Clark University

Faculty Member, History

Strassler Professor in Holocaust History

About

Thomas Kühne is the Strassler Family Professor in the Study of Holocaust History at Clark University, Worcester, Mass., U.S.A. He teaches Modern European and German History.  His academic and research work is concerned with the relation of war, genocide, and society, with long-term traditions of political culture of Central Europe, above all with the problem of locating the Holocaust and Nazi Germany in the social and cultural history of the 20th century.
Professor Kühne received his academic degrees in Germany. He earned his Ph.D. from the University of Tübingen in 1994 and taught at the Universities of Konstanz, Tübingen and Weingarten thereafter. Awarded major grants from the German Research Foundation, he completed his habilitation thesis at the University of Bielefeld in 2003. Accepting an invitation from the Institute of Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey, Thomas Kühne came to the United States in 2003. He has been at Clark since 2004.
Kühne’s initial scholarly work focused on the political culture of Wilhelmine Germany.  His dissertation, published as Dreiklassenwahlrecht und Wahlkultur in Preussen 1867–1914 [Three Class Suffrage and Electoral Culture in Prussia, 1867-1914] (Düsseldorf, 1994), won the German Bundestag Prize.
Kühne has organized conferences, edited several volumes to advance relevant scholarly discussions on gender, military and political history, and also served as chair of the German Historical Peace Research Society. He is especially interested in synthesizing new approaches to the history of mass violence.  His essay collection on the history of masculinities in modern Germany, Männergeschichte-Geschlechtergeschichte (1996) established this field in Central Europe and stimulated a broad range of innovative gender studies.
As his 2006 book Kameradschaft suggests, the myth of comradeship, born in WWI, shaped the experiences and actions of German WWII soldiers as well as war memory after 1945. In the Nazi war of annihilation, comradeship served as social cement in military face-to-face units. Comradeship combined male bonding through criminal means with in-group “humanity.” It thus established a moral framework that abandoned the idea of individual responsibility and enabled soldiers to support and to carry out the Holocaust.
Kühne has just published a new book addressed to the Anglophone public exploring how the Germans switched to community-based violent ethics even before the Nazis came to power. Belonging and Genocide (Yale University Press 2010) revolves around the thesis that the German nation eventually found itself through committing the Holocaust.

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