x

European History

Fifteen Eighty Four

Menu

Number of articles per page:

  • 17 Nov 2023
    Adam Bisno

    Hitler, the Hotel Guest

    In February 1931, two years before he became chancellor, Adolf Hitler checked in to Berlin’s Hotel Kaiserhof and made it his headquarters in the capital. The building soon swarmed with Nazis, who transformed the clientele overnight. Jewish custom evaporated. Business suffered. A year and a half later, with revenues in freefall, the hotel’s parent company […]

    Read More
  • 15 Nov 2023
    Yaniv Feller

    Thinking Empire with Leo Baeck

    White-bearded and dignified, Leo Baeck disembarked an airplane in New York’s La Guardia airport in January 1948. The seventy-four year-old rabbi came to preach in the United States as part of the American Jewish Cavalcade, a religious revival program of the Reform movement. As the former official leader of German Jewry under Nazism and a […]

    Read More
  • 17 Oct 2023
    Tomás Irish

    Rebuilding Intellectual Life After The First World War

    Students and professors being fed with Commonwealth Fund donation in Innsbruck, June 1921. Hoover Institution Archives In late 1920 Vienna, an old café basement, recently used as a storeroom for coal, was transformed; long tables, covered in white linen and decorated with flowers, were set up, and 170 people dined there daily. This was the scene […]

    Read More
  • 6 Jul 2023
    Leonard V. Smith

    The Grey Zones of Empire

    A generic narrative of decolonization has informed how we think about the history of empire. According to this narrative, a colonized people gradually becomes conscious of its predicament. Through this consciousness, it empowers itself eventually to throw off the colonizer. The imperial domain thus “decolonizes.” The central argument of French Colonialism from the Ancien Régime […]

    Read More
  • 31 May 2023
    Claire Andrieu

    When War Knocks on the Door: What Do Civilians Do?

    WW2 Comparative History from BelowWritten by Claire Andrieu Unlike the objects of its title, the subject of this book did not fall from the sky. I did not set out to write a comparative history of the reception of downed airmen in Britain, France and Germany during World War II. The story of When Men […]

    Read More
  • 16 May 2023
    Peter Thompson

    Atmos(fears): The Gas Mask in Interwar Germany

    Image Description: The front page of a 1937 edition of Die Sirene, the monthly magazine for the Nazi Reichsluftschutzbund (or Reich Air Protection League). The man on the front sports the Volksgasmaske, or “People’s Gas Mask.” While most technical experts knew that the mass-produced mask offered little protection against chemical weapons, the captions boast of its technical specifications and claim that: “Every German can feel safe under the gas mask!”

    Read More
  • 16 May 2023
    Péter Bokody

    Politics of Sexual Violence?

    The HBO series Game of Thrones is perhaps the most recent expression of the general view that the Middle Ages were rape-prone. Humiliation and exploitation of female (and male) characters repeatedly come together with direct sexual violence, which is only partially reframed through a series of revenge-sequences in the last season. The cinematic quality of […]

    Read More
  • 18 Apr 2023
    Mikkel Dack

    Purging Nazism from German Society

    For thousands of years, wars have generally ended in the same way: a military invasion is followed by a decisive victory or negotiated ceasefire. Treaties are signed, territories seized, and reparations procured — the invading army leaves. To avoid the same failures of the Treaty of Versailles (1919), the victorious Allied armies took additional measures […]

    Read More

Number of articles per page:

Authors in European History