History Flakes - The Berlin History Podcast

Last ep of Season 4 Everyone!
Yeah it’s long…she was a big deal!
Part two sees us follow Rosa to Berlin from Zurich, with her doctorate in hand and a fig leaf marriage for a German passport. The partnership with Leo Jogiches has become long distance (rocky) and she’s flourishing out on her own, developing long lasting and important friendships with the likes of Clara Zetkin and Karl Kautsky. Rosa Luxemburg’s dreams for the working class are big and bold and beautiful, recognising the decimation of human dignity that industrialised capitalism and militarism have unleashed. Rosa meets a devastating and violent end in January 1919, but her legacy and writings are vindicated with every fresh global crisis. 

Meanwhile the SPD party of Germany won’t stop growing, and there will be big bureaucratic changes and opportunities for the politically ambitious.
…also an oddly prescient rant about the demise of the Starmer premiership of the UK at the time of recording, early summer 2026, but look sorry not sorry, been carrying this around for a while. 
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🎟️ You can get in touch and book a tour of Berlin with Jonny: www.whitlams-berlin-tours.com.
Or now Pip: https://www.piproper.com/

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You can find Jonny online on YouTube, Instagram, BlueSky, and TikTok!
You can find Pip on Instagram

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Mixed and Produced by Alex Griffiths
https://www.instagram.com/alexgriffiths_music/
https://alexgriffiths.bandcamp.com/
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Sources:
Revolutionary Berlin: A Walking Guide, Nathaniel Flakin
Red Rosa, A Graphic Biography of Rosa Luxemburg, Kate Evans
The Socialist Manifesto, Bhaskar Sunkara
Rosa Luxemburg: Letters to Karl and Luise Kautsky from 1896 to 1918, Luise Kautsky, Translated: Louis P. Lochner: Marxist Internet Archive
Comrade and Lover: Rosa Luxemberg's Letters to Leo Jogiches
Elzbieta Ettinger
Love, Money, and Career in the Life of Rosa Luxemburg
Deborah Hertz
In Our Time Podcast: Rosa Luxemburg
Online Resource Rosa Luxemburg Stiftung: https://www.rosalux.de/en/

That’s right! Part 1! And you’d better enjoy this one, because it’s the most fun we’re gonna have on this topic! Imagine, you’re a young woman, charming, witty, a political genius with an unbridled passion for life and your fellow human beings. You make it to Switzerland, one of the only places women can study and meet the love/biggest political influence /worst pain in the arse of your life. He’s rich and good looking. Coalescing here are countless political refugees from multiple different countries, struggling to throw off the yolk of autocratic oppression, and you can switch between multiple different languages to engage with them. Something unstoppable seems to be swelling throughout Europe, an irrefutable appetite for massive change. And you have the intellectual acumen, unstoppable energy and resounding humanity that this cause will need to propel it into the twentieth century. God…can’t we just stay here?
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🎟️ You can get in touch and book a tour of Berlin with Jonny: www.whitlams-berlin-tours.com.
Or now Pip: https://www.piproper.com/

Don't forget to subscribe for more Berlin history every two weeks!

++++++

You can find Jonny online on YouTube, Instagram, BlueSky, and TikTok!
You can find Pip on Instagram

++++++

Mixed and Produced by Alex Griffiths
https://www.instagram.com/alexgriffiths_music/
https://alexgriffiths.bandcamp.com/
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Sources:
Revolutionary Berlin: A Walking Guide, Nathaniel Flakin
Red Rosa, A Graphic Biography of Rosa Luxemburg, Kate Evans
The Socialist Manifesto, Bhaskar Sunkara
Rosa Luxemburg: Letters to Karl and Luise Kautsky from 1896 to 1918, Luise Kautsky, Translated: Louis P. Lochner: Marxist Internet Archive
Comrade and Lover: Rosa Luxemberg's Letters to Leo Jogiches
Elzbieta Ettinger
Love, Money, and Career in the Life of Rosa Luxemburg
Deborah Hertz
In Our Time Podcast: Rosa Luxemburg
Online Resource Rosa Luxemburg Stiftung: https://www.rosalux.de/en/

