2115 Francis Scott Key
University of Maryland
College Park, MD 20742
phone: 301-405-7667
fax: 301-314-9399
Email: jherf@umd.edu

          Professor Herf's research and publications examine Europe and Germany's political culture over the breaks and continuities of the twentieth century. In spring 2006, Harvard University Press published his fourth book, The Jewish Enemy: Nazi Propaganda During World War II and the Holocaust. The work examines the Nazi regime's radical anti-Semitic propaganda as a bundle of hatreds, an explanatory framework, and effort to legitimate mass murder. His first book, Reactionary Modernism: Technology, Culture and Politics in Weimar and the Third Reich (Cambridge University Press, 1984) has become a standard work and was published in Greek, Italian, Japanese, Portuguese and Spanish translation. War By Other Means: Soviet Power, West German Resistance and the Battle of the Euromissiles (The Free Press, 1991) examined the intersection of political culture and power politics in the last major European confrontation of the Cold War. Divided Memory: The Nazi Past in the Two Germanys (Harvard University Press, 1997) was the co-winner of the Fraenkel Prize of the Institute of Contemporary History and Wiener Library in London in 1996. In 1998 it received the George Lewis Beer Prize of the American Historical Association. Jeffrey Herf has lectured widely in the United States, Europe, and Israel, and has been the recipient of fellowships from the Institute for Advanced Studies in Princeton, National Endowment for the Humanities, the German Marshall Fund, the German Academic Exchange Service, the Max Planck Gesellschaft, the Fulbright program, the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum and the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars. His current interests include work on varieties of opposition to and debates about communism in Weimar Germany, Nazi Germany and West Germany during the Cold War and in unified Germany covering the period from 1919 to the 1990s; and the diffusion of national Socialist and fascist ideas and propaganda beyond Germany, within Europe and outside Europe from the 1930s to the 1950s. He is also working on a collection of essays on ideas and politics in twentieth century German history.

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