Table of Contents

Preface

Chapter 1. Introduction: Biography in Modern History—Modern Historiography in Biography
Simone Lässig

Chapter 2. Biography and the Historian: Opportunities and Constraints
Ian Kershaw

Chapter 3. Dreams and Nightmares: Writing the Biography of Kaiser Wilhelm II
John C.G. Röhl

Chapter 4. Gustav Stresemann: A German Bürger?
Karl Heinrich Pohl

Chapter 5. Women’s Biographies—Men’s History?
Angelika Schaser

Chapter 6. Historiography, Biography, and Experience: The Case of Hans Rothfels
Jan Eckel

Chapter 7. A Historian’s Life in Biographical Perspective: Johan Huizinga
Christoph Strupp

Chapter 8. The Heroic Ecstasy of Drunken Elephants: The Substrate of Nature in Max Weber—A Missing Link between his Life and Work
Joachim Radkau

Chapter 9. Generational Experience and Genocide: A Biographical Approach to Nazi Perpetrators
Michael Wildt

Chapter 10. Criminal Biographies and Biographies of Criminals: Understanding the History of War Crimes Trials and
Perpetrator “Routes to Crime” Using Biographical Method
Hilary Earl

Chapter 11. From Himmler’s Circle of Friends to the Lions Club: The Career of a Provincial Nazi Leader
Hartmut Berghoff and Cornelia Rauh-Kühne

Chapter 12. Contexts and Contradictions: Writing the Biography of a Holocaust Survivor
Mark Roseman

Chapter 13. The Improbable Biography: Uncommon Sources, a Moving Identity, a Plural Story?
Willem Frijhoff

Chapter 14. Structuralism and Biography: Some Concluding Thoughts on the Uncertainties of a Historiographical Genre
Volker R. Berghahn

Bibliography
Notes on Contributors

About the Author

Volker Berghahn is the Seth Low Professor of History at Columbia University where he moved in 1998 from Brown University, after a longer spell of teaching at the University of Warwick in England. The author of more than a dozen books, he has long been interested in the challenges of modern biography. In 1993, he published a study of the industrialist Otto A. Friedrich and his role in the reconstruction of West German industry after 1945. His America and the Intellectual Cold Wars in Europe uses Shepard Stone—renowned journalist, Ford Foundation officer in charge of its European and international programs, and the first director of the Berlin Aspen Institute—as a window to the trans-Atlantic world of American and European intellectuals and scholars, many of whom were associated with the Congress for Cultural Freedom during the Cold War.