Civilizing Germany? The French Occupation of Germany with Dr. Drew Flanagan

Today’s special episode is an interview with Dr. Drew Flanagan. Flanagan is an assistant professor of history at the University of Pittsburgh at Bradford, where he also directs the History and Political Science BA program. He holds a BA in history from Wesleyan University and an MA and Ph.D in modern European history from Brandeis University. His research focuses on the history of the Franco-German borderlands and the global entanglements of the European unity project, above all the links between European integration, the Cold War, and the process of decolonization in the French Colonial Empire. Today we are discussing his fascinating book From Occupation to Integration: Recivilizing the French Zone of Post-Nazi Germany, 1945-1955, which was published in April 2026 by LSU Press. In this work, Flanagan examines how French occupiers of Germany in the 1940s and 1950s attempted to ‘civilize’ Germans following the Second World War, sometimes taking ideas and practices of the French ‘civilizing mission’ and applying it to occupied Germany.

script forthcoming