Jeffrey Herf

Jeffrey C. Herf (born April 24, 1947) is an American historian of modern Europe, particularly modern Germany. He is professor emeritus of modern European history 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 emigrated to the United States. His mother's parents left Ukraine and 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 Weimar's "conservative revolution" and in the Nazi Party and 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; Nazi propaganda aimed at North Africa and the Middle East; 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; and international support for and opposition to establishing the state of Israel, 1945–1949.

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, D.C., and at the American Academy in Berlin in 2007.