Episode 7: The Grand Budapest Hotel with Dr. Adam Blackler
We're joined this week by my good friend and fellow University of Minnesota alum Dr. Adam Blackler to talk about Wes Anderson's The Grand Budapest Hotel. Folks, I'd never seen this film before watching it for the pod so listening to Adam dissect it is a thing of beauty. But stay on, because he'll talk about his work in German colonial Africa as well as German cinema and how it informs the present. It's good stuff.
Dr. Adam A. Blackler is an associate professor of history at the University of Wyoming. He is a historian of modern Germany and southern Africa, whose research emphasizes the transnational dimensions of imperial occupation and colonial violence in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. His scholarly interests also include the political and social dynamics of Germany’s Weimar Republic and the interdisciplinary fields of holocaust & genocide Studies and international human rights. Dr. Blackler has held invited positions as a visiting professor in the Friedrich-Meinecke-Institute at Freie Universität (Berlin, Germany) and at the Ernst-Abbe-Hochschule (Jena, Germany). He held these positions as part of a year-long sabbatical in 2024-2025, when he conducted extensive archival research in Germany, Namibia, and South Africa.
His scholarship has appeared in distinguished peer-reviewed journals, university presses, and edited collections since 2017. Dr. Blackler published his first book monograph, entitled An Imperial Homeland: Forging German Identity in Southwest Africa, with Pennsylvania State University Press’s series “Germans Beyond Europe” in 2022. PSUP released it in paperback in 2023. Dr. Blackler is presently writing a second book-length monograph, entitled Scrambling Back to Southwest Africa: False Victimhood and Empire in Weimar Germany. In addition, he is writing a new short analysis of Viktor Klemperer and his personal confrontations with fascist violence during the Third Reich, entitled I Shall Bear Witness—Viktor Klemperer in His Time, and Ours. Numerous national and international organizations have generously funded his research, including the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH), Deutscher Akademischer Austausch Dienst (DAAD), United States Holocaust Memorial Museum (USHMM), Holocaust Educational Foundation (HEF), Flittie Sabbatical Award, Center for Global Studies and Engagement (CGS), College of Arts and Sciences, and the Wyoming Institute for Humanities Research (WIHR). Dr. Blackler received the University of Wyoming’s Extraordinary Merit in Research Award in 2022.
Dr. Blackler offers a wide range of survey, upper division, online, study abroad, and graduate courses in modern European and world history. Course topics include European colonialism, nationalism and transnationalism, comparative and opposing fascism, Nazi Germany and the Holocaust, Weimar Germany, and human rights and crimes against humanity. Several of his MA advisees accepted funded positions in prestigious Ph.D. programs, including UNC-Chapel Hill, University of Kansas, and Boston College. In 2024, he received both the Extraordinary Merit in Teaching Award and John “Jack” P. Ellbogen Meritorious Classroom Teaching Award.