History

Beginning with the 1871 unification of Germany, and ending with the Third Reich’s defeat in the Second World War, this course explores numerous themes, including: political and cultural innovation, diplomacy, violence, gender relations, everyday life under democracy and dictatorship, memory and commemoration, war and genocide, and the changing place of Germany within Europe. We discuss the fractures and divisions within Imperial German society, the home and fighting fronts of the First World War, the short-lived but influential Weimar Republic, the rise of Adolf Hitler and the Volksgemeinschaft of the Third Reich, and the Nazi “Final Solution to the Jewish Problem” in Occupied Europe.