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Books
News from Germany
The Competition to Control World
Communications, 1900-1945
To control information is to control the world. This innovative history reveals how, across two devastating wars, Germany attempted to build a powerful communication empire—and how the Nazis manipulated the news to rise to dominance in Europe and further their global agenda. The book received three awards: the Ralph Gomory Prize, the Wiener Holocaust Library Fraenkel Prize, and the David Barclay Book Prize. It also received an honorable mention and was a finalist for five further prizes.
Information warfare may seem like a new feature of our contemporary digital world. But it was just as crucial a century ago, when the great powers competed to control and expand their empires. In News from Germany, Heidi Tworek uncovers how Germans fought to regulate information at home and used the innovation of wireless technology to magnify their power abroad.
Tworek reveals how for nearly fifty years, across three different political regimes, Germany tried to control world communications—and nearly succeeded. From the turn of the twentieth century, German political and business elites worried that their British and French rivals dominated global news networks. Many Germans even blamed foreign media for Germany’s defeat in World War I. The key to the British and French advantage was their news agencies—companies whose power over the content and distribution of news was arguably greater than that wielded by Google or Facebook today. Communications networks became a crucial battleground for interwar domestic democracy and international influence everywhere from Latin America to East Asia. Imperial leaders, and their Weimar and Nazi successors, nurtured wireless technology to make news from Germany a major source of information across the globe. The Nazi mastery of global propaganda by the 1930s was built on decades of Germany’s obsession with the news.
News from Germany is not a story about Germany alone. It reveals how news became a form of international power and how communications changed the course of history.
The book was a #1 new release in international relations, media studies, and journalism on Amazon.
Reviews
“This riveting technological chronicle dispels two myths: that the digital era spawned information warfare, and that twentieth-century global communications was largely Anglo-American. From 1900 to 1945, reveals historian Heidi Tworek, Germany strove mightily to achieve world power through news agencies, spoken radio and wireless, urged on by figures from Weimar Republic foreign minister Gustav Stresemann to Nazi propagandist Joseph Goebbels. A chillingly timely cautionary tale, demonstrating that once elites destroy democratic institutions, a free press cannot prevent further disintegration.”
— Nature
“Tworek reveals how officials in the Weimar government, believing they were acting in the best interests of democracy, created structures to oversee and regulate news supply. This led to policies, such as restricting political advocacy from the radio, intended to forestall inflaming partisan passions. Ironically, it was the state’s tight control over the news supply that allowed the Nazis to swiftly take over the country’s communications channels and remake them to serve their interests.”
— The Washington Post
The Interwar World collects an international group of over 50 contributors to discuss, analyze, and interpret this crucial period in twentieth-century history. A comprehensive understanding of the interwar era has been limited by Euro-American approaches and strict adherence to the temporal limits of the world wars. The volume’s contributors challenge the era’s accepted temporal and geographic framings by privileging global processes and interactions. Each contribution takes a global, thematic approach, integrating world regions into a shared narrative.
Three central questions frame the chapters. First, when was the interwar? Viewed globally, the years 1918 and 1939 are arbitrary limits, and the volume explicitly engages with the artificiality of the temporal framework while closely examining the specific dynamics of the 1920s and 1930s. Second, where was the interwar? Contributors use global history methodologies and training in varied world regions to decenter Euro-American frameworks, engaging directly with the usefulness of the interwar as both an era and an analytical category. Third, how global was the interwar? Authors trace accelerating connections in areas such as public health and mass culture counterbalanced by processes of economic protectionism, exclusive nationalism, and limits to migration. By approaching the era thematically, the volume disaggregates and interrogates the meaning of the ‘global’ in this era.
As a comprehensive guide, this volume offers overviews of key themes of the interwar period for undergraduates, while offering up-to-date historiographical insights for postgraduates and scholars interested in this pivotal period in global history.
