Research
Research groups
Research interests
- Art music in twentieth century Germany
- Cultural histories in modern German history
- The Third Reich and Nazism
- Minorities in German history
Current research
His current research focuses on the consumption of art music in twentieth century Germany. It is driven by a desire to combine more traditional social history methods with newer approaches - such as histories of the body, the emotions and the senses. At the same time, he is interested to write cultural histories of phenomena that cut across the conventional period divides of modern German history, divides which seem increasingly to constrain, rather than foster, our understandings of many longer term processes. In pursuit of these interests, he has recently collaborated with musicologist Thomas Irvine in the production of a collection of essays entitled Dreams of Germany: Musical Imaginaries from the Concert Hall to the Dance Floor (Berghahn, 2018). He is currently in the latter stages of writing up a large-scale monograph on the symphony concert in Nazi Germany.
Research interests
His first book, Daimler-Benz in the Third Reich (Yale University Press, 1998), examined the ways in which a major German corporation adapted to the demands of the Third Reich and became complicit in its racial crimes as a result; it was shortlisted for the Longman/History Today Book Prize and shared the Fraenkel Prize for Contemporary History in 1997. His second major monograph, Haunted City: Nuremberg and the Nazi Past (Yale University Press, 2008) marked an attempt to explore the unstable dynamics of post-1945 memory cultures against the background of the social history of the post-war years; it also shared the Fraenkel Prize for Contemporary History for that year.
Whilst working on the post-war years he has maintained an active interest in the study of the Third Reich, editing a collection on the historiography of Nazism, publishing a short study of Hitler's writings, and, editing a Festschrift for Jeremy Noakes; he has co-edited, with my colleagues Mark Roseman (Indiana) and Nils Roemer (Texas) a volume of essays on the comparative study of minorities in German history.