Racism and Antiracism in Divided Germany with Michelle Lynn Kahn and Lauren Stokes (Cornell UP, 2026)

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Lauren Stokes (1:22)

Welcome to The New Books Network.

Jenna Pittman (1:26)

Hello everybody and welcome back to The New Books Network. I'm Jenna Pittman, your host for the episode. Today we'll be talking to Michelle Kahn and Lauren Stokes about their new volume, Racism and Anti-Racism in Divided Germany, published just this month by Cornell University Press. Michelle and Lauren are both historians of 20th century divided Germany and migration history. Michelle's first book, Foreign in Two Homelands, Racism, Return Migration and Turkish German History, explores the transnational history of Turkish migrants to the Federal Republic of Germany between 1961 and 1990 Lauren's first book, Fear of the Family, Guest Workers and Family Migration in the Federal Republic of Germany, illustrates how racial, ethnic, and gender difference have been inscribed in the neoliberal welfare state of the Federal Republic of Germany.

Lauren and Michelle's Racism and Anti-Racism in Divided Germany addresses how racism expresses itself and what it means to be anti-racist by tracing the history of racism and anti-racist activism in East, West, and Unified Germany.

As far-right extremism surges in Germany today, this volume is a timely contribution which shows how racism, right-wing extremism, and anti-foreign violence have been embedded in the center of both East and West German society.

With that, I'm very excited to welcome Lauren and Michelle to the show.

Michelle Lynn Kahn (2:49)

Thank you so much, Jenna, for having us. We're happy to be here.

Lauren Stokes (2:53)

Yes. Thank you, Jenna.

Jenna Pittman (2:54)

It's great to have you guys. I wonder if we could begin the episode just by talking a little bit about how this book came to be. I always think it's so interesting. Your guys' first books are like two sides of a very similar topic, so it's great to see you guys working together on this volume.

Michelle Lynn Kahn (3:15)

Yeah. So Lauren and I have known each other for over a decade, like even before we both started our Ph.Ds on this topic. As we were finishing our first books around the year 2021, 2022, we realized that there were a lot of people that we had come to know in the archives or at conferences who were working on different aspects related to racism and anti-racism in divided Germany, and that this scholarship was primarily being written by junior scholars, and that it was a really exciting opportunity for us to try to juxtapose all of it, put it together into one volume, and see what we could make of it and what kinds of collective conclusions we could come up with.

Jenna Pittman (3:58)

Yeah. That's great. It's so good to see such a wide range of academic careers represented in this volume. So what you guys have is that Rita Chin writes the preface to the volume, correct? And then I know, oh, I'm drawing a blank on her name. She just finished her Ph.D. at University of Michigan. Paige Newhouse is also in this volume. And so just really great to see like kind of all of these contributions come together.

So as you point out in the introduction, race was an absent category in post-war historiography for many decades. Race and racism in the history of post-war Germany have only recently become widely accepted analytical categories. But in the past 20 years or so, the body of scholarship engaging explicitly with race and racism in post-war Germany, including East Germany, has grown substantially.

What does this volume contribute to this new body of scholarship by examining the history of divided and post-unification Germany through the lens of racism and anti-racism?