Reviews
“This is a wonderfully comprehensive companion to the history of the interwar world which is often successful in transcending the western-centric bias that has characterized perspectives on this important period in world history to date. In its global aspirations and its thematic inclusiveness it represents a major milestone bringing together a vast amount of research. Specialists and non-specialists of the period alike, regardless of regional or country specialisms, will find a huge amount of fresh and innovative arguments and perspectives in this volume that will be a must-read starting point for anyone planning to engage with the interwar world in future.”
— Stefan Berger, Professor of Social History at the Ruhr University
"The Interwar Worldshows us processes that were not just simply simultaneous but connected or responsive, both geographically and temporally. The book’s success is that it challenges us historians to rethink what we do when we work on ‘Interwar histories’, to not discard the term but to use it, consciously and critically."
— Collaborative review by the Interwar Histories Working Group
The Routledge Companion to the Makers of Global Business draws together a wide array of state-of-the-art research on multinational enterprises. The volume aims to deepen our historical understanding of how firms and entrepreneurs contributed to transformative processes of globalization.
This book explores how global business facilitated the mechanisms of cross-border interactions that affected individuals, organizations, industries, national economies and international relations. The 37 chapters span the Middle Ages to the present day, analyzing the emergence of institutions and actors alongside key contextual factors for global business development. Contributors examine business as a central actor in globalization, covering myriad entrepreneurs, organizational forms and key industrial sectors. Taking a historical view, the chapters highlight the intertwined and evolving nature of economic, political, social, technological and environmental patterns and relationships. They explore dynamic change as well as lasting continuities, both of which often only become visible – and can only be fully understood – when analyzed in the long run.
With dedicated chapters on challenges such as political risk, sustainability and economic growth, this prestigious collection provides a one-stop shop for a key business discipline.
Reviews
“This important collection of new surveys by leading scholars represents an essential state of the art summary and reflection on the often neglected major contribution of entrepreneurs and firms to the globalisation of business and provides a comprehensive overview of the evolution of global business in historical perspective, notably on the role of institutions and organisational forms.”
— Robert Read, Lancaster University Management School, UK
“This is a terrific contribution to the broad field of analytical business history, focused on the key actors who have created the global economy. A must read for economists, political scientists, sociologists and strategy scholars with an interest in how international business actually functions.”
— Alain Verbeke, Editor-in-Chief, Journal of International Business Studies
International Organizations and the Media in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries is the first volume to explore the historical relationship between international organizations and the media. Beginning in the early nineteenth century and coming up to the 1990s, the volume shows how people around the globe largely learned about international organizations and their activities through the media and images created by journalists, publicists, and filmmakers in texts, sound bites, and pictures.
The book examines how interactions with the media are a formative component of international organizations. At the same time, it questions some of the basic assumptions about how media promoted or enabled international governance. Written by leading scholars in the field from Europe, North America, and Australasia, and including case studies from all regions of the world, it covers a wide range of issues from humanitarianism and environmentalism to Hollywood and debates about international information orders.
Bringing together two burgeoning yet largely unconnected strands of research—the history of international organizations and international media histories—this book is essential reading for scholars of international history and those interested in the development and impact of media over time.
Reviews
“Prominent historians and talented young scholars have contributed to this consistent and coherent volume offering a variety of approaches, methods and methodologies. They have zoomed in on the motives, politics and silences of a number of international institutions since the early 19th century. The volume is original and innovates at the level of the optics and perspectives, of the units of analysis and the levels of analysis. It will be a fruitful read for specialists, useful and inspirational for teachers and undergraduate students in history and social sciences.”
— Davide Rodogno, The Graduate Institute, Geneva
“Overall, this volume does an exceptional job of showing the successes and failures that international organizations had in using media to reach the public over the long term of the last two centuries. It offers scholars an excellent model for how to do global history in covering such a wide swath of time and array of countries, and it should prove foundational and influential on a range of new studies about other international organizations.”
— Michael Stamm, Michigan State University