Biography Between Structure and Agency: Central European Lives in International Historiography(9 Studies in German History)

While bookstore shelves around the world have never ceased to display best-selling “life-and-letters” biographies in prominent positions, the genre became less popular among academic historians during the Cold War decades. Their main concern then was with political and socioeconomic structures, institutions, and organizations, or—more recently—with the daily lives of ordinary people and small communities. The contributors to this volume—all well known senior historians—offer self-critical reflections on problems they encountered when writing biographies themselves. Some of them also deal with topics specific to Central Europe, such as the challenges of writing about the lives of both victims and perpetrators. Although the volume concentrates on European historiography, its strong methodological and conceptual focus will be of great interest to non-European historians wrestling with the old “structure-versus-agency” question in their own work. Contributors: Volker R. Berghahn, Hartmut Berghoff, Hilary Earl, Jan Eckel, Willem Frijhoff, Ian Kershaw, Simone Lässig, Karl Heinrich Pohl, John C. G. Röhl, Angelika Schaser, Joachim Radkau, Cornelia Rauh-Kühne, Mark Roseman, Christoph Strupp and Michael Wildt.

Table of Contents:
Preface Chapter 1. Introduction: Biography in Modern History—Modern Historiography in Biography Simone Lässig Chapter 2. Biography and the Historian: Opportunities and Constraints Ian Kershaw Chapter 3. Dreams and Nightmares: Writing the Biography of Kaiser Wilhelm II John C.G. Röhl Chapter 4. Gustav Stresemann: A German Bürger? Karl Heinrich Pohl Chapter 5. Women’s Biographies—Men’s History? Angelika Schaser Chapter 6. Historiography, Biography, and Experience: The Case of Hans Rothfels Jan Eckel Chapter 7. A Historian’s Life in Biographical Perspective: Johan Huizinga Christoph Strupp Chapter 8. The Heroic Ecstasy of Drunken Elephants: The Substrate of Nature in Max Weber—A Missing Link between his Life and Work Joachim Radkau Chapter 9. Generational Experience and Genocide: A Biographical Approach to Nazi Perpetrators Michael Wildt Chapter 10. Criminal Biographies and Biographies of Criminals: Understanding the History of War Crimes Trials and Perpetrator “Routes to Crime” Using Biographical Method Hilary Earl Chapter 11. From Himmler’s Circle of Friends to the Lions Club: The Career of a Provincial Nazi Leader Hartmut Berghoff and Cornelia Rauh-Kühne Chapter 12. Contexts and Contradictions: Writing the Biography of a Holocaust Survivor Mark Roseman Chapter 13. The Improbable Biography: Uncommon Sources, a Moving Identity, a Plural Story? Willem Frijhoff Chapter 14. Structuralism and Biography: Some Concluding Thoughts on the Uncertainties of a Historiographical Genre Volker R. Berghahn Bibliography Notes on Contributors

About the Author :
Volker Berghahn is the Seth Low Professor of History at Columbia University where he moved in 1998 from Brown University, after a longer spell of teaching at the University of Warwick in England. The author of more than a dozen books, he has long been interested in the challenges of modern biography. In 1993, he published a study of the industrialist Otto A. Friedrich and his role in the reconstruction of West German industry after 1945. His America and the Intellectual Cold Wars in Europe uses Shepard Stone—renowned journalist, Ford Foundation officer in charge of its European and international programs, and the first director of the Berlin Aspen Institute—as a window to the trans-Atlantic world of American and European intellectuals and scholars, many of whom were associated with the Congress for Cultural Freedom during the Cold War.