We're joined this week by my good friend and fellow University of Minnesota alum Dr. Adam Blackler to talk about Wes Anderson's The Grand Budapest Hotel. Folks, I'd never seen this film before watching it for the pod so listening to Adam dissect it is a thing of beauty. But stay on, because he'll talk about his work in German colonial Africa as well as German cinema and how it informs the present. It's good stuff.

About Adam: Adam A. Blackler is an assistant professor of history at the University of Wyoming. He is a historian of modern Germany and southern Africa, whose research emphasizes the transnational dimensions of imperial occupation and settler-colonial violence in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. His scholarly and teaching interests also include the political and social dynamics of Germany’s Weimar Republic and the interdisciplinary fields of holocaust & genocide Studies and international human rights. Dr. Blackler’s  book, entitled An Imperial Homeland: Forging German Identity in Southwest Africa, is in the Pennsylvania State University Press’s series “Germans Beyond Europe” sponsored by the Max Kade Research Institute. His most recent publications include a co-edited anthology, entitled After the Imperialist Imagination: Two Decades of Research on Global Germany and Its Legacies, and a chapter in the multi-volume collection, A Cultural History of Genocide. Dr. Blackler is presently researching a book project that explores the vibrant topography of Berlin’s parks, market squares, streets, and municipal districts before and during the Weimar Republic.