As one of the leading historians of Modern Europe and an internationally acclaimed scholar for the past five decades, Konrad H. Jarausch presents a sustained academic reflection on the post-war German effort to cope with the guilt of the Holocaust amongst a generation of scholars too young to have been perpetrators. Ranging from his war-time childhood to Americanization as a foreign student, from his development as a professional historian to his directorship of the Zentrum für Zeithistorische Forschung and concluding with his mentorship of dozens of PhDs, The Burden of German History reflects on the emergence of a self-critical historiography of a twentieth-century Germany that was wrestling with the responsibility for war and genocide. This partly professional and partly personal autobiography explores a wide range of topics including the development of German historiography and its methodological debates, the interdisciplinary teaching efforts in German studies, and the role of scholarly organizations and institutions.

Konrad H. Jarausch is the Lury Professsor of European Civilization at the University of North Carolina and the past director of the Zentrum für Zeithstorische Forschung in Potsdam/Germany. He is a prize-winning author and/or editor of about fifty books on German and European history. His latest volumes include Broken Lives: How Ordinary Germans Experienced the Twentieth Century (Princeton, 2018) and Embattled Europe: A Progressive Alternative (Princeton, 2021). A former president of the German Studies Association and Chair of the Conference Group for Central European History, he has taught both in the US and Germany and mentored about five dozen PhDs.

“Konrad Jarausch’s academic memoir reveals a “hybrid identity” of many dimensions: an historian of Germany and Europe’s periods of both “catastrophe” and “recovery”; an historian of both of Germany’s post-war regimes—the “re-civilized” democracy in the west and the “welfare dictatorship” in the east; an historian of multiple methodologies; and finally a “transatlantic mediator” and “double insider” with a distinguished career on each side of the ocean.” • Christopher R. Browning, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill