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

          Jeffrey Herf studies the intersection of ideas and politics in modern European history, specializing in twentieth century Germany. He has published extensively on Germany during the Weimar Republic, Nazi Germany and on West and East Germany during the Cold War. The Jewish Enemy: Nazi Propaganda During World War II and the Holocaust (Harvard, 2006) offers a new look at the Nazi regime’s translation of radical anti-Semitism into the conspiracy theory that shaped its public narrative of World War II and its equally public defense of a policy of “exterminating” Europe’s Jews. He has followed this work with a history of Nazi Germany’s propaganda aimed at the Arab and Muslim societies of the Middle East during World War II and the Holocaust and hence of the efforts to diffuse Nazi ideology and radical anti-Semitism beyond Europe.. “Nazi Propaganda in the Middle East” is forthcoming with Yale University Press in fall 2009. His Reactionary Modernism: Technology, Culture and Politics in Weimar and the Third Reich (Cambridge, 1984) examined the simultaneous embrace of modern technology and rejection of liberal modernity by right-wing intellectuals. The work became a standard work and has been published in Greek, Italian, Japanese, Portuguese and Spanish translations. War By Other Means: Soviet Power, West German Resistance and the Battle of the Euromissiles (Free Press, 1991) examined the connection between changing political culture within West Germany and power politics in the last major confrontation of the Cold War in Europe, the dispute over nuclear weapons between the Soviet Union and the Western Alliance during the 1980s. Divided Memory: The Nazi Past in the Two Germanys (Harvard, 1997) traced the varieties of memory and avoidance about the Holocaust offered by West and East German political figures from the 1940s through the 1990s. It was one of the first works to make extensive use of the then recently opened East German Communist Party and government archives. It was a 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 . He has published numerous articles in scholarly journals. He has received a research fellowships from the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, the American Academy in Berlin, the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, the German Marshall Fund, the German Academic Exchange Service, and the Fulbright Program. He is a member of the editorial board of Central European History, and The Journal of Israeli History. His essays and reviews have appeared in The New Republic, Partisan Review, Internationale Politik, Die Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, Die Welt, Die Zeit, The National Interest, and The Washington Post.

Teaching Interests

Professor Herf teaches undergraduate and graduate courses that explore the connection between ideas and politics 20th Century Europe. His courses include 20th Century Europe, Nazi Germany, Twentieth Century European Intellectual History, Europe Since 1945 and 20th Century Germany. His graduate students work on a wide variety of topics on German and European political and intellectual history in the 19th and 20th centuries. His doctoral students have recently completed dissertations on the memory of the Eastern Front in World War II in postwar East and West Germany; the “radio wars” between major broadcasting stations in early Cold War Berlin; academics in Nazi Germany; the German engineers and scientists working on the Nazi missile program; and the Alternative Liste political party in 1980s Berlin. Current doctoral students War; French policy towards African colonies in Vichy and in the postwar era; and the reception of American blues and the emergence and impact of British rock-n-roll in the 1960s. In addition to relevant archives in Europe, his students make extensive use of the U.S. National Archives (located next to campus), the Library of Congress, German Historical Institute, United States Holocaust Memorial Museum and other institutions in the Washington area with important resources for research on modern European history.

Recent Lectures and Essays:

“Broadcasting Anti-Semitism to the Middle East: Nazi Propaganda during World War II and the Holocaust,” Vidal Sassoon Center for the Study of Anti-Semitism, Hebrew University of Jerusalem, June 3, 2008.

“Comparative perspectives on anti-Semitism, radical anti-Semitism in the Holocaust and American white racism,” Journal of Genocide Research, Volume 9, Issue 4 December 2007 , pages 575 - 600

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