16922
Seminar
Reading Hitler: (auto)biography as history
Daniel Louis Nethery
Comments
Workload and assessment: During the semester you will be required to read around 20 pages each week. You will qualify for 5 ECTS points if your attendance is satisfactory, you engage with the course materials, and you pass the examination at the end of the semester.
Is this course for me? This course is open to all students. There are no prerequisites.
Subject: Ian Kershaw argued that the legacy of Adolf Hitler ‘belongs to us all,’ and that ‘part of that legacy is the continuing duty to seek understanding of how Hitler was possible.’ For that purpose Kershaw saw biography as indispensable. But he warned that biography ‘runs the natural risk of over-personalizing complex historical developments, [and] over-emphasizing the role of the individual in shaping and determining events.’ Biography, then, poses dilemmas which arise whenever we seek to interpret human affairs, past or present.
Program: We will draw on several biographies of Hitler and of those close to him to study important episodes in his personal and political career. We will read about his childhood, his experience of war and peace, and his accumulation of power, first in the Nazi party, then in the German parliament and government. We will consider his role in the drafting of the Nuremberg laws and in the diplomacy leading to the Munich agreement, and discuss the ways in which biographers have addressed the question of his personal responsibility for the war and for the holocaust. And we will see that even his death gave rise to a debate over the role of government in the dissemination of information, which reappeared in a different aspect when historians came to edit his autobiography, Mein Kampf, seventy years later.
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16 Class schedule
Regular appointments
Tue, 2024-10-15 12:00 - 14:00
Tue, 2024-10-22 12:00 - 14:00
Tue, 2024-10-29 12:00 - 14:00
Tue, 2024-11-05 12:00 - 14:00
Tue, 2024-11-12 12:00 - 14:00
Tue, 2024-11-19 12:00 - 14:00
Tue, 2024-11-26 12:00 - 14:00
Tue, 2024-12-03 12:00 - 14:00
Tue, 2024-12-10 12:00 - 14:00
Tue, 2024-12-17 12:00 - 14:00
Tue, 2025-01-07 12:00 - 14:00
Tue, 2025-01-14 12:00 - 14:00
Tue, 2025-01-21 12:00 - 14:00
Tue, 2025-01-28 12:00 - 14:00
Tue, 2025-02-04 12:00 - 14:00
Tue, 2025-02-11 12:00 - 14:00
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