Nazism

When it comes to krautrock, it’s impossible not to mention the war

22 June 2024 9:00 am

The wild and wonderful music that exploded from West Germany in the 1970s stemmed from a young generation’s determination to escape the trauma of the Nazi past

Nietzsche’s thinking seems destined to be mangled and misunderstood

4 May 2024 9:00 am

Two Italian editors, determined to rescue the philosopher from Nazi associations, find their concern with philological truth derided by French postmodernists

Has Germany finally shaken off its dark past?

6 January 2024 9:00 am

‘When it comes to helping others, we are the world champions’, one politician declared in 2015. But Merkel’s welcome to immigrants was pragmatic – and anti-Semitism is on the rise again

Is Israelophobia the latest form of anti-Semitism?

30 September 2023 9:00 am

The demonisation of the state of Israel is basically an anti-Semitic mutation ‘evolving out of reach’, argues Jake Wallis Simons, the editor of the Jewish Chronicle

A doomed democracy

26 August 2023 9:00 am

Despite its democratic ideals and artistic creativity, 1920s Germany lacked both the flexibility and social cohesion necessary for functional politics, says Frank McDonough

The unimaginable horrors confronting the Allies in 1945

25 June 2022 9:00 am

No one had prepared the Allied soldiers, as they began their invasion of the Reich early in 1945, for what…

The opera that wouldn’t die

18 June 2022 9:00 am

Richard Bratby on the resurrection of wunderkind Erich Korngold’s long-neglected masterpiece

Nobody paints the sea like Emile Nolde

11 June 2022 9:00 am

In April, ten years after opening its gallery on the beach in Hastings, the Jerwood Foundation gifted the building to…

The history of Nazism in small objects

21 May 2022 9:00 am

‘I can’t cook,’ writes the historian Karina Urbach, ‘which is probably why it took me so long to realise that…

Fresh air and fascism in the Bavarian Alps

14 May 2022 9:00 am

The village of Oberstdorf lies in the Bavarian Alps, geographically remote but, as this gripping book demonstrates, deeply etched by…

The Prince of Prussia's Nazi problem

30 August 2021 1:47 pm

Perched on a mountain top overlooking the Swabian Alps, Hohenzollern Castle, with its picturesque towers, seems like something out of a…

Waiting for Gödel is over: the reclusive genius emerges from the shadows

29 May 2021 9:00 am

The 20th-century Austrian mathematician Kurt Gödel did his level best to live in the world as his philosophical hero Gottfried…

Apostle of modernism: Clive Bell’s reputation repaired

24 April 2021 9:00 am

Clive Bell is the perennial supporting character in the biographies of the Bloomsbury group. The husband of Vanessa Bell, brother-in-law…

An unsuitable attachment to Nazism: Barbara Pym in the 1930s

17 April 2021 9:00 am

Vicars, tea parties and village fetes were a far cry from Barbara Pym’s early enthusiasms, Philip Hensher reveals

The fall of Golden Dawn

3 October 2020 9:00 am

The fall of Greece’s neo-Nazi party

Hitler’s admiration has severely damaged Wagner’s reputation

12 September 2020 9:00 am

Wagner gripped the communal mind for decades after his death. Philip Hensher examines his enduring influence

A true story that never feels true: Resistance reviewed

20 June 2020 9:00 am

Resistance stars Jesse Eisenberg and tells the true story of how mime artist Marcel Marceau helped orphaned Jewish children to…

How did the infamous Josef Mengele escape punishment?

24 January 2020 10:00 pm

The atrocities of the concentration camp at Auschwitz–Birkenau are now universally known, but it is still almost beyond belief that…

Ernst Jünger in Paris in 1941

Ernst Jünger — reluctant captain of the Wehrmacht

19 January 2019 9:00 am

Ernst Jünger, who died in 1998, aged 102, is now better known for his persona than his work. A deeply…

Credit: Getty Images

Nazi caricatures: The Order of the Day, by Éric Vuillard, reviewed

12 January 2019 9:00 am

There was a time when you read French literary novels in order to cultivate a certain kind of sophisticated suspicion.…

‘Portrait of Friedrich Nietzsche’, Edvard Munch, c. 1906

Nietzsche’s intense friendship with Wagner forms the core of Sue Prideaux’s excellent new biography

29 September 2018 9:00 am

In 1945, with the second world war won bar the shouting, Bertrand Russell polished off his brief examination of Friedrich…

Making Nietzsche New

30 April 2016 9:00 am

Had you been down at Naumburg barracks early in March 1867, you might have seen a figure take a running…

Nietzsche's school jeremiad sounds oddly familiar

5 March 2016 9:00 am

When Friedrich Nietzsche was offered a professorship in classical philology at the university of Basel in 1869 he was so…

Nimoy and Shatner in ‘The Man Trap’, the first episode of Star Trek (September 1966)

Close encounters on the starship Enterprise

5 March 2016 9:00 am

For a show with a self-proclaimed ‘five-year mission’, Star Trek hasn’t done badly. Gene Roddenberry’s ‘Wagon train to the stars’…

Always prone to depression: David Astor c.1946

David Astor: the saintly, tormented man who remade the Observer

5 March 2016 9:00 am

Before embarking on this book, Jeremy Lewis was told by his friend Diana Athill that his subject, the newspaper editor…