Astrid M. Eckert

Astrid M. Eckert, Assistant Professor, (M.A., University of Michigan, 1995; M.A. Free University Berlin, 1998; Ph.D. Free University Berlin, 2003); modern German history. Author of Kampf um die Akten. Die Westalliierten und die Rückgabe von deutschem Archivgut nach dem Zweiten Weltkrieg (2004). [Battle for the Files: The Western Allies and the Return of Captured German Archives after World War II], awarded the 2004 Friedrich Meinecke Dissertation Prize of Free University’s history department, and the biennial Hedwig Hintze Dissertation Award of the German Historical Association 2004; Co-editor of Der Holocaust und die westdeutschen Historiker. Eine Debatte [The Holocaust and West German Historians: A Debate], eds., Astrid M. Eckert and Vera Ziegeldorf (2004); editor of Institutions of Public Memory: The Legacies of German and American Politicians (Washington, D. C.: German Historical Institute/Sheridan Press, 2007).

I am a historian of 20th century Germany with a focus on the period after 1945. I study postwar transformations to engage in various ways with the ever perplexing question of how a country that produced the Nazi dictatorship and committed the crimes of the Holocaust could be transformed, in less than a generation, into a stable, prosperous ‘Western’ democracy.

In my first book, Battle for the Files: The Western Allies and the Return of Captured German Archives after World War II, I wrote about the early years of the Federal Republic of Germany, above all its quest for sovereignty in the face of Allied occupation and interference and its confrontation with the Nazi past. To do so, I examined the history of German records and archives confiscated in the wake of the Second World War, and in particular the long-winded negotiations concerning their return into (West) German custody. Because of their symbolic value, these negotiations were not just another foreign policy issue for the new Federal Republic. All participants were aware that these files constituted the historical material essential to (re)write recent German history. Discussion about their return thus moved to another level: at stake suddenly was nothing less than the power to interpret German history. Who would write the proverbial first draft of “Germany under National Socialism,” based on the original sources? Who would control the writing of German history and ultimately define German identity in the second half of the 20th century?

I have begun a new book project, tentatively entitled West Germany and the Iron Curtain. This study reconceptualizes the history of West Germany during the Cold War by examining its most sensitive geographical space: the border with its ideological adversary, socialist East Germany. The Iron Curtain imposed on Germany after the Second World War created borderlands where none had been before. Starting with the idea that borderlands are in many ways “fields of heightened consciousness” (D. Berdahl) and have historically often served as loci for the articulation of national identities, this study investigates the manifold relations West Germans developed with the border, and with the new eastern borderlands and its residents. While existing scholarship places the border almost exclusively within the history of East Germany, this work recasts West German history from its periphery.

Curriculum Vitae