Burden of German History

Konrad H. Jarausch was the Lury Professsor of European Civilization at the University of North Carolina and the past director of the Zentrum für Zeithstorische Forschung in Potsdam/Germany. He is a prize-winning author and/or editor of about fifty books on German and European history. His latest volumes include Broken Lives: How Ordinary Germans Experienced the Twentieth Century (Princeton, 2018) and Embattled Europe: A Progressive Alternative (Princeton, 2021). A former president of the German Studies Association and Chair of the Conference Group for Central European History, he has taught both in the US and Germany and mentored about five dozen PhDs.

• List of IllustrationsAbbreviationsAcknowledgementsPrefaceIntroduction: A Poisoned PastChapter 1. Child of WarChapter 2. Adventure AmericaChapter 3. Becoming a HistorianChapter 4. Exploring German PastsChapter 5. The Wild EastChapter 6. Southern Part of HeavenConclusion: German LessonsA Note on SourcesBooks by Konrad H. JarauschSelected Bibliography

“Konrad Jarausch’s academic memoir reveals a “hybrid identity” of many dimensions: an historian of Germany and Europe’s periods of both “catastrophe” and “recovery”; an historian of both of Germany’s post-war regimes—the “re-civilized” democracy in the west and the “welfare dictatorship” in the east; an historian of multiple methodologies; and finally a “transatlantic mediator” and “double insider” with a distinguished career on each side of the ocean.” • Christopher R. Browning, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill