Colloquium: German Angst - Fear and Democracy in Postwar Germany

The Center for the History of Emotions at the Max Planck Institute for Human Development, led by Prof. Ute Frevert, cordially invites all interested to attend its winter semester 2019/2020 colloquium:

Frank Biess, University of California, San Diego

German Angst: Fear and Democracy in Postwar Germany

The talk will present the main arguments of the book Republik der Angst by Frank Biess. By taking seriously postwar Germans uncertainties about the future, the book challenges teleological narratives of West German “success.” Based on case studies from the 1940s to the present, the book tells the history of the Federal Republic as a series of cyclical crises of fear and anxiety. While these emotions have historically been seen as antithetical to democracy, the book highlights their productive and stabilizing functions. The book also analyzes the emotional basis of right-wing populism, and it explores the possibilities of a “democratic politics of emotion.”

Frank Biess is Professor of Modern European History at the University of California – San Diego. He is the author of Homecomings: Returning POWs and the Legacies of Defeat in Postwar Germany (Princeton, 2006), and has co-edited volumes on the European “postwar,” on “Science and Emotions after 1945” and on “Germans in the Pacific.” His new project deals with the global history of the Weimar Republic.