Jumping off from Jonny’s brilliant discussion with historian Samuel Clowes Huneke about his book I Will Not Abandon You: Queer Women in Nazi Germany (2026), we talk about some of the stand out stories from this time and the strangely invisible, sometimes very dangerous status queer women occupied under the Third Reich.
Jonny and Sam chat on youtube watch here!
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 💸 Donations keep us running.
Click below to support the show 
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😆 Donate €20
😄 Donate €10 
🙂 Donate €5

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🎟️ You can get in touch and book a tour of Berlin with Jonny: www.whitlams-berlin-tours.com.
Or now Pip: https://www.piproper.com/

Don't forget to subscribe for more Berlin history every two weeks!

++++++

You can find Jonny online on YouTube, Instagram, BlueSky, and TikTok!
You can find Pip on Instagram

++++++

Mixed and Produced by Alex Griffiths
https://www.instagram.com/alexgriffiths_music/
https://alexgriffiths.bandcamp.com/
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Sources: 
Samuel Clowes Huneke, I Will Not Abandon You: Queer Women in Nazi Germany (2026)

Legendary pioneering film director, original bad boy auteur, visionary…bit of a dick. Fritz Lang’s personal life was almost as dramatic as his films. He’s in Paris for the febrile pre-war days of 1914, showing real acts of bravery on the Galician front. Driving to work at the UFA studios on the days of the Spartacist Uprisings and conveniently dodging Goebbels in 1933.

Not the most reliable narrator, particularly when it comes to his first wife and his departure from Berlin in 1933, but if there were ever a man of his time, it’s Fritz Lang. His work would span the turbulent era from silent to sound, and later from Europe to the US. Obsessive and dictatorial on set, he directed some of the most recognisable films of the Weimar era, Metropolis and M.
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 💸 Donations keep us running.
Click below to support the show 
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😄 Donate €10 
🙂 Donate €5

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🎟️ You can get in touch and book a tour of Berlin with Jonny: www.whitlams-berlin-tours.com.
Or now Pip: https://www.piproper.com/

Don't forget to subscribe for more Berlin history every two weeks!

++++++

You can find Jonny online on YouTube, Instagram, BlueSky, and TikTok!
You can find Pip on Instagram

++++++

Mixed and Produced by Alex Griffiths
https://www.instagram.com/alexgriffiths_music/
https://alexgriffiths.bandcamp.com/
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Sources:
Podcasts: In our time: Fritz Lang
You Must Remember This, Karina Longworth

Books: Fritz Lang The Nature of the Beast by Patrick Mcgilligan
Fritz Lang and Goebbels: Myth and Facts by Gösta Werner

Documentary: From Caligari to Hitler

Matti Geyer is here!!
And we’re talking about The biggest boy band 20th-century Germany had to offer!

The Comedian Harmonists, move over 5ive, get out of the way N’sync.
Who could forget ‘Mein Kleine Grune Kaktus’ (my small green cactus) 
‘Veronica der Lent ist da’…a song about Lent. The sexiest time of year 

Who’s the cute one? Which one loves his mamma? Most importantly who’s the bad boy?! (It’s…the Bass!).  All against the backdrop of the Third Reich and World War Two, wowzer!
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 💸 Donations keep us running.
Click below to support the show 
🤩 Donate €50
😆 Donate €20
😄 Donate €10 
🙂 Donate €5

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🎟️ You can get in touch and book a tour of Berlin with Jonny: www.whitlams-berlin-tours.com.
Or now Pip: https://www.piproper.com/

Don't forget to subscribe for more Berlin history every two weeks!

++++++

You can find Jonny online on YouTube, Instagram, BlueSky, and TikTok!
You can find Pip on Instagram

++++++

Mixed and Produced by Alex Griffiths
https://www.instagram.com/alexgriffiths_music/
https://alexgriffiths.bandcamp.com/
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