Venue: Koserstraße 20, 14195 Berlin, A336

This talk examines approaches to and key challenges of writing a global history of the Holocaust. The speaker reflects on a range of previous and ongoing studies from Gerhard Weinberg's pathbreaking evaluations of the Holocaust as an evolving global genocide of the Jews steeped in the pronounced intentionalist readings of the 1980s to Herbert A. Strauss' approach to Jewish migration histories from Nazi Germany on a global scale and Timothy Snyder's renewed intellectual history that positions Adolf Hitler as a committed "globalist" at the center of analysis. The talk then makes the case for applying and fine-tuning approaches from the new global and re-calibrated transnational histories to illuminate the Holocaust's increasingly global dimensions. It combines methodological reflections with empirical examples that encompass, for example, Tunesia under German-Italian occupation and the Philippines and present-day Indonesia after the 1941-42 Japanese attacks. 

Thomas Pegelow Kaplan is the Louis P. Singer Endowed Chair in Jewish History and a Professor of History at the University of Colorado Boulder. His research interests include linguistic and cultural history of Nazi Germany, modern German-Jewish history, historical theory, transnational history, and global protest movements. He is the author of The Language of Nazi Genocide (Cambridge University Press, 2009; Russian-language edition, 2025) and The German-Jewish Press and Journalism Beyond Borders, 1933–1943 (Yad Vashem Publications, 2