Events

The Heavy Burden of Modern German History: Imperialism, Wars, Genocide in the Twentieth Century, and the Fall-Out

Volker R. Berghahn

Seth Low Emeritus Professor of History
Columbia University

Lecture I: Debates Among Historians of Modern Germany, 1950-2024
Monday, October 7, 2024, 8 pm

Lecture II: Hitler’s War Aims: Genocide and World Domination
Monday, October 21, 2024, 8 pm

Lecture III: Learning from the Past after 1945: Ordinary Germans and Elites
Monday, October 28, 2024, 8pm

These lectures will examine the development of Germany in the twentieth- and twenty-first- centuries up to the year 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, 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.

Volker Berghahn, Seth Low Emeritus Professor of History at Columbia University, specializes in modern German history and European-American relations. He received his M.A. from the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill (1961) and his Ph.D. from the University of London (1964). He taught in England and Germany before coming to Brown University in 1988 and to Columbia ten years later. His publications include America and the Intellectual Cold Wars in Europe (2001); Quest for Economic Empire (ed., 1996); Imperial Germany (1995); The Americanization of West German Industry, 1945-1973 (1986); Modern Germany (1982); Der Tirpitz-Plan (1971); Europe in the Era of Two World Wars (2006); and most recently Industriegesellschaft und Kulturtransfer (2010).