When Warriors Turn: Nationalism and the Meaning of the Great War in Ernst Jünger, Käthe Kollwitz, and Otto Dix

Helmut Walser Smith is a historian of modern Germany with particular interests in the history of nation-building and nationalism, religious history, and the history of antisemitism. He is the author of German Nationalism and Religious Conflict, 1870-1914 (Princeton 1995) and a number of edited collections, including The Oxford Handbook of Modern German History (Oxford 2011), Protestants, Catholics and Jews in Germany, 1800-1914 (Oxford 2001), and The Holocaust and Other Genocides (Nashville 2002).

His book, The Butcher’s Tale: Murder and Anti-Semitism in a German Town (New York 2002), received the Fraenkel Prize in Contemporary History and was an L.A. Times Non-Fiction Book of the Year. It has also been translated into French, Dutch, Polish, and German, where it received an accolade as one of the three most innovative works of history published in 2002. Smith has also authored The Continuities of German History: Nation, Religion, and Race across the Long Nineteenth Century (Cambridge 2008) and is currently working on a book on German conceptions of nation before, during, and after nationalism.

This is a public lecture.