Hermann Beck

Ph.D., University of California, Los Angeles (1989);
Professor

e-mail: hbeck@miami.edu
Office: Rm. 603 Ashe
Phone: (305) 384-5947

Professor Hermann Beck received his Ph. D. from the University of California, Los Angeles after studying history at German universities (Mannheim, Freiburg, and Berlin), the London School of Economics, and the Sorbonne. He has been a Fulbright Scholar, a Fellow at the Berliner Historische Kommission, and, in 1997-1998, a member of the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton. In 1996 he won the “Excellence in Teaching Award” at the University of Miami, an honor for which he was also nominated in 2005 and 2006. He is an historian of modern Europe, especially modern Germany, with particular interests in political, intellectual, and social history, as well as the histoire des mentalités. His book on nineteenth-century Prussia, The Origins of the Authoritarian Welfare State in Prussia: Conservatives, Bureaucracy, and the Social Question, 1815-1870, which focuses on the mindset of Prussian conservatives and officials in their attempt to solve social problems, combines approaches in social, intellectual, and administrative history. His second book, The Fateful Alliance: German Conservatives and Nazis in 1933. The Machtergreifung in a New Light (Oxford & New York, 2008), examines the complex relationship between German conservatism and National Socialism. This study reveals the existence of a strong anti-conservative component in Nazism and thus disproves the still widely-held but fallacious assumption that National Socialism was mainly an extreme manifestation of rightist politics. The evidence presented here suggests that it was a socio-political amalgam that combined vehement opposition to the Left with a strong antagonism toward the German Bürgertum that was reminiscent of leftist denunciations of the bourgeoisie.

Professor Beck has also published numerous articles on nineteenth and twentieth century German conservatism, German socialism during the Age of Bismarck, the Prussian bureaucracy, anti-Semitism, and the Nazi seizure of power. These have appeared in edited collections on conservatism, socialism, and Prussian history, as well as in American, British, and German journals, including the Journal of Modern History, Central European History, Totalitarian Movements and Political Religions, German History, Jahrbücher für die Geschichte Mittel- und Ostdeutschlands, and the Journal of Contemporary History. In his current project on the reaction of German society to anti-Semitic attacks during the period of the Nazi takeover, he examines the reaction of German institutions, such as the army, the Christian churches, and political parties, to the proliferation of anti-Semitic transgressions in 1933, addressing the puzzling issue of why there was so little opposition to anti-Semitic violence on the part of the German elites at a time when resistance still seemed possible.