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About Paul Lerner
I teach in the History Department at The University of Southern California, primarily courses on German and European history, with specializations on fascism, the history of medicine, consumer culture, and Jewish history. I have been at USC since 1997, after spending 18 months as a postdoc at the Wellcome Institute for the History of Medicine in London and after graduate school in history at Columbia. My current book project is called "Exiles on Main Street: Central European Émigrés, American Capitalism, and Cold War Consumer Culture, 1940-1970," and is about the American household/housewife as a site of intervention for émigré experts (architects, psychologists, advertising professionals, psychiatrists, etc.) who fled Nazi controlled Europe for the safe shores of the US where they encountered a booming economy and a robust consumer sphere. Previous books and articles concern the history of the "Jewish department store" in pre-Nazi Germany (The Consuming Temple), shell shock and the history of German psychiatry (Hysterical Men), and German Jewish masculinity (Jewish Masculinities). I've recently written about the German TV hit Babylon Berlin, Lion Feuchtwanger as Jewish writer, etc.Paul Lerner is Professor of History at the University of Southern California where he directs the Max Kade Institute for Austrian-German-Swiss Studies. He can be reached at plerner@usc.edu and @PFLerner.
NBN Episodes hosted by Paul:
July 20, 2024
Vanishing Vienna
In Vanishing Vienna: Modernism, Philosemitism, and Jews in a Postwar City (U Pennsylvania Press, 2024) historian Frances Tanzer traces the reconstruct…
July 16, 2024
Psychiatric Institutions and Society
Stefanie Coché's Psychiatric Institutions and Society: the Practice of Psychiatric Commital in the “Third Reich,” the Democratic Republic of Germany, …
April 16, 2024
Traces of a Jewish Artist
Graphic artist, illustrator, painter, and cartoonist Rahel Szalit (1888-1942) was among the best-known Jewish women artists in Weimar Berlin. But afte…
February 24, 2024
Multiplicity
Since the Enlightenment, the question has arisen as to how it is possible to think of the “unity of the human race” as a multiplicity. How can the pro…
February 2, 2024
Between Two Worlds
Facing the harrowing task of rebuilding a life in the wake of the Holocaust, many Jewish survivors, community and religious leaders, and Allied soldie…
December 6, 2023
Space and Time Under Persecution
The rapid and radical transformations of the Nazi Era challenged the ways German Jews experienced space and time, two of the most fundamental characte…
August 6, 2023
Nervous Systems
In this eye-opening chronicle of scientific research on the brain in the early Cold War era, the acclaimed historian Andreas Killen traces the compl…
September 14, 2022
Sustainable Utopias
By most accounts, the twentieth century was not kind to utopian thought. The violence of two world wars, Cold War anxieties, and a widespread sense of…
July 1, 2022
The Hygienic Apparatus
The Hygienic Apparatus: Weimar Cinema and Environmental Disorder (Northwestern UP, 2022) traces how the environmental effects of industrialization rev…
June 29, 2022
Fear of the Family
Beginning in 1955, West Germany recruited millions of people as guest workers from Yugoslavia, Italy, Greece, Spain, Portugal, and especially Turkey. …
January 26, 2022
Jewish Primitivism
Around the beginning of the twentieth century, Jewish writers and artists across Europe began depicting fellow Jews as savages or "primitive" tribesme…