Want to create an interactive transcript for this episode?
Podcast: New Books in German Studies
Episode: Alan E. Steinweis, “Kristallnacht 1938” (Harvard UP, 2009)
Description: One of the most fundamental–and vexing–questions in all of modern history is whether cultures make governments or governments make cultures. Tocqueville, who was right about almost everything, thought the former: he said that American culture made American government democratic. Neocon theorists, who have been wrong about most things, believe the opposite: that democratic governments can make cultures democratic. Under this theory, we should be able to impose liberal democracy on, say, Iraq or Afghanistan, and thereby make their cultures liberal democratic.
The culture-government question is also central to modern German historiography. It usually takes this form...