Konrad H. Jarausch – from someone who moved out …

Live two souls, oh! In my chest. ”I wanted to know from Konrad H. Jarausch whether this faustic shock sigh. Although my journalistic curiosity did not apply directly to the question of the back and undergrade meaning of human existence or existences between bright and dark powers, but rather its possible conflict between two peoples, two states, two quite culturally and mentally different worlds. It goes without saying that the German-American history professor is not for magic, but is committed to the strictest scientific nature. But does he understand himself more than an “Ami” or a “Germane”?

Born on August 14, 1941 in Magdeburg, in a “Prussian and northern German family” with a “strong sense of personal discipline and national duty”, strictly Protestant and pride in the Lutheran Reformation, on the one hand, Jarausch has its roots in a Silesian farming village, where the fatherly ancestors operated a small grocery store, on the other hand, the maternal branch, in the Civil servant, educational bourgeoisie “with a pinch of nobility”. “The genealogy with numerous clergymen and teachers can be traced back to 1391,” reveals Jarausch in his just appeared memoirs – with which he almost gave himself a birthday present. He was not allowed to get to know his father. Although not in the NSDAP “because he loathed their new health and racist reintrotation of Christianity”, he, like so many of his generation, was eager to attend a historical war that made the German defeat of 1918 “.” The father fell in the so -called Russian campaign of the Nazis.

The childhood of the son of a single and sole earning mother, teacher by profession, was overshadowed by frequent moves. Which is why the young Jarausch “could not develop an emotional bond to a specific place as a home”. “The last stop of my childhood was the Paul Schneider-Gymnasium, a Protestant boarding school, named after a resistance pastor that was killed by the Nazis in 1939,” Jarausch informed “The Load of Past” in his just appeared memoirs. He visited a boarding school in Meisenheim, “a picturesque place in the Rheinpfalz, near Bad Kreuznach”. For him, replacement fathers were the brothers of the mother and his producer, as it used to be called. One was a historian, “innovative in the methodology, but a former member of the NSDAP and a political nationalist”, the other a vocational school teacher, also with great historical knowledge – which probably promoted the protective choice of the protégé. However, according to Jarausch in his memories, the ultimate decision was determined “by the destructive effects of the Second World War that had asked for my father’s life”.

But at first the boy continued, far away, over the “big pond”. A decade of the student 68-revolt, he broke up, repelled by the bustling and fussiness, conservatism and restoration in Adenauer’s Federal Republic and attracted by supposed liberality and non-conformism in the USA. He wanted to treat himself to a year of “time out”. From this became almost four decades. He studied in Princeton and did her doctorate at the University of Wisconsina center of student support for the African American civil rights movement and the protests against the dirty war of the United States in Vietnam; He then taught on the University of MissouriColumbia, and afterwards University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

“The combination of my German origin and the newly created American personality created a hybrid transatlantic identity,” writes Jarausch. For some time he felt torn between a possible German or American future. He has now solved this salomonically, lives here and there. Also thanks to his wife, daughter of a German scientist who was ordered to the United States after the victory over Nazi Germany in the course of the US operation “PaperClip”, such as “rocket father” Wernher von Braun. The Soviet winning power had won Manfred von Ardenne and other specialists.

Why did he, the “refugee” from Germany, turn to German history in the United States? Because this country didn’t let him go. His doctoral thesis was the Chancellor Theobald By Bethmann Hollweg and dedicated to the guilt on the First World War. “The past of the past appealed to me because it promised a key to understanding the present and the future.” Increasingly interested Jarausch was increasingly interested in the different development channels of the two German post -war states. Looking at this from overseas offered all sorts of advantages, he expresses in conversation with »ND«. The book states: “The spatial distance offered the opportunity to distance yourself from the internal crosselles Allande.” Say: objectivity, emotional soberness, scientific objectivity.

His heart beat for the “Bielefeld School”, a new, progressive methodological approach of historical science, initiated in the early 1970s of Reinhart Koselleck, Hans-Ulrich Wehler and Jürgen Kockathat “had to fight hard to assert themselves against conservative apologists”. Curiosity and sympathies felt Jarausch for GDR colleagues, the work of which he paid respect, despite the Marxist reduction in German history, in a number of class struggles or some necessary cats of dogs “from above”. You meet at conferences, exchanging yourselves, developing friendships, so with Joachim Petzold. “We tried to communicate across the Iron Curtain.” This also included a body, founded in 1980, which was called “Interquant” and was previously a president Jarausch and the Soviet academy member Ivan Kovalchenko.

When the son Peter Peter, which was crouched in front of the television on November 9, 1989: “The wall fell in Berlin”, there is no stopping. Konrad H. Jarausch is drawn to the place of global political, world -historical events. In December of the year, he organized a conference in Berlin, on which East and West Germans and American historians have so far had been informed and the balance of their work just experienced. In 1998 Jarausch took the head of the Center for Temporary History Research in Potsdam, which he did until his retirement in 2006 together with initially Christoph Kleßmann from Bielefeld and then Martin Sabrow from Kiel leads (i.e. also western leadership here). The ZZF was one of the so-called “seven dwarfs”, founded to collect positively evaluated GDR scientists. Jarausch sees the evaluations, the necessity of which he is based on the book in the “ND” conversation, critically, criticized exaggerations and injustices. He pays respect for criticism and self-criticism of renowned GDR colleagues like Kurt Pätzold and Fritz Klein.

The ZZF itself was confronted with the most violent hostility for years because it did not follow the mainstream, not limited itself to wall, Stasi, repression, SED power in the research of and in publications on the GDR history, but also tried to explore everyday social life and also to understand the solidarity of millions of citizens. At that time the worst adversary was the research association SED state at FU-Berlin. My question of whether he feels a loss of malfunction or at least satisfaction that this was dissolved at the end of last year, Jarausch acknowledges with a cautious laugh, then to answer: »Well, we had a lot of argument, a lot of noise. But I think that we were right with our approach and not you who revived the totalitarianism theory and described the GDR as a gigantic prison. That was and is just too flat. ”

Incidentally, in the Jarausch book, the considerations about how political historians can be. Political abstinence is picked up. Certainly alone whether the embossing during his apprenticeships in the United States by German-Jewish emigrant colleagues such as Fritz Stern and Georg Iggers. As an “overdue confrontation”, Jarausch evaluates the debate on the “entanglement” of leading German historians such as Werner Conze and Theodor Schieder in the Nazi dictatorship as well as their silence after 1945 with regard to this unspeakable collaboration.

Further exciting discussions followed with the Millennium turn. With like -minded people, Jarausch put the great historical “master’s stories” on the body. In the book one reads: »At the beginning of the new millennium, all main versions of the representation of the German past seemed to be discredited: the nationalist narrative had failed with the Third Reich so catastrophically that it could hardly be saved; The Marxist interpretation of the GDR had collapsed with communism; And even the self -critical specialism of the Federal Republic had been undermined by comparative research. But also newer alternatives such as the Holocaust or the feminist and global history soon reached their limits. «In short, with his review, Jarausch also offers something like a” short course “or” demolition “on the history of history recent German past, if you can formulate this here.

Reading is also profitable in terms of personal revelations that life in the United States was by no means as much as the outsiders often suspect. Especially for academics, as Jarausch knows from his own experience of financial needs and despair in the provincial atmosphere. What should apply today with Trump’s declaration of war against science and against renowned academic institutions. Touching the confession with regard to your own initial naivety or inattention, overcome in a gradual learning process. Also a sample from the book: »My falling in the United States led me to ignore the massive evidence of the dark side of the American dream, which turned into a nightmare for many people. When I met some Indians in the west, I was more interested in their silver jewelry than for the expropriation of their country through the white settlers. Since there were very few blacks in Wyoming, her recruitment for the football team caused a lot of sensation without her feeling of discomfort being taken seriously because of her discrimination. I also met some Hispanics, but they remained largely invisible to me because they worked in simple service jobs and as a seasonal worker in agriculture. «

But back to the initial question: Is Konrad H. Jarausch more American than German or vice versa? I recently took our conversation: In Trump’s America, he does not feel at home, and increasingly uncomfortable in Germany. The tornness and inhospitality of our conflict -loaded, crisis -shaped and warlike world rummages. Even if you don’t want to note it, a man of calm, almost stoically looking mind.

Konrad H. Jarausch: The burden of the past. A transatlantic life. Criminal publisher, 244 p., Br., € 20.

“Studying the past appealed to me because it promised a key to understanding the present and the future.”

Konrad H. Jarausch