James Retallack, “Red Saxony: Election Battles and the Spectre of Democracy in Germany, 1860 to 1918” (Oxford UP, 2017)

In Conversation: An OUP Podcast · Jun 12, 2018 · 1h 2m

How can political modernization reinforce authoritarianism? What brought middle-class liberals and conservative monarchists to make common cause in late 19th- and early 20th-century Germany? How did a political culture defined by anti-socialism and anti-semitism emerge? In his new book Red Saxony: Election Battles and the Spectre of Democracy in Germany, 1860 to 1918 (Oxford University Press, 2017), James Retallack uses a regional lens to rethink assumptions about Germany’s changing political culture over the span of six decades. By tracing election battles and suffrage debates, Jim…