Christian Goeschel

My research focuses on the history of modern Europe, with a particular, but not exclusive interest in Germany and Italy. I study the intersection of politics with culture and society in a European and global perspective. 

I am currently writing a sensory history of Germany in the early 1930s.

My work to date, based on several years of fieldwork in Germany and Italy and informed by years of teaching the wide spectrum of modern European and global history to undergraduate and postgraduate students, has covered the following broad areas:

1. In my earlier work on Suicide in Nazi Germany (Oxford University Press, 2009, German translation, Suhrkamp Verlag, 2011), I examined the Third Reich’s end in an orgy of self-immolation and explored how these events fit into the wider pattern of self-destruction in Modern Germany. I developed a new methodology for the historical analysis of suicide, by exploring suicide at three distinct, but interrelated levels: the social, the discursive and the individual-emotional. I proposed a new social and cultural history, one firmly grounded within both theory and social structures, while also bringing back the individual into the analysis. 

2. Together with Nikolaus Wachsmann, I examined repression in pre-war Nazi Germany. We published a book The Nazi Camps, 1933-1939: A Documentary History (Nebraska University Press, 2012) and a 2010 special issue of the Journal of Contemporary History.

3. Following my work on repression in Nazi Germany, I developed an interest in organised crime in Germany from 1918 to the aftermath of defeat in 1945. I explored this subject with a two-year Leverhulme Early Career Fellowship at Birkbeck, University of London. In May 2013, I published a major article in the History Workshop Journal. My interest in this theme was driven partly by one of the longest-lasting myths about the Third Reich that whatever bad things Hitler and the Nazis did, at least they clamped down on crime. Yet networks of organised crime survived the Nazi takeover of power in 1933 and continued to exist throughout the Third Reich and the post-war period when they played a major role on the black market. This fact casts into doubt that the Nazis ever managed to control all aspects of German everyday life. While working on this project, I became increasingly aware of the necessity to extend my work’s scope beyond Germany. After all, organised crime was and is a global phenomenon. Particularly the rich Italian literature on the mafia prompted me to think about the connections between Italian and German crime syndicates. 

4. As a result of my interest in transnational connections between Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy, I completed a major monograph Mussolini and Hitler: The Forging of the Fascist Alliance, published by Yale University Press in August 2018 and by Tantor Media as an audio book. The book, based on several years of fieldwork in Italy and Germany, has been translated into German, Italian, Danish, and Arabic, Romanian and Brazilian. In the book, I propose a history of ‘fascist entanglement’, which is more than a comparative history. I study the crossovers and exchanges amongst both leaders and their regimes, Europe’s first and most significant fascist dictatorships. Through a study of this relationship, I address some of the central interpretative problems involved in exploring these regimes and their leaders: I focus on the rituals, ceremonies, gestures and material culture surrounding the Mussolini-Hitler relationship and argue that these aspects constituted political outcomes. Seemingly peripheral aspects of politics, such as photographs, newsreel, illustrated magazines and books, dress codes, gift exchanges, salutations, and meeting venues helped to create the Axis alliance as a menacing display of friendship and unity. I aim to overcome the increasingly self-referential debates on ‘generic fascism’ by examining the prototypical fascist diplomatic relationship, one constructed by the Fascist and Nazi regimes as an ‘emotive friendship’ which rested largely on a propaganda construction of ‘face-to-face’ meetings. This style of diplomacy, which represented the alleged friendship of Mussolini and Hitler, two supposedly ordinary young men, was constructed by the regimes in contradistinction to the allegedly secretive diplomacy of the ‘Western plutocracies’, led by old privileged men. I thus demonstrate that the aggressive Nazi-Fascist New Order found its representation in a new style of face-to-face, masculine diplomacy that destroyed the liberal international system manifested by the Versailles Treaty and the League of Nations.

In a recent article published in Contemporary European History, I pursue this approach further and include Japan.

With Dr Hannah Malone (Groningen), I am running a network of scholars interested in the comparative and transnational history of fascism. In 2024, we published a special issue on the 'The Cultural Axis Between Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany' in European History Quarterly.

At present, I am continuing work on the global cultural history of diplomacy. With Professor Naoko Shimazu (Yale/NUS, ARI, Singapore), I am co-editing the Oxford Handbook of the Cultural History of Diplomacy, 1750-2000 (under contract with Oxford University Press).

I enjoy explaining my research on Europe to general audiences via newspapers and magazines, public lectures, and TV programmes. For instance, I was one of the featured expert commentators on all four seasons of the BBC 2 TV series on the ‘Rise of the Nazis' (parts have also been broadcast on PBS and ZDF).

I was also historical consultant for an episode of Italy's flagship History TV series La Grande Storia (Rai Tre) that was informed by my published work on Mussolini and Hitler.

In May 2024, I was interviewed by Deutschlandfunk, Germany's leading public radio station, on the usefulness of Weimar analogies.

In June 2024, the major Netflix documentary Hitler and the Nazis: Evil on Trial, directed by Joe Berlinger, was released. In it, I appear as an academic expert.

I welcome inquiries from students interested in doing research on the history of modern Germany and Italy in the 19th and 20th centuries, the history of Europe and the world, and the cultural history of diplomacy.