Blackbourn on Germany.
A new episode of The News Items Podcast.
From The American Academy of Arts & Scienes:
Professor David Gordon Blackbourn is the Cornelius Vanderbilt Distinguished Chair and Professor of History at Vanderbilt University. He taught for twenty years at Harvard University (1992-2012), where he was Coolidge Professor of History, and before that was on the faculty of London University (1976-1992). He has produced significant work in many different areas of modern German history. An early work co-written with Geoff Eley helped to undermine the then dominant historical paradigm of Germany’s special path, or Sonderweg. His six books include works on modern mass politics, a microhistory of popular religiosity, and a work of synthesis on Germany in the long nineteenth century. One of his best-known books is “The Conquest of Nature: Water, Landscape and the Making of Modern Germany,” which won the the George Mosse Prize for Cultural History and the Charles A. Weyerhaeuser Prize for Best Book in Forest and Conservation History. He is a Fellow of the British Academy and the Royal Historical Society, and has received fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and Alexander von Humboldt Foundation, among others. His work has appeared in 11 languages. His most recent book is “Germany in the World,1500-2000”.
In two years time (1989-1990), the Berlin Wall fell, East and West Germany re-united, and the Soviet Union collapsed. For Germany and for Europe generally, more than two decades of relative stability and frequent success followed.
The three pillars of Germany’s business/political model came to be known as “Gas from Russia, Cars to China, Security from the United States”. Close enough. The important thing about the model was that it worked.
It no longer does.
If it’s true that “as Germany goes, so goes the European Union” then we may be at a (truly) pivotal moment in German and European history. Who better to talk to about this than David Blackbourn? As noted above, David is one of the world’s most eminent and widely respected historians of modern Germany and Europe. Germany in the World: A Global History, 1500-2000 is an extraordinary and magnificent work of history. If you had to pick one person to talk about Germany’s history and its present moment, it would probably be David.
So I called his agent, Robin Straus, and she set it up.
(News Items Podcast with David Blackbourn. Recorded June18, 2026. Produced by Dale Eisinger. You can find this podcast, and previous News Items podcasts, on most of the major platforms, including Apple, Amazon and Spotify.