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Podcast: New Books in German Studies
Episode: Timothy Snyder, “Black Earth: The Holocaust as History and Warning” (Tim Duggan Books, 2015)
Description: It’s rare when an academic historian breaks through and becomes a central part of the contemporary cultural conversation.
Timothy Snyder does just this with his book Black Earth: The Holocaust as History and Warning (Tim Duggan Books, 2015). He does so by boldly arguing that we don’t really understand what happened during the Holocaust. He argues in favor of an emphasis on ideology with Adolf Hitler at the center. But he also stresses the importance of the experience of occupation and the role of state structures, incentives and punishments. It was, he suggests, the persistence or disa...