Reichs & Republics | The German History Podcast

In this episode, Katja and Chris are joined by Sarah Bowden, Professor of German and Medieval Studies at King’s College London, to explore one of the strangest puzzles of medieval Europe: why hundreds of churches and chapels across southern Germany, Austria and the Alps are dedicated to Oswald, a 7th-century king of Northumbria. From Bede’s account of a Christian warrior king and his miraculously incorruptible right arm to the royal marriages that carried his cult into the Holy Roman Empire, they trace how Oswald travelled from northern England to Weingarten Abbey and beyond. Along the way, they uncover how German storytellers transformed him almost beyond recognition, adding a multilingual raven, a bridal quest, mermaids and a chaste marriage enforced by a cold bath. What can one saint’s many reinventions tell us about power, faith and culture in medieval Germany?

Links:

https://oswaldusrex.co.uk/

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In this episode, Katja and Chris explore the life of Baldur von Schirach, leader of the Hitler Youth and one of the more unlikely figures in the Nazi elite. Born into a wealthy, cosmopolitan family with American roots, Schirach enjoyed the privilege and connections to pursue almost any career. Instead, he threw himself into the fledgling Nazi movement long before it had any prospect of power. From his antisemitic schooling in Weimar and starstruck first encounter with Hitler to his mobilisation of ultranationalist university students and his ambition to forge an entire generation of children in Nazism’s image, Katja and Chris explore Schirach’s rise within the Nazi movement. They trace how a sensitive young aristocrat became a convicted war criminal, culminating in his role in the deportation of Vienna’s Jews. They also examine how his grandson, the bestselling author Ferdinand von Schirach, has grappled with this troubling inheritance, and what his response reveals about Germany’s continuing struggle with the memory of Nazism.

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In this week's episode, Katja and Chris are joined by Professor Tim Blanning to discuss Augustus the Strong, Elector of Saxony and King of Poland. Famous for his strength, mistresses and lavish parties, Augustus has been called one of Europe's worst monarchs. They explore how he won and lost the Polish crown, his failures in the Great Northern War, and his triumph as the patron who transformed Dresden. So was he really such a bad king?

Books

The Pursuit of Glory: Europe 1648-1815

https://www.amazon.co.uk/Pursuit-Glory-Europe-1648-1815/dp/014016667X/

Frederick the Great: King of Prussia

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In this episode, Katja and Chris explore the Guillaume Affair, one of the Cold War's most dramatic spy scandals. Günter Guillaume was an East German Stasi officer who spent nearly two decades climbing the ranks of the SPD to become Chancellor Willy Brandt's personal aide. They ask how he got there, what West German intelligence knew, and why his arrest in 1974 brought down one of West Germany's most charismatic chancellors.

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In this episode, Katja and Chris are joined by historian Dr. Jan Markert to look past the myth of Wilhelm I as a passive "soldier on the throne" and uncover the shrewd, hands-on monarch who shaped Germany's path to unification. They trace his Napoleonic-era childhood, his doomed teenage romance, his brutal role in crushing the 1848 revolution, and the real story behind his appointment of Bismarck, one that overturns the popular image of Bismarck as the mastermind and Wilhelm as his pawn. Along the way, they explore his troubled marriage, his fraught relationships with his son and grandson, and why Wilhelm's legacy still deserves a serious reckoning.

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In this episode, Katja and Chris explore the hidden history of German America in the White House. From Friedrich Trump's secretive teenage flight from Kallstadt in 1885 to the presidencies of Dwight Eisenhower, Herbert Hoover, Richard Nixon and Donald Trump, they trace how the largest immigrant group in American history became so thoroughly assimilated that its influence all but disappeared from public view. The episode also uncovers Donald Trump's decades-long insistence that his family was Swedish rather than German, and asks why a community of 44 million Americans produced so few leaders ever remembered as German American.

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In this episode, Katja and Chris examine the origins and implementation of Aktion T4, the Nazi regime’s systematic programme of mass murder targeting disabled people. They trace the intellectual and political foundations of the programme, from nineteenth-century eugenic thought and Weimar-era anxieties about demographic decline to the 1933 Law for the Prevention of Hereditarily Diseased Offspring and, ultimately, the establishment of a coordinated system of mass killing by gas, which anticipated methods later employed during the Holocaust.

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In this episode, Katja and Chris explore the extraordinary life of Elisabeth Förster-Nietzsche, the sister who became the architect of her brother Friedrich's public legacy. From a devout Protestant upbringing in Saxony and a doomed attempt to found a "racially pure" German colony in Paraguay, to her return as a penniless widow who transformed herself into the gatekeeper of Nietzsche's writings, they trace how she edited, curated and sometimes fabricated his work, most notoriously assembling "The Will to Power" from his scattered notes. They examine her growing nostalgia for the old imperial order, her early admiration for Mussolini, and her complicated relationship with Adolf Hitler, who visited her Weimar villa on every trip he made to the town as German chancellor until her death in 1935.

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In this episode, Katja and Chris trace the long and sometimes misunderstood history of Jews in German-speaking Europe, from Roman Cologne to the founding of the German Empire in 1871. They explore how Jewish communities settled along the Rhine under Frankish and medieval rulers, survived cycles of expulsion and violence including the Crusades and the Black Death pogroms, and gradually built livelihoods as traders, doctors, and financiers who were excluded from land ownership and the guild system. Along the way they examine the Reformation's impact on Jewish-Christian relations, the Enlightenment-era friendship between Moses Mendelssohn and Gotthold Lessing, and how the French Revolution and Napoleon's armies spread the idea of Jewish civic equality across the German lands. The episode also looks at the 19th-century process of emancipation, the amicable social relations between Jews and Christians recalled by memoirists of this period, and how the deep, centuries-old entanglement of Jewish and Christian life made the antisemitism of the Nazi era so emotionally devastating for German Jews.

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In this episode, Katja and Chris explore the East German regime's ambitious drive to build socialism one prefabricated apartment at a time. Between 1971 and 1989, the GDR pledged to build millions of new homes, using concrete, steel and propaganda to try to eliminate the post-war housing shortage and forge a "classless" society. Drawing on Katja's own family history growing up in a GDR housing block, they trace the story from the rubble of 1945 and the Bauhaus's prefabrication experiments in Weimar, through Walter Ulbricht's neglect of housing in favour of heavy industry, to Erich Honecker's flagship building programme and the birth of vast new estates like Halle-Neustadt (aka "Ha-Neu""). They ask whether the GDR's caring dictatorship ever really delivered on its promise of a home for every family and what became of these estates after reunification.

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