Research
Research groups
Research interests
- Art music in twentieth century Germany
- Cultural histories in modern German history
- The Third Reich and Nazism
- Minorities in German history
Current research
His current research focuses on the consumption of art music in twentieth century Germany. It is driven by a desire to combine more traditional social history methods with newer approaches - such as histories of the body, the emotions and the senses. In pursuit of these interests, he has collaborated with musicologist Thomas Irvine in the production of a collection of essays entitled Dreams of Germany: Musical Imaginaries from the Concert Hall to the Dance Floor (Berghahn, 2018). Most recently he completed a large-scale study of The Symphony Concert in Nazi Germany (University of Chicago Press, 2025).
Research interests
His first book, Daimler-Benz in the Third Reich (Yale University Press, 1998), examined the ways in which a major German corporation adapted to the demands of the Third Reich and became complicit in its racial crimes as a result; it was shortlisted for the Longman/History Today Book Prize and shared the Fraenkel Prize for Contemporary History in 1997. His second major monograph, Haunted City: Nuremberg and the Nazi Past (Yale University Press, 2008) marked an attempt to explore the unstable dynamics of post-1945 memory cultures against the background of the social history of the post-war years; it also shared the Fraenkel Prize for Contemporary History for that year.
Whilst working on the post-war years he has maintained an active interest in the study of the Third Reich, editing a collection on the historiography of Nazism, publishing a short study of Hitler's writings, and, editing a Festschrift for Jeremy Noakes; he has co-edited, with my colleagues Mark Roseman (Indiana) and Nils Roemer (Texas) a volume of essays on the comparative study of minorities in German history.