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On 10 May 1570, at the chateau of Dieppe in Normandy, a cloth-merchant was interrogated about the contents of a basket he was carrying, including thirty notes and letters ‘concealed in a bed of straw under cheeses’. This chance interception piqued my curiosity about the wider context of this episode, from where and to where, […]
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General audiences are accustomed to imagining medieval culinary practices through those of the elites — in shows, films, and novels, where little attention is given to the habits of common people. Perhaps as a contrast to the material wealth of aristocrats, society tends to picture ordinary individuals from the Middle Ages as dirty and uncivilised, […]
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‘The powerful ruler is today unable to steer the press in his directions simply through his will. Words of command echo as empty calls in the empire of typesetting and rotation machines,’ observed the Fränkischer Kurier on 14 July 1906. When media celebrities-turned-politicians Donald Trump and Volodymyr Zelensky bring us live reality TV from the […]
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On our book’s cover stands a small church. Coloured in a blue that suggests the haze of a summer’s day, it is set against a yellow landscape dotted with vines. We chose this image partly for its aesthetic appeal, and partly because it was painted in the 1950s by Kurt Franke, the grandfather of one […]
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Historians of war often pride themselves on telling ‘forgotten stories’ on the basis of ‘lost voices’ from the past, and rightly so. Those dedicated to the International Brigades would, however, have a hard time getting these buzz words into the subtitles of their own books, even though they have – for as long as they […]
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‘What about looting? Was there looting during the First World War?’ – I smile at the question from the young man who eagerly awaits confirmation of his supposition. There’s some habit in my answer because after a quickly interjected ‘how interesting!’, this is the standard question I get whenever I mention that I wrote a […]
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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 MoreWhite-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 […]
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