Detlev Peukert und die NS-Forschung (=Beiträge zur Geschichte des Nationalsozialismus 31)

Detlev Peukert, as readers of this journal know, was one of the most prolific German historians of the post-war era, even if his work was tragically cut short by AIDS in 1990, just before turning forty. Working in both a scholarly and a public vein, he wrote major works in modern German history on social policy, Communists, youth and resistance to fascism. He also wrote a string of extremely influential articles, like the ‘The Final Solution from the Spirit of Science’, still often cited. And he composed stunning, provocative works of synthesis, like his book on The Weimar Republic: Crisis Years of Classical Modernity, which placed the so-called ‘superfluous generation’ in the middle of our thinking about the turbulence of the period, and opened a space to a wider social, political and cultural interpretation of the fraught republic; and Inside Nazi Germany: Conformity, Opposition and Racism in Everyday Life, which centred the destructive dynamic between community and outsiders in an interpretation that not only shaped future scholarship but that also changed in fundamental ways how we taught the history of the Third Reich. Finally, towards the end of his short life, he developed an interest in economic development and dependency theory, and was working on the history of Santo Domingo.

German · Nazi Germany · Nazism · Political science · Politics · Sociology · Weimar Republic · European history and politics · German History and Society · German Social Sciences and History · History · Law