Some not-so-light reading for the New Year
Your history fix for the first half of 2026
I have been very excited over the last few days about the first media announcements for my new book, Weimar: Life on the Edge of Catastrophe, which is due to be released in May. Among those recommending to look out for it were the Sunday Times, which pleasingly introduced it as the latest work of “Britain’s favourite German historian”, and the Financial Times, which described it as a tale of “cultural experimentation and political upheaval through the stories of those who witnessed it and whose choices and fates reveal the human experience of a descent into tyranny.”
Encouraged by this much enthusiasm, I decided to collate my own book list for the New Year, and the first half of 2026 looks like a particularly rich stretch for readers who enjoy modern German and European history in all its unsettling complexity. Books are set to be released that speak of societies under pressure, political systems wobbling or collapsing and of ordinary people trying to live meaningful lives in extraordinary circumstances.
No light reading then, but perfect for our times.
January
Exit Stalin: The Soviet Union as a Civilisation, 1953–1991 by Mark B. Smith
January’s pick is an ideal way to start the year: serious, provocative and intriguingly just a little bit revisionist. Mark B. Smith takes the death of Stalin as his starting point and asks what the Soviet Union actually was in the decades that followed. Rather than treating it simply as a failed state lurching towards collapse, Smith frames it as a civilisation with its own values, rhythms and internal logic.
What makes this book's approach especially compelling is its refusal to view the post-Stalin era as static. Smith wants to show how Soviet society adapted, stabilised, and, in many ways, functioned well enough for millions of people to build their lives within it, even as the system’s flaws deepened. It promises to be a bracing antidote to simplistic Cold War narratives and a reminder that history rarely conforms to neat moral arcs. Understanding life in the Soviet Union is also a crucial piece of the puzzle of today’s Russia. Historian Christopher Clark even deems the book “essential reading for anyone with an interest in contemporary Russia and its people.”
February
Hotel Exile: Paris in the Shadow of War by Jane Rogoyska
February moves us west and to an earlier point in the story of the 20th century, to Paris as a city of refuge and uncertainty in the years surrounding the Second World War. I love a good microhistory, and that is effectively what this book is set up as. Author Jane Rogoyska uses the Hotel Lutetia in the French capital as a lens through which to explore exile, displacement and cultural survival. This ‘grand’ hotel drew writers, artists and political refugees, people waiting for visas or for history to turn in their favour.
Rogoyska has a novelist’s eye for detail and atmosphere, which should make this book feel intimate without losing its historical weight. Paris provides no romantic backdrop here but a tense, fragile space where lives were paused, redirected and often upended. It’s a reminder that war is not only fought on battlefields but also endured in corridors, cafés and hotel rooms. Richard Ovenden, Bodley’s Librarian in the University of Oxford, calls the book “an utterly compelling account that sheds important new light on a seemingly familiar episode of modern history.”
March
Stay Alive: Berlin 1939–1945 by Ian Buruma
By March we are deep inside the war itself, with Ian Buruma guiding us through fraught life in Berlin during the years of Nazi rule and total conflict. Stay Alive is exactly what its title suggests: a book about survival rather than heroics. Buruma focuses on how ordinary Berliners navigated bombing raids, shortages, propaganda and fear, often with little room for moral purity. His own father lived among them as a forced labourer who had been dragged into the German war economy alongside hundreds of thousands of others. This personal perspective promises to lend Buruma’s account a sharp and specific lens through which to view the horrific events in wartime Berlin.
Buruma’s great strength is empathy without indulgence, as he has shown in previous books. He neither excuses complicity nor ignores the sheer difficulty of staying alive in challenging circumstances. I’m hoping in this case his skills as a social historian will have produced a portrait of wartime Berlin that feels grounded, unsettling and human, in other words, history that resists easy judgement and forces the reader endure uncomfortable complexities.
I’m reviewing this book in detail for the Financial Times, so keep your eyes peeled if you’d like to know more before committing.
April
Weimar Germany: Death of a Democracy by Victor Sebestyen
April takes us back a decade or two to the fragile experiment that preceded the Nazi catastrophe. Victor Sebestyen’s account of Weimar Germany aims to be both brisk and alarming. He charts how a democratic system, rich in culture and innovation, was gradually hollowed out by economic crisis, political extremism and institutional weakness.
What will make this book terrifyingly compelling is a sense of momentum that appears all too familiar to us today. You can see the warning signs piling up: the economic problems, the political polarisation, the growing longing in parts of the population for a system-smashing force... As a case study in how democracies fail, the Weimar era is uncomfortably relevant.
May
Weimar: Life on the Edge of Catastrophe by Katja Hoyer
Sorry, I couldn’t help myself… I’ll get my coat. In an act of shockingly shameless self-promotion, I’ve put my own book on the list for May. My only excuse is that it links to my April suggestion, staying in Weimar territory but shifting the focus from high politics to lived experience and stretching deep into the Nazi era, too.
In choosing a specific place — the town of Weimar, right in the geographical, cultural and imaginary heart of Germany — I aim to explore what it was like to live in Germany between the wars, from coping with hyperinflation and political frustration to work, leisure and family life. While researching, I encountered a society that felt modern and in many ways familiar as it edged inexorably towards catastrophe.
June (well, sort of)
The Nuclear Age: An Epic Race for Arms, Power and Survival by Serhii Plokhy
And now we come to June, or rather late May, where I admit to cheating slightly by sneaking in the paperback release of Serhii Plokhy’s The Nuclear Age on 28 May. I make no apologies. I have a real soft spot for Serhii Plokhy’s work because he is an astute and original observer of history. You may know him best from his book Chernobyl: History of a Tragedy, which was a bestseller and won the prestigious Baillie Gifford Prize.
This latest book of his is a sweeping tale that deserves a wide audience, and the paperback release feels like the right moment to tackle it. Plokhy traces the global nuclear story from its origins through Cold War brinkmanship to the uneasy present. What stands out is his focus on contingency and near misses. The nuclear age, he suggests, has been shaped as much by luck and human judgment as by strategy.
At a time when we’re once again exposed to nuclear threats, understanding how the dynamics of weapons systems that have the power to extinguish life on earth have evolved is well worth a few hours of anybody’s time. The Nuclear Age should make for a sobering but readable conclusion to the first half of the year’s historical journey.
Thank you for this intriguing list! I’ve been spending a good part of my retirement reading history, which I think was a weak point in my education.
Back in the 1980s, I was in a PhD program (in the US) in interdisciplinary social science. What I wanted to study was how to prevent wars, particularly in Europe, hoping to use my knowledge of German (I had lived in Germany for a year and had an M.A. in the language). This was of course during the Cold War.
I loved what I was studying but ended up leaving the program largely because I realized I did not want a teaching career. I became a lawyer instead. When the Soviet Union collapsed I wondered what would have happened if I had stayed in the program. (For one thing, I might have been in West Berlin working on my thesis when the wall came down!) But I realized that we were faced with a whole set of new problems as the Eastern European countries tried to reorganise themselves. And Russia was in a very precarious position. Democracies do not break out by default; they take a great deal of work and organization. I thought the dangers were not being taken seriously enough, and hoped I was wrong. (Unfortunately, I was right.)
When I retired I started my history exploration with American history. I had worked in state government, so it was especially interesting to see how our ways of governing ourselves have evolved over time. Then I turned to Europe (that’s my ancestry as well as cultural heritage), starting 1,500 years ago or so. (How did we get here??) In the midst of this, the question of how to prevent wars has taken on an urgency I never expected to experience in my lifetime.
Trotz allem, ich wünsche Ihnen (und uns alle) ein glückliches Neujahr!
“Britain’s favourite German historian”- Congratulations- a very accurate epithet indeed! Reading your articles and posts is helping me understand more clearly the Germany which my grandparents were born into and subsequently my mother and her sisters. All the snippets of stories of “drüben” or my grandfather’s war in stories were very confusing for me as a child. I am very grateful that, through your writings I am finally getting a clearer picture of the Germany I visited only once a year. Very much looking forward to getting a copy of your book in May.