Associate Professor of History Jeffrey Herf still can remember the tales of life in Nazi Germany that his father would tell him as a boy growing up in Milwaukee. Those tales proved to be the genesis for Herf’s academic career, which has focused on the land o f his Jewish ancestors, and led to his award-winning book, Divided Memory: The Nazi Past in the Two Germanys ($29.95 hardcover), recently published by Harvard University Press.
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Associate Professor of History Jeffrey Herf. Photos: Rick Fatica |
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The manuscript for Divided Memory won the 1996 Fraenkel Prize in Contemporary History from the Institute for Contemporary History and the Wiener Library in London .
While researching the book, Herf was among the first Western historians to examine records from the East German Ministry of Security that were unavailable prior to the reunification of Germany.
“Divided Memory is about East and West German attitudes towards the Holocaust — what they said and did, and did not say and did not do about the Holocaust — and other crimes of the Nazi era,” Herf says. “While there is a great deal of commentary on facing the Nazi past, Divided Memory is one of the first comparative historical studies of how the two German governments faced their common past. I was fortunate to be working on these issues at the same time the archives of the former Communist government became available.”
After the Nuremberg Trials following World War II in which Nazi leaders were made to answer for their war crimes, West Germans went into a denial of the past, Herf says. At the same time, Jews were persecuted in East Germany.
“Amnesia and denial of a Nazi past is an important chapter of the first decade of the Cold War in the West,” Herf says. “In West Germany, justice was delayed, and many times denied, because it was unpopular. In East Germany, the Cold War was accompanied by the emergence of anti-Western and anti-Jewish policies.”
Herf, 50, completed a bachelor’s degree in history at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, a master’s in history at the State University of New York at Buffalo, and a Ph.D. in sociology at Brandeis University.
Herf lectured about his research at numerous universities and institutions, including Harvard University, Amherst College, the American Historical Association and the Institute for Contemporary German Studies, before joining the Ohio University faculty in 1996.
While Herf’s inspiration to study German history stems from his personal connection to the Holocaust, he hopes to contribute to a wider understanding of postwar Germany.
“My sympathies instead are with other voices, then and now, that expressed hope for a liberal democracy resting on clear memory and justice,” he says. “I hope that understanding why those hopes remained unfulfilled then, and subsequently were only partially fulfilled, will contribute to their full and prompt realization in other times and places.”
— Dwight Woodward, BA ‘81, MSJ ‘89
