Biography between Structure and Agency

"While bookstore shelves around the world have never ceased to display best-selling "life-and-letters" biographies in prominent positions, the genre became less popular among academic historians during the Cold War decades. Their main concern then was with political and socioeconomic structures, institutions, and organizations, or - more recently - with the daily lives of ordinary people and small communities. The contributors to this volume - all well known senior historians - offer self-critical reflections on problems they encountered when writing biographies themselves. Some of them also deal with topics specific to Central Europe, such as the challenges of writing about the lives of both victims and perpetrators. Although the volume concentrates on European historiography, its strong methodological and conceptual focus will be of great interest to non-European historians wrestling with the old "structure-versus-agency" question in their own work."--BOOK JACKET.

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.

Simone LSssig has been Director of the Georg Eckert Institute for Internatinoal Textbook Research in Brunswick, Germany and Professor of Modern History at the University of Brunswick since October 2006. From 2002 to 2006 she was a research fellow at the German Historical Institute in Washington, D.C. She has published mainly on modern German and Jewish history. Her last book focused on the question of how nineteenth century German Jews entered the bourgeoisie. She is currently preparing a biographical study on a German-American banking family.

Introduction : biography in modern history - modern historiography in biography	p. 1
Biography and the historian : opportunities and constraints	p. 27
Dreams and nightmares : writing the biography of Kaiser Wilhelm II	p. 40
Gustav Stresemann : a German Burger?	p. 51
Women's biographies - men's history?	p. 72
Historiography, biography, and experience : the case of Hans Rothfels	p. 85
A historian's life in biographical perspective : Johan Huizinga	p. 103
The heroic ecstasy of drunken elephants : the substrate of nature in Max Weber - a missing link between his life and work	p. 119
Generational experience and genocide : a biographical approach to Nazi perpetrators	p. 143
Criminal biographies and biographies of criminals : understanding the history of war crimes trials and perpetrator "routes to crime" using biographical method	p. 162
From Himmler's circle of friends to the Lions Club : the career of a provincial Nazi leader	p. 182
Contexts and contradictions : writing the biography of a Holocaust survivor	p. 201
The improbable biography : uncommon sources, a moving identity, a plural story?	p. 215
Structuralism and biography : some concluding thoughts on the uncertainties of a historiographical genre	p. 234
Bibliography	p. 251
Table of Contents provided by Blackwell. All Rights Reserved.

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Biography between Structure and Agency

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