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January 30, 2009 Michael Geyer (University of Chicago) Genocide, Massacre, and Warfare in World War Two in Comparative Perspective Reading Seminar and Public Lecture What distinguishes “good war” from “bad war”? Are there moral choices to be made in war and what might they entail? Specifically, how would you differentiate between the Nazi war in the Soviet Union, the Red Army’s advance into Germany, the bombing campaign of the Western Allies against German cities, and the mass-expulsion of civilians? Are all wars against civilians genocides, and is the Holocaust another genocide? These questions have gained a new urgency with regard both to the European and the East Asian War. Research on World War II during the past decade provides some judicious, if tentative, answers to these questions, but has also produced its share of miscues. The more productive answers all point to the insight that World War II is best understood as a “new war,” if not a “revolution in warfare,” rather than being the last and most extreme in a series of “old” mass wars. Michael Geyer is Samuel N. Harper Professor for German and European History at the University of Chicago. His main field of study is twentieth-century German and European history. He has written on a wide range of topics such as German armaments, resistance against the Third Reich, and politics of memory. War, civil war, and genocide in modern German and European history has been the focus of his research interests throughout his academic life. He received a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Fellowship in 2003/04 and was Fellow at the American Academy in Berlin spring 2004. In 2007/08 he was awarded a Humboldt Research Prize. His most recent books are: Religion und Nation - Nation und Religion: Beiträge zu einer unbewältigten Geschichte (ed. with Hartmut Lehmann, 2004); War and Terror in Contemporary and Historical Perspective (ed., 2003); A Shattered Past: Reconstructing German Histories (ed. with Konrad H. Jarausch, 2002); Beyond Totalitarianism: Nazism and Stalinism Compared (ed. with Sheila Fitzpatrick, 2008). He is currently collecting material for a project with the working title “Catastrophic Nationalism: Defeat and Self-destruction in German Myth and History.” Essays for the Reading Seminar:
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