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 second of three events, join legal scholar David Abraham (Professor Emeritus, University of Miami) and Benjamin Hett (The Graduate Center and Hunter College) for a conversation about

Political Economy and the Crisis of “The System”

Date and Location:

Wednesday, October 16, 2024
6:30 PM-8 PM, Room 9205, 9th Floor
The Graduate Center, CUNY (365 Fifth Avenue)

Please RSVP by clicking the button below.

David Abraham is professor emeritus of law at the University of Miami School of Law specializing in property, immigration, and citizenship law, citizenship and identity, and law and the transition to capitalism. A historian by training, he received a BA, an MA, and a PhD in history from the University of Chicago. He received a JD in 1989 from the University of Pennsylvania Law School. After teaching for many years in the history department at Princeton University, he served as law clerk to Judge Leonard Garth of the US Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit and as an associate with Simpson Thacher & Bartlett. He joined the Miami faculty in 1991. Abraham has published widely on issues of politics and economics in Weimar Germany and is the author of The Collapse of the Weimar Republic, which examined the conditions and fate of a social democratic, class-compromise effort to establish a viable welfare state. Abraham has been a Fellow at the Wissenschaftszentrum Berlin and the American Academy in Berlin as well as a guest Professor in Jena and Leipzig.  He has also received Alexander von Humboldt and DAAD Research Fellowships.  And although never a political scientist, he won the APSA’s Best Book Chapter prize a few years ago.

Born in Rochester NY, Benjamin Carter Hett earned a J.D. at the University of Toronto (1990) and practiced litigation in Canada for four years before earning a Ph.D. in history at Harvard (2001). He has taught at Harvard College and the Harvard Law School and, since 2003, at Hunter College and the Graduate Center, City University of New York. He is the author of The Death of Democracy: Hitler’s Rise to Power and the Downfall of the Weimar Republic (Henry Holt, 2018), winner of the 2019 Vine Award for History and named one of the year’s best books by The Times of London and the Daily Telegraph, and The Nazi Menace: Hitler, Churchill, Roosevelt, Stalin, and the Road to War (Henry Holt, 2020) named an editors’ choice by the New York Times Book Review.  His other books include Burning the Reichstag: An Investigation into the Third Reich’s Enduring Mystery (Oxford, 2014), winner of the 2015 Hans Rosenberg Prize, and Crossing Hitler: The Man Who Put the Nazis on the Witness Stand (Oxford, 2008), which won the 2007 Fraenkel Prize and was made into a documentary film and a television drama for the BBC. Hett has been the recipient of fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the American Council of Learned Societies.

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.