Natalie Scholz is Senior Lecturer of modern and contemporary history at the historical department of the University of Amsterdam. She has done her Ph.D. at the University of Münster, Germany. Previously, she worked as a Humboldt guestresearcher at the Free University Amsterdam and as a Lise-Meitner-fellow at the University of Cologne. She held a research fellowship at the Institute for Advanced Study Konstanz in 2012 and at the Netherlands Institute for Advanced Study in 2013-14.

Personal research statement

My research focusses on the cultural history of the political in modern Europe (France and Germany) with a special interest in popular representations, including visual, material and memory culture. I have published on the imaginations of the restoration monarchy in early nineteenth century France and more recently on the connection between commodity culture and the political in the postwar period. In my work, I try to understand the culturally and emotionally mediated intersection between modern political regimes and national, ethnic and gender identities.

Fields of interests

Cultural history of the political in 19th and 20th century Europe (especially France and Germany), imaginations of the political, symbolic representations, material culture, memory studies, gender history, visual culture, film and advertising.

New book

Redeeming Objects. A West German Mythology (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2023).

Redeeming Objects traces the afterlives of things. Out of the rubble of World War II and the Holocaust, the Federal Republic of Germany emerged, and with it a foundational myth of the “economic miracle.” In this narrative, a new mass consumer society based on the production, export, and consumption of goods would redeem West Germany from its Nazi past and drive its rebirth as a truly Western nation. Turning this narrative on its head, the book shows that West Germany’s consumerist ideology took shape through the reinvention of commodities previously tied to Nazism into symbols of Germany’s modernity, economic supremacy, and international prestige.

Postwar advertising, film, and print culture sought to divest mass-produced goods—such as the Volkswagen and modern interiors—of their fascist legacies. But the postwar representations were saturated with unacknowledged references to the Nazi past and older German colonial fantasies. Drawing on a vast array of popular and highbrow publications and films, Redeeming Objects adds a new perspective to debates about postwar reconstruction, memory, and consumerism. 

• “a bold, meticulous and unflinching examination … thoroughly researched, thought-provoking” “Scholz’s innovative study of West Germany’s material culture reveals the unbroken continuity of entrenched postwar Nazi beliefs and worldviews in a visceral manner … it definitely has the potential to fuel many scholarly seminars and new, cutting-edge research.” (Central European History)
• “Scholz explores the afterlife of Nazism as a repurposing and remythologizing process. Scholars have yet to learn how to account for the ‘affective legacies’ of the Third Reich, or even to realize that they existed. Scholz’s analysis of the postwar fabric of Nazi myth showcases a subject and an approach that could be of great consequence for contemporary German and, more generally, post-totalitarian scholarship.” —Michael Geyer, University of Chicago
• "A fascinating, meticulous, and seminal study ... Exceptionally well organized and presented, "Redeeming Objects" is groundbreaking." —Midwest Book Review 
• “Scholz is at her best when dissecting the Volkswagen Beetle and the transformation of West German interior design, showing convincingly how claims of ‘timeless’ design could replace unpleasant references to the Nazified patterns.” —CHOICE Reviews
• "Scholz' book is a rich rereading of West Germany's early material culture, one that opens up a range of unsettling questions about how the ghosts of the past hid in plain sight at the time.”  —Journal of Design History
• “Redeeming Objects is a necessary and significant contribution to a wider scholarly movement that has sought to reappraise the legacy of German modernism. … Scholz’s thoughtful discussions of positionality are a particular strength of the work. Still a relative rarity in the field, this is a powerful example of how unflinching personal reflection can greatly enhance historical enquiry.” —German History
• "Redeeming Objects ... helpfully unites long-running scholarly discussions of Nazi continuities in the FRG with the history of consumer culture and postcolonial studies, while calling due attention to the affective and symbolic ambiguities of these objects."  —German Studies Review 
• "This challenging, visionary, and at times profound look at postwar ruptures and continuities ... offers a new way to conceptualize postwar West German history, which integrates familiar historical topics: sites of memory, the Nazi past, consumer society, racial ideologies, and imperialist imaginaries. What emerges is an uncanny whole, a broad perspective on the time period that should spark further historical studies." —Joe Perry on the George L. Mosse Program in History blog.
• "In this highly engaging book, Natalie Scholz alternately reverses and revises the narrative of West Germany's economic miracle ... Scholz's book is significant for its integration and careful examination of many media types and the seriousness with which it scrutinizes film and advertising as elemental initiators of our pasts, presents, and futures." —Film & History
• "This book has much to recommend it as a study of the ‘relationship between the political meanings of mass consumption under Nazism and during the early Federal Republic’... a well-written, persuasive, and, above all, engaging account of West German consumer culture in the early post-war years." —Modern Language Review

• Redeeming Objects. A West German Mythology (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2023). 

“Scholz’s analysis of the postwar fabric of Nazi myth showcases a subject and an approach that could be of great consequence for contemporary German and, more generally, post-totalitarian scholarship.” —Michael Geyer, University of Chicago

• Die imaginierte Restauration. Repräsentationen der Monarchie im Frankreich Ludwigs XVIII. (Darmstadt: Verlag der Wissenschaftlichen Buchgesellschaft, 2006). 

"How to legitimate the monarchy in Restoration France is the subject of this imaginative and stimulating dissertation. (...) This is an important, original, scholarly and well-written monograph that should attract the attention of all historians working on French history of theperiod 1770-1830."  —Tim Blanning, English Historical Review

• Représentation et pouvoir. La politique symbolique en France (1789-1830), co-edited together with Christina Schröer, with an introduction by Jean-Clément Martin (Rennes: Presses Universitaires de Rennes, 2007).
• genus (ed.), Kultur, Geschlecht, Körper (Münster: agenda-Verlag 1999) (as co-editor). 

• '"A Final Solution for Humanity"? Modern Design and the Ambivalence of Redemption in Post-War West Germany', Cultural History 12:1 (2023).
• ‘Grauzone des Heroischen. Der Volkswagen als Gründungsmythos’, Die Neue Rundschau 1 (2021), special issue Braucht Demokratie Helden?
• Ghosts and Miracles. The Volkswagen as Imperial Debris in Postwar West Germany (Comparative Studies in Society and History 62:3, 2020, open access).

• Interview "Volkswagen" (Online exhibition "Schuldig Design"/"Guilty Design", Design Museum Den Bosch, recorded September 2023)
• Book presentation Redeeming Objects. A West German Mythology at Spui 25, 7 March 2024.
• “The Un/Homeliness of Postwar Cosmopolitanism. The Case of West Germany”, keynote lecture, international colloquium “Aesthetics in the Center IV. Aesthetics of Travel”, June 28, 2021, Brasília (online).

I am coordinator of the History Master (in Dutch) and regularly teach the following courses:

• Core course Master Geschiedenis
• Core course Duitslandstudies
• Master elective "Civilization. A western or a global concept?"

Previous courses include:

• Wetenschapsfilosofie (Historische Wetenschappen) and Geschiedfilosofie
• BA Verdiepingsvak II: Commercial culture and the meanings of race in Europe (19th and 20th century)
• BA elective: The postwar moment in Germany as historical experience

Thesis supervision

I supervise theses that broadly relate to my expertise in the field of 19th and 20th cultural history.

Selection of supervised MA theses since 2018:

• Puck Limburg, Crafting Images of a Female Painter. The conflicting and incongruent narratives about Elisabeth Vigée-Lebrun in late 18th, early 19th-century France, Research Master Thesis 2024 (Prix de Paris laureate 2025).
• Nora Gosselink, ‘Bijgeloof’ en bewijsdrang. De ontwikkeling van astrologie als vakgebied in de Weimarrepubliek en de beginjaren van Nazi-Duitsland (1918-1939), Research Master Thesis 2024.
• Daan Uhde, Mytisch Europa? Een kritisch onderzoek naar het concept van moderniteit via het post- en dekoloniale werk van Dipesh Chakrabarty en Walter Mignolo, Master Thesis 2024.
• Laura Molijn, “De tweede Germaensche invaesie”. Het verschil tussen emoties en beeldvorming over de Bondsrepubliek bij de pamflettenactie “Deutsche nicht erwünscht” (1954), Master Thesis 2024.
• Xander Ziedses des Plantes, Berlin Techno Subculture 1988-1994. Uncovering Hidden Gaps in the Mainstream Narrative, Master Thesis 2024.
• Romane Voet, 'Wat deed Joséphine met ons koelbloedigen?' Josephine Bakers spektakel van exotisme en moderniteit in Nederland, 1925-1928, Research Master Thesis 2023.
• Willem Buist, De Balkan, eeuwenlang beschavings(on)begrip. Een onderzoek naar het Balkanistische discours in Nederland en het beschavingsbegrip aan het begin van de twintigste eeuw, Master Thesis 2023.
• Melle van Dammen, Utopisme, schuld en verlossing: temporele ontwrichting in naoorlogs Nederland, Research Master Thesis 2023.
• Emma Anker, "Ook de gedenktekenen hebben hun geschiedenis". Studie naar de omgang  met Napoleontisch erfgoed in de Bataafse herinnering in het Verenigd Koninkrijk der Nederlanden in de lange negentiende eeuw (1800-1925), Research Master Thesis 2023.
• Tijmen van Voorthuizen, "Niet onze omgeving maakt ons Homo-Sexueel". Ervaring van homoseksualiteit in Amsterdam, 1890-1940, Research Master Thesis 2022. (thesis prize UvA faculty of humanities 2023, Volkskrant IISG thesis prize 2023)
• Jerry Verschuren, Our Future Demise. The changing face of dystopian images in sci-fi movies between 1950 and 1990, Research Master Thesis, 2022.
• Xayide van der Schaaff, 'Van de propoagandamiddelen'. Propaganda en de Nederlandse vrouwenkiesrechtstrijd, 1894-1919, Research Master Thesis 2021.
• Wouter van Maanen, Een conflict tussen het Oosten en het Westen. Occidentalisme en oriëntalisme in Nederland tijdens de Indonesische onafhankelijkheidsoorlog, 1945-1949, Research Master Thesis, 2019.
• Ezra Engelsberg, Veranderlijk Verleden. Historische Werkelijkheid en representatie bij Saul Friedländer en W.G. Sebald, Research Master Thesis, 2019.
• Aimée Plukker, Roman Holiday. The Marshall Plan, American tourism to Rome, and the creation of the West (1945-1957), Research Master Thesis, 2018. (Volkskrant IISG thesis prize 2018)