Death in Berlin: From Weimar to Divided Germany (Cambridge, 2010) looked at how Berliners buried, mourned, commemorated, and imagined their dead in the afterlife from the end of WWI to the building of the Berlin Wall. Taking in the fields of memory, cultural anthropology, psychology, and political history, and with a keen eye for the ethnographically-incisive detail, the book argued that the unredeemed loss in WWI of millions of young soldiers—and their very material remains—changed the ways Germans related to death in a general way.

A powerful preoccupation with “proper burial” continued through WWII, particularly during the Allied air war. It persisted afterward, as Berliners gained detailed, visual knowledge of the Holocaust, its crematoria and mass graves.

Death in Berlin departed from a historiography that has very often hewed to one or another major state-political division—Empire (1871-1918), Weimar Republic (1918-1933), Nazi Germany (1933-1945), etc., to reveal the practices of death as part of the deep, unreflected-upon structure of German culture, one foundational to social life in an era when mass death became a daily reality.

Death in Berlin won two major prizes—the Hans Rosenberg Prize of the Central European History Society and the Ernst Fraenkel Prize of the Wiener Library. It was based on my dissertation, which received the Fritz Stern Prize. In 2015, it appeared in a Russian edition with New Literary Observer.

Click to hear Marshall Poe and me talk about Death in Berlin on the New Books in History podcast.