Deutsches Haus at NYU and the Center for European and Mediterranean Studies at NYU present a lecture by Konrad Jarausch on “Broken Lives: How Ordinary Germans Experienced the Twentieth Century.” The talk will be introduced by Alexander Geppert, Associate Professor at the Center for European and Mediterranean Studies at NYU.

On the basis of five dozen autobiographies of the cohort born during the Weimar Republic this lecture explores the shared experiences and tropes of memory by ordinary Germans during the tumultuous twentieth century. By engaging the fascinating stories of individual fates from a perspective of below, it sheds new light on the rise, impact and consequences of the Nazi dictatorship and the subsequent division of Germany.

Konrad H. Jarausch is Lurcy Professor of European Civilization at the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill and Senior Fellow of the Zentrum für Zeithistorische Forschung in Potsdam. He has founded the Center for European Studies at UNC and was director of the ZZF. He has written or edited about forty books on German and European history of the nineteenth and twentieth century. His last publication was “Out of Ashes: A New History of Europe in the Twentieth Century” (Princeton, 2015), which was awarded the Bronislaw Geremek prize.

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