The Age of Revolution Hobsbawm, Eric (2024)

Wahrscheinlich war es die Zeit, in der die wichtigsten, nachhaltigsten und dramatischsten Fortschritte in der Medizin gemacht wurden. Die 8 Jahrzehnte von 1840 bis zum Beginn des Ersten Weltkriegs werden gerne als das "Goldene Zeitalter der Medizin" bezeichnet. In diesen Jahren veränderte sich sowohl das Selbstbild als auch der wissenschaftliche Blick auf den Menschen. Die technologische Entwicklung ging in dramatischen Schritten voran, aber auch in der Medizin gab es wegweisende Forschungen, Entdeckungen und Heilerfolge.

Ronald Gerste beschreibt diese umwälzenden Entwicklungen auf allen gesellschaftlichen Ebenen packend, spannend und fundiert.

Pageturner.

Towards the end of my undergraduate degree, I became entirely fascinated by the ways that the children of Nazi perpetrators reacted to their parents' crimes. So it was with something between excitement and jealousy that I later learned that Philippe Sands was making an (excellent) film about exactly the same topic. As part of that film, he got to know Horst von Wächter, the son of Otto von Wächter, Nazi Governor in Galicia during the war. This stunning book (there is also a podcast) not only tells the story of the elder von Wächter's escape from justice at the end of the War - a story which twists and turns like a John le Carre novel (Mr le Carre does in fact feature!) - but also the story of his son's deeply problematic views on his own father. The younger Wächter, despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary, refuses to accept his father was a major criminal and Sands's great achievement here is to explore that alongside the gripping tale of the so-called Nazi ratlines.

In Joseph Conrad's short story "Heart of Darkness" the madmen Kurtz utters a sentence which has become infamous: "Exterminate all the Brutes". This story as well as the infamous sentence are indispensable to Sven Lindqvist's attempt to intertwine historical and biographical fact and fiction. It is also the outset for the author's journey through the history of Europe's expansion at the heart of which lies capitalistic greed and violent contempt for otherness. While the journey's result is a harrowing account of the depraved methods of imperial Europe's colonialism, it is also a detailed examination of the brutal submission and extermination of people who were regarded as inferior. The book itself is a mixture of memoir, travel diary and history book and is narrated by a man whose powerful quest for truth and justice rings through every page.

It's not always easy to praise Nobel Prize juries but in bringing Svetlana Alexievich to global attention, they have (by contrast to giving a gong to a guy with a guitar) done great service to global literature. This is her first book and not only one of the best books on World War Two I have read but also a superb advertisement for oral history as a historical and literary form. Even today, it feels fresh and somewhat revolutionary for giving a voice to the huge range of women who fought in the Red Army nearly 40 years after its first publication. What makes the narrative so compelling that it shows which Soviet narratives were widely adopted by ordinary soldiers but also clearly demonstrates this was not a perfect process. And while the horror of war is its central theme, it also shows how fighting could for some (but again not all) female Soviet soldier be emancipatory. A stunning book which is set the stone for her subsequent entirely Nobel-worthy corpus of work.

We might all once have felt that the moment of saturation for books about the Third Reich might be approaching when British writers start writing fairy in depth histories of not very significant Bavarian villages during the period. And Julia Boyd is not even the first British person to analyse the social history of smaller places in the era (I think Ian Kershaw might be able to make that claim). This book is however a valuable and well-written addition to the popular history of Nazi Germany. Boyd's cast of characters is kept small enough to mean you begin to understand the internal politics of the village and she faithfully tells stories in an unembellished way. Boyd is not an academic and it sometimes shows in both positive and negative ways. There are a few small inaccuracies in the book but her empathy for her characters shines through (occasionally to an almost jarring extent). In short, even if this is the moment of saturation, I think we might be best off just adding more water.

Perhaps this is not the time to be reading about examples of suspicion of mainstream medicine in German history. Monica Black's research into spiritual healers in post-war West Germany could be read as a harbinger of Impfskeptiker to come. However, this would be a bold reading indeed - one of Black's points is in fact that the craze around witch doctoring petered out as Germany began to tackle the history of the Holocaust in the 60s. In general, I thought this was a superb piece of historical research which focuses on Bruno Gröning, a Christian healer who emerged in Herford, a small town in West Germany, before becoming subject of a national cult at the end of 1940s. If I were to criticise Black, I would point to the fact the book really is just the history of Gröning with a few other examples of witch crazes thrown in to back up her narrative. I would also say she can occasionally draw big conclusions from small facts but generally this is an excellent, thought provoking book.

There are a number of books one could read to try and make sense of the current situation but this one is definitely a good place to start. Originally published seven years ago, it chronicles Pomerantsev's experiences in the early noughties, when he was pursuing a career in Russian TV production. His highly readable account focuses on several cultural phenomena, such as the gangster turned film producer, the rise of Russia Today and the deeply ingrained corruption. I suspect this was once a more light-hearted read but in the light of recent events, it is almost scarily prescient and underlines once again the argument, that the war on Ukraine shouldn't really be a surprise but is rather the result of a development that someone could already knowledgably write about in 2014.