Jeffrey Herf

Jeffrey C. Herf (born April 24, 1947) is an American historian of Modern European, in particular, modern German history. He is Distinguished University Professor of modern European at the University of Maryland, College Park.

Biography

He was born and raised in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. Herf's father escaped from Nazi Germany in 1937 and immigrated to the United States. His mother's parents left Ukraine to came to the United States before World War I. He grew up in a Reform Jewish family in Milwaukee, Wisconsin.

Herf graduated in history from the University of Wisconsin–Madison in 1969 and received his PhD in sociology from Brandeis University in 1981. Before joining the faculty at the University of Maryland, he taught at Harvard University, Ohio University, and Emory University.

In his 1984 book, '' Reactionary Modernism: Technology, Culture and Politics in Weimar and the Third Reich'', drawing on critical theory, in particular ideology critique, Herf coined the term "reactionary modernism" to describe the mixture of robust modernity and an affirmative stance toward progress combined with dreams of the past, a highly technological romanticism, which was a current in the thinking of ideologues of Weimar's "conservative revolution" and of currents in the Nazi Party and Nazi regime.

His subsequent books examine the political culture of West Germany before and during the battle over Euromissiles in the 1980s; memory and politics regarding the Holocaust in East and West Germany; Nazi Germany's domestic antisemitic propaganda; and Nazi propaganda aimed at North Africa and the Middle East; and the history of antagonism to Israel by the East German regime and West German leftist organizations from the Six Day War in 1967 to the Revolutions of 1989, the collapse of the European Communist states and the German reunification in 1990.

Herf has had a variety of fellowships including at Harvard University, the University of Chicago, the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, the German Historical Institute in Washington, the Yitzhak Rabin Center for Israel Studies in Tel Aviv, the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars in Washington, DC and at the American Academy in Berlin in Fall 2007.

He is married to the historian and artist Sonya Michel.

Awards and honors

*1996 Charles Frankel Prize (co-winner) of the Wiener Library and Institute of Contemporary History, ''Divided Memory''
*1998 George Louis Beer Prize, ''Divided Memory''
*2006 National Jewish Book Award

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