stereotypes, at the same time offering a critique of the Nazi regime.

Guest: Jakub Gortat (he/him) is an Assistant Professor in the Department of German Studies at the University of Lodz.

Host: Jenna Pittman (she/her), a Ph.D. student in the Department of History at Duke University. She studies modern European history, political economy, and Germany from 1945-1990.

Scholars@Duke: here

Linktree: here

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Kenneth G. Appold joins Jana Byars to talk about his new book, Luther and the Peasants: Religion, Ritual, and the Revolt of 1525 (Oxford UP, 2025).  The German Peasants' Revolts of 1525 were a defining moment both for the Protestant Reformation and the history of European culture. But while the conflicts are well-studied, they are typically analyzed today from political and socioeconomic perspectives, whereas the protagonists themselves framed them in religious and theological terms. Luther and the Peasants takes these perspectives seriously to offer a novel and timely reinterpretation of the uprisings. A detailed examination of peasants' religious lives reveals commitments to peace, social harmony, and the environment that came into conflict with spiritual priorities of the Protestant Reformation, notably with those of Martin Luther. Drawing on the peasants' own documents, such as the famous manifesto The Twelve Articles, the book provides a thorough re-examination their actions, including their negotiations with lords and their organization into bands and Christian brotherhoods, and a fresh analysis of their behavior in battle. This ritual reconstruction makes peasants' statements and behaviors historiographically legible for the first time, effectively giving voice to an illiterate rural people, and offers new ways of reading Luther's 1525 writings on peasants, which are among his most challenging works. In this context, the 1525 conflict between Luther and the peasants comes to light as the collision of two different religious worlds, each incomprehensible to the other. This, in turn, reveals the important role played by religion in a defining moment of early modern European history.

Kenneth G. Appold, James Hastings Nichols Professor of Reformation History, Princeton Theological Seminary.

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Winston Churchill famously remarked that the threat of the German U-Boats was the only thing that had “really frightened” him during World War Two. The U-Boats certainly claimed a bitter harvest among Allied shipping: nearly 3,000 ships were sunk, for a total tonnage of over 14 million tonnes, nearly 70% of Allied shipping losses in all theatres of the war. With justification, then, they are an integral part of the traditional narrative of the Battle of the Atlantic; a story of technological brilliance, dramatic sinkings, life and death, and – of course – the sinister, unseen threat of the U-Boats themselves.

For Allied seamen during the war, the U-Boat was a hidden menace, a faceless killer lurking beneath the waves; and the urgent needs of survival afforded them little time or energy to consider the challenges and privations of their enemy. History, however, affords us that time and energy, and any pretence of comprehensiveness demands that we consider what life was like for the crews of those most claustrophobic vessels; packed into a steel hull, at the mercy of the enemy, of the elements – and of basic physics.

Germany’s U-Boat crews posted the highest per-capita losses of any combat arm during World War Two. Some 30,000 German submariners were killed – over 75% of the total number deployed – the vast majority of whom have no grave except the seabed. Using archival sources, unpublished diaries and existing memoir literature, Wolfpack: Inside Hitler’s U-Boat War (Basic Books, 2025) by Roger Moorhouse gives the U-Boatmen back their voice, allowing their side of the narrative to be aired in a comprehensive manner for the first time.

With that testimony, Wolfpack takes the reader from the heady early days of the war, when U-Boat crews were buoyed with optimism about their cause, through to the challenges of meeting the Allied counterthreat, to the final horror of defeat, when their submarines were captured by the enemy or scuttled in ignominy. Using the U-Boatmen’s own voices to punctuate an engaging narrative, it tells their story; of courage, certainly, but also of fear, privation and – ultimately – failure.

This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. You can find Miranda’s interviews on New Books with Miranda Melcher, wherever you get your podcasts

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In his new book, The First Soldier: Hitler as a Military Leader (Yale University Press, 2018), Stephen Fritz professor of history at East Tennessee State University reexamines Hitler as a military commander and strategist. That Hitler saw World War II as the only way to retrieve Germany’s fortunes and build an expansionist Thousand-Year Reich is uncontroversial. But while his generals did sometimes object to Hitler’s tactics and operational direction, they often made the same errors in judgment and were in agreement regarding larger strategic and political goals. A necessary volume for understanding the influence of World War I on Hitler’s thinking, this work is also an eye-opening reappraisal of major events like the invasion of Russia and the battle for Normandy.

Craig Sorvillo is a PhD candidate in modern European history at the University of Florida. He specializes in Nazi Germany, and the Holocaust. He can be reached at [email protected] or on twitter @craig_sorvillo.

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In his new book, Plots Against Hitler (Eamon Dolan/Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2016), Danny Orbach, Senior Lecturer at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem offers a profound and complete examination of the plots to assassinate Nazi dictator Adolf Hitler. A riveting narrative of the organization, conspiracy, and sacrifices made by those who led the resistance against Hitler. Orbach deftly analyzes the mixed motives, moral ambiguities and organizational vulnerability that marked their work, while reminding us forcefully of their essential bravery and rightness. And he challenges us to ask whether we would have summoned the same courage.

Craig Sorvillo is a PhD candidate in modern European history at the University of Florida. He specializes in Nazi Germany, and the Holocaust. He can be reached at [email protected] on twitter @craig_sorvillo.

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Driving Productivity: Automation, Labor, and Industrial Development in the United States and Germany (Brill, 2025) reconstructs the industrial histories of the American and German automotive industries in a new light. From the Fordist assembly line to Japanese lean production and Industry 4.0, Anthony J. Knowles critically examines major technical developments within the historical dynamics of capitalism. Both countries face the pressure to automate, transform labor, and increase efficiency, yet their responses differ due to divergent paradigms of integrating business, labor, and government. Driving Productivity makes the case that improving productivity is a never-ending process that becomes a compulsory social imperative that industries must respond to but are nevertheless responded to differently between countries.

Guest: Anthony Knowles (he/him) is a Teaching Assistant Professor in Sociology and a Postdoctoral Researcher at the Center for Transportation Research at the University of Tennessee.

Host: Jenna Pittman (she/her), a Ph.D. student in the Department of History at Duke University. She studies modern European history, political economy, and Germany from 1945-1990.

Scholars@Duke: here

Linktree: here

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The extensive research literature on race has paid little attention to Armenians.

Between the two world wars, they had to prove that they were free white persons to ensure their naturalization in the United States, while in Nazi Germany they needed to document that they were stakeholders of the Aryan race to safeguard their existence.

Vartan Matiossian's book is the first comprehensive account of a mostly untold story of dehumanization and racism in Europe and America that enhanced the racial and moral profiling of Armenians as undesirables. The Color of Choice: The Armenians and the Politics of Race in the United States and Germany (1890-1945) (Brill, 2025) frames this development within the context of the debates on whiteness and immigration in the United States culminating in the Immigration Act of 1924 and the xenophobic discourse in Germany before and during Nazism likening Armenians to Jews.

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This open access book is about Mozambicans and Angolans who migrated in state-sponsored schemes to East Germany in the late 1970s and throughout the 1980s. They went to work and to be trained as a vanguard labor force for the intended African industrial revolutions. While they were there, they contributed their labor power to the East German economy. This book draws on more than 260 life history interviews and uncovers complex and contradictory experiences and transnational encounters. What emerges is a series of dualities that exist side by side in the memories of the former migrants: the state and the individual, work and consumption, integration and exclusion, loss and gain, and the past in the past and the past in the present and future. By uncovering these dualities, the book explores the lives of African migrants moving between the Third and Second worlds. Devoted to the memories of worker-trainees, this transnational study comes at a time when historians are uncovering the many varied, complicated, and important connections within the global socialist world.

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David Whitford joins Jana Byars to talk about his new book, The Making of a Reformation Man: Martin Luther and the Construction of Masculinity (Routledge, 2025). This volume explores how Martin Luther's life and teachings reshaped and redefined masculinity during the Reformation, offering a more nuanced portrayal of him as a man grappling with the complexities of fatherhood, marriage, and the battlegrounds of religious controversy. This book demonstrates how Luther forged a new ideal of Christian manhood by examining his struggles with monastic vows, his transformation of the household as a spiritual center, and his reshaping of male authority. Integrating insights from cultural historians, gender studies, and feminist scholarship, Whitford analyzes the intersections of gender, power, and religion during a time of profound social upheaval and change. Through Luther's personal transformation, this book reveals how early Protestant ideals of masculinity were intricately tied to broader religious, political, and cultural changes that reshaped Europe. By placing Luther within the wider context of religious and social transformation, this work offers a fresh perspective on his impact and the changing notions of masculinity in the early modern period. The Making of a Reformation Man is a valuable resource for scholars and students of the Reformations and gender theory, as well as readers interested in the broader implications of religious thought on societal roles and identity.

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