Germany after the Dictatorships: Totalitarianism and its Consequences: November 19-21, 2004

Germany after the Dictatorships: Totalitarianism and its Consequences

November 19-21, 2004

Stanford University

Scholars from multiple disciplines will reconsider the German experience with

National Socialism and Communism from the perspective of the six decades succeeding

World War II and the Holocaust, and the decade and a half after the fall of

the Berlin Wall. This conference will be the first academic gathering to examine

totalitarianism in the German context in the light of the ways the term "totalitarianism"

was used and abused after 9/11 and in the months preceding the Iraq war. A conservative

usage of the term might restrict it to the regimes of Hitler and Stalin; alternatively,

it could be utilized as an analytical tool for multiple political phenomena

of the late twentieth century and beyond. We will explore the consequences of

these different strategies through a reflection on the term itself and its appropriation

in various venues.

The conference is co-sponsored by SIIS and the European Forum.

Partial list of participants:

Paul Berman (Author of Terror and Liberalism, Norton, 2003)

Michael Geyer (History, University of Chicago)

Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht (Comparative Literature, Stanford)

Julia Hell (German, University of Michigan)

Jeffrey Herf (History, University of Maryland)

Andrew Hewitt (German, UCLA)

Peter Uwe Hohendahl (German, Cornell)

Sigrid Meuschel (Sociology, New School)

Norman Naimark (History, Stanford)

Todd Presner (UCLA)

Anson Rabinbach (History, Princeton)

Sigrid Weigel (Zentrum für Literaturforschung, Berlin)

For more information, contact Amir Eshel, eshel@stanford.edu">eshel@stanford.edu.