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 first of three events, join historians Isabel Hull (John Stambaugh Professor of History Emerita, Cornell University) and Steven Remy (History, Brooklyn College and The Graduate Center) for a conversation about

The Military, Political Violence, and Defense of the Republic

Date and Location:

Wednesday, October 9, 2024
6:30 PM – 8:00 PM, The Skylight Room, 9th Floor
The Graduate Center, CUNY (365 Fifth Avenue)

Please RSVP by clicking the button below.

Isabel V. Hull (Ph.D. Yale 1978) is John Stambaugh Professor of History Emerita at Cornell University. Her research has ranged broadly in German history from the early modern to the modern period, and from governance, the history of sexuality, military culture, to international law. A Scrap of Paper: Breaking and Making International Law in the First World War (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2014) won the American Society of International Law book prize in 2016. A member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, Hull was awarded the Max Weber Stiftung-Historisches Kolleg Prize for lifetime achievement in German history and studies in 2013. She is currently writing a book on the international law governing when states could legitimately go to war (jus ad bellum) in Europe just before 1914.

Steven Remy has taught modern European history at Brooklyn College and the CUNY Graduate Center since 2002. He teaches courses in modern European and German history, Nazi Germany, the politics and culture of memory in 20th-century Europe, colonial wars, and historical methodology. Steven Remy is a scholar of modern German history. The Heidelberg Myth: The Nazification and Denazification of a German University (Harvard, 2003), examined the responses of scholars to National Socialism. The Malmedy Massacre: The War Crimes Trial Controversy (Harvard, 2017) deals with debates over war crimes trials in the U.S. and Germany. His most recent book is War Crimes: Law, Politics, & Armed Conflict in the Modern World (Taylor & Francis, 2023).

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.