Home »
Keith Lowe
Episode 159
AoH Book Club: Keith Lowe on Savage Continent
Keith's book, published in July 2012, has lessons for us all and is our Book Club recommendation.
What was your inspiration for Savage Continent, your book about Europe in the immediate aftermath of the Second World War? Did it grow out of your work on the devastating bombing of Hamburg? That was the seed out of which it grew. Having seen how devastated Hamburg...
Episode 21 & 22
Keith Lowe on Monuments to WW2, Soviet statues and Winston Churchill | RSS.com Keith Lowe on the Bombing of Hamburg in 1943 and the Impact of WW2 on Europe. | RSS.com
The Yasukuni Shrine
The Yasukuni Shrine is the commemoration of Japanese war dead, a controversial monument that is hated by Japan's neighbours.
The Yasukuni Shrine is an island of calm in an otherwise bustling city. Mature pines and cypress trees surround it, screening it from Tokyo’s relentless traffic noise. Shady walkways, sacred ponds and dozens of cherry trees make it a haven for those who come here to...
Prisoners of History, by Keith Lowe
Lowe's latest book provokes new thought.
Keith Lowe, a prominent author of works on the Second World War, examines nations’ architectural remembrances of the conflict in this timely book. Though the 'Rhodes Must Fall Campaign' gained immense traction last summer, and over the past few years Poland has...
Prisoners of History: An interview with Keith Lowe
Keith Lowe's book on monuments is even more prescient in the wake of the protests against historical statues in the summer of 2020. Keith sat down with us to discuss Prisoners of History: What Monuments Tell Us About Our History and Ourselves.
From Keith Lowe, author of Prisoners of History Over the past year there has been a great deal of controversy about statues and other monuments. Why do you think we have been getting so emotional about them? Have monuments always been this controversial? No, monuments...
The Motherland Calls: Mamayev Kurgan Monument
We should look back at the lessons given at the end of the most traumatic event in human history.
The Second World War was probably the greatest human catastrophe the world has ever seen. Historians have always struggled to find words that can convey even a glimpse of its total scale. We give endless statistics – more than 100 million soldiers mobilised, more than...
Have we forgotten the lessons of 1945?
We should look back at the lessons given at the end of the most traumatic event in human history.
As the world around us reels from one crisis to another, it is worth pausing occasionally to remind ourselves that things could always be worse. Seventy-five years ago, the world was emerging from a catastrophe that makes our own troubles look trivial. We still live...
Keith Lowe
What first attracted you to the period or periods you work in? The Second World War was such a dramatic, traumatic event – but what interests me just as much is what happened next. How did we react to that massive trauma? How did it change society? How do we remember...