JEFFREY HERF
Profile
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. 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 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 and received a variety
of distinguished research fellowships. He is a member of the editorial
board of Central European History, and The Journal of Israeli History,
was a Contributing Editor to Partisan Review and has contributed
articles, reviews and essays to The New Republic (print and online
editions), Internationale Politik, Die Frankfurter Allgemeine
Zeitung, Die Welt, Die Zeit,
The National Interest, and The Washington Post.
He is the Convener of the European Caucus and of the European Workshop seminar
in the Department of History. He joined the University of Maryland Department of History in 2000 after teaching at Ohio University in Athens, Emory, Holy Cross and Harvard. In fall 2007 he is a Fellow at the American Academy in Berlin.
Current Project
Professor Herf is beginning two projects. The first is an examination of Communism, the West, and the Jews in German political culture in the Nazi era and then in the postwar and Cold War decades. The second examines the lineages, comparisons and differences between Nazism, fascism and radical Islam.
Selected Publications
Reactionary Modernism:
Technology, Culture and Politics in Weimar
and the Third Reich (Cambridge
University Press, 1984)
War By Other Means: Soviet Power, West German
Resistance and the Battle
of the Euromissiles (The Free Press, 1991)
Divided Memory: The Nazi Past in the Two Germanys (Harvard University Press, 1997)
The Jewish Enemy: Nazi Propaganda During
World War II and the Holocaust (Harvard
University Press, 2006)
Guest Editor, “Convergence and Divergence:
Anti-Semitism and Anti-Zionism in Historical Perspective,” The Journal
of Israeli History, Vol. 25, No. 2 (Spring 2006)
Teaching Interests
Professor Herf
teaches undergraduate and graduate courses that explore the connection between
ideas and politics both within societies and between states. 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. Recently completed PhDs have dealt with 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 are working on the memory of the Eastern Front in East and
West Germany; radio and politics in West and East Berlin in the first decade of
the Cold 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 rockers in the 1960s. His students make extensive use of the
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.
Education
B.A. in History, University
of Wisconsin-Madison,
1969. Phi Betta
Kappa
M.A. in History, State
University
of New York
at Buffalo,
1971
Ph.D. in Sociology, Brandeis University,
1981
Link to full CV
Recent Essays and Lectures
For "An Age of Murder: Ideology and Terror in Germany, 1969-1991," Opening Lecture, German Historical Institute, Washington series on “The ‘German Autumn’ of 1977: Terror, State, and Society in West Germany,” delivered at the German Historical Institute in Washington on Thursday, September 27, 2007 click on the following link.
