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, the Holocaust, and on West and East Germany during the Cold War. In November 2009, Yale University Press published his book Nazi Propaganda for the Arab World. It examines the Third Reich's efforts to diffuse its ideology to North Africa and the Middle East during World War II. It is the recipient of the German Studies Association 2011 Sybil Halpern Milton prize awarded every second year for work on the Nazi Germany and the Holocaust, and of the 2010 Washington Institute for Near East Policy bronze book prize for work on the modern Middle East. The Jewish Enemy: Nazi Propaganda During World War II and the Holocaust (Harvard, 2006) examined 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. It received the 2006 National Jewish Book Award for work on the Holocaust. 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. Reactionary Modernism: Technology, Culture and Politics in Weimar and the Third Reich (Cambridge, 1984), interpreted 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) was a study of 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.
He is associated with the University's Gildenhorn Institute for Israel Studies. 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, Internationale Politik, Die Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, Die Welt, Die Zeit, The National Interest, The American Interest and The Washington Post. He joined the University of Maryland Department of History in 2000 after teaching at Ohio University in Athens, Emory, Holy Cross and Harvard.
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
Vita
Current Research
My current research project is entitled: "A protean antagonism: Anti-Zionism in Nazi Germany, the German Democratic Republic (East Germany), and in the New Left and its Aftermath in the 1970s and 1980s in West Germany and in Austria."
