A major national election looms and the leader who years earlier had encouraged an insurrection is campaigning to a devoted audience. Politically tinged trials unfold in the courts, and political violence appears to be spreading amidst armed protests and assassination attempts. The above could describe Weimar Germany in the 1920s, but also characterizes the United States of America in 2024. This series seeks insights from the history of the Weimar Republic that might illuminate our current social and political climate—a fraught era for the American republic just as Weimar was for Germany.

In the third and final event of this series, join political scientist Sheri Berman (Barnard College, Columbia University) and sociologist John Torpey (The Graduate Center) for a conversation about

National Socialism and the Decline of the Weimar Republic

Date and Location:

Wednesday, October 30, 2024
6:30 PM-8 PM, The Skylight Room, 9th Floor
The Graduate Center, CUNY (365 Fifth Avenue)

Please RSVP by clicking the button below.

Sheri Berman is a professor of Political Science at Barnard College, Columbia University. Her research interests include European history and politics; the development of democracy; populism and fascism; and the history of the left. She has written about these topics for a wide variety of scholarly and non-scholarly publications, including the New York Times, The Washington Post, Foreign Policy, Foreign Affairs, and VOX. She currently serves on the boards of the Journal of Democracy, Dissent and Political Science Quarterly. Her most recent book, Democracy and Dictatorship in Europe: From the Ancien Regime to the Present Day, was published by Oxford University Press in 2019.

John Torpey is professor of sociology and history and director of the Ralph Bunche Institute for International Studies at the Graduate Center, CUNY. He is the author or editor of a number of books, including Intellectuals, Socialism, and Dissent: The East German Opposition and its Legacy (1995); The Invention of the Passport: Surveillance, Citizenship, and the State (2000; 2nd ed. 2018); Documenting Individual Identity: The Development of State Practices in the Modern World (edited with Jane Caplan; Princeton: Princeton UP, 2001); Politics and the Past: On Repairing Historical Injustices (2004); Old Europe, New Europe, Core Europe: Transatlantic Relations after the Iraq War (2005), Making Whole What Has Been Smashed: On Reparations Politics (2006); The Post-Secular in Question (2012); Legal Integration of Islam: A Transatlantic Comparison (with Christian Joppke, 2013); Transformations of Warfare in the Contemporary World (edited with David Jacobson, 2017); and The Three Axial Ages: Moral, Material, Mental. He is on the editorial board of Theory and Society and edits a series for Temple University Press titled “Politics, History, and Social Change.”

This event is presented by the European Union Studies Center of the Ralph Bunche Institute for International Studies, co-sponsored by the DAAD Alumni Association USA and supported by the “Germany on Campus” program of the Embassy of the Federal Republic of Germany.