Stalingrad p.1 by Vasily Grossman

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Show Notes

This week, Matt and Cameron kick off their biggest podcast series ever with one of the most obscure choices possible for such a venture: Stalingrad by Vasily Grossman. Stalingrad is the first book in a dilogy, followed by the much more famous Life and Fate, which covers the siege of the city of Stalingrad by the German Wehrmacht in World War 2. We’re going to be dealing with a whole cast of characters here and their varied experiences of the war so get a pencil and paper, get ready to start diagramming family trees, and tune in!

Major themes: Getting off-topic, Ways of looking at truth, Polyphony

Quick note: this week, I had too many show notes and the word count exceeded the maximum allowed in the description. To see the full show notes as well as the recommended reading list, please check out this google document.

03:17 - Not even five minutes in and my first blunder. Professor Rauchway also taught his course on WW2 alongside Professor Ari Kelman.

04:58 - I hate to come for Matt, but my brief reading seems to imply that they mean it in the latter sense.

11:38 - Mea culpa, I got the year wrong here. The Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor happened on December 7th, 1941, and the US would be involved in the war militarily from 1942 to 1945.

12:49 - Listen to “Politely and Calmly Discussing 1984” here or anywhere else you listen to your podcasts.

13:01 - Guernica