Cardiff School of History, Archaeology and Religion

Research Interests

My research concentrates on the cultural, political, and military history of the twentieth century in Europe. I have focused particularly on the role and place of music in Germany after 1945; on music in the early GDR; and on the relationship between different forms of music and concepts of citizenship in modern Germany. I have also written about the end of the Second World War in Europe, and most recently I have written a full length biography of Joseph Goebbels. I am now devoting attention to British culture, the arts, and the construction of memory during and after the First World War, and am researching for a forthcoming book on this subject.

Selected Publications

Monographs:

Toby Thacker, The End of the Third Reich: Defeat, Denazification, and Nuremberg, 1944–1946 (Stroud: Tempus, 2006)

Toby Thacker, Music after Hitler, 1945-1955 (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2007)

Toby Thacker, Joseph Goebbels: Life and Death (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009)

Essay:

Toby Thacker, “‘Renovating’ Bach and Handel: New Musical Biographies in the German Democratic Republic”, in Jolanta Pekacz (ed.), Musical Biography: Towards New Paradigms (Ashgate, 2006), pp. 17-41.

Research Projects

I am currently working on a monograph on British culture, the arts, and the construction of memory during and after the First World War. This will focus on the wartime experience of a group of selected composers, painters, and writers; it will explore how that experience was reflected in their creative work, and how that in turn contributed to the construction of a British memory of the war.

Research Group, Centre or Network

1. I am contributing to an interdisciplinary research group based in Austria, the “Arbeitsgemeinschaft Klang(welten)” exploring the ways in which music works in society, and in different historical and societal contexts.
2. I am contributing to a separate international network exploring the theme of ‘Music and International Relations’, based in Cologne;

   3.and I am speaking in September 2012 at an international conference to be held in Cardiff on the theme of political violence.

Additional Information

I teach a Year Three Advanced Option on ‘Biography and German History, 1870-1945’; a Year Two course on ‘Britain and the First World War’; and I contribute to team taught Year One courses on modern history.

Impact and Engagement

As well as giving lectures to sixth form students on Nazi Germany, I am representing Cardiff University on a Steering Group for the Centenary Commemoration of the First World War in Cardiff; and on a panel coordinating the digitization of selected documents relating to the ‘Welsh experience of World War One 1914-1918’, which is being run from the National Library of Wales at Aberystwyth.

I regularly review books for a range of scholarly journals, including Music and Letters, German History, European History Quarterly,Central European History, and Gender History.

I have spoken on a number of radio programmes for BBC Radio 3, Radio 4, and for BBC Radio Wales; most recently on Radio 4’s programme ‘Bach’s Choir’, broadcast in March 2012. I am contributing to a television documentary on the Welsh journalist Gareth Jones which is being premiered at the Friontline Club in London on 6 July 2012, and is due to be shown on BBC 4 in October 2012.