The three lectures will examine the development of Germany in the 20th and 21 centuries up to 2024. As that development has led to at times heated debates among historians and social scientists, the first lecture will analyze the most important controversies from 1950 to the present in an attempt to provide the larger historical context. The second lecture will present the latest scholarship on Germany’s role in two world wars, culminating in the genocide of the Jews of Europe and other minorities up to 1945. The third lecture will discuss how the Germans got out of the catastrophe of World War II and how, with Allied help, they reconstructed their political system, their economy and their intellectual and cultural life, raising the question of their capacity to learn from a horrific past.
