I currently lead two externally funded research projects.
The first, supported by the Swedish Research Council, is a consideration of the beer cafés and mass-market restaurants of Weimar Berlin (1919–1933) as democratic infrastructure – that is, as everyday commercial spaces where citizens of different political and social backgrounds managed to coexist and even to interact, despite intense political polarization and deep social conflict.
The second project, funded by Riksbankens Jubileumsfond, examines how Jewish activists in German-speaking Europe strategically publicized the achievements of Jewish inventors to counter antisemitic claims, and how that strategy can help us account for the turn toward technocracy in some dominant forms of Zionist thinking before 1945.
Past Projects
My recent book, Big Business and the Crisis of German Democracy: Liberalism and the Grand Hotels of Berlin, 1875–1933 (Cambridge University Press, 2024), presented Berlin’s luxury hotels as crucibles of political conflict, where the difficulties of running such businesses under conditions of economic and social crisis corroded the owners’ demonstrated commitments to democratic liberalism. Those owners ultimately dropped such commitments and allowed Hitler to use the Kaiserhof Hotel as his Berlin headquarters in 1932. In this way, the book offers a micro-historical answer to macro-historical questions: Why, when, and how do authoritarian solutions become so appealing?
My research has been recognized by the German Historical Institute (Fritz Stern Dissertation Prize, 2018: “Hotel Berlin: The Politics of Commercial Hospitality in the German Metropolis, 1875–1945”) and the Waterloo Center for German Studies (short-list, book prize, 2024: Big Business and the Crisis of German Democracy).
