Current Research:

  • I have recently completed a study that explores how Germans confronted defeat during the last years of the Nazi dictatorship and in the postwar period. I employ the issue of German MIA and POWs as a vehicle to write a comparative history of the German postwar period. The book combines the political history of postwar reconstruction with the social history of returnees and the cultural history of war memories and gender identities. It demonstrates that both German societies were indeed "postwar" societies in a sense that they remained infused with the consequences of war and defeat far into the 1950s and beyond.
  • Histories of the Aftermath: The European "Postwar" in Comparative Perspective
  • German Angst: War Scares and Security Concepts in 20th Century Germany