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 […]