Anne Berg

Anne Berg is best described as a historian of destruction, deeply interested in how ordinary people are implicated in and actively shore up violent systems of race-making, waste-making, and war-making. Her research proceeds along several intersecting tracks, tracing the mobility of materials, practices, images, and ideas in Nazi Germany and beyond. Her work moves between micro-historical, national, transnational, comparative, and indeed global perspectives. She has written about cities and film, about waste, about war and genocide, about carceral systems and policing. 

Anne has authored two books. The most recent, Empire of Rags and Bones: Waste and War in Nazi Germany (New York: Oxford University Press, 2024), which won the 2023 Ernst Fraenkel Prize, examines the disturbing connections between waste management and genocide in the Third Reich. Her first book, On Screen and Off: Cinema and the Making of Nazi Hamburg (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2022) details the processes by which local actors, such as welfare workers, cultural experts, and administrators transformed Hamburg into a Nazi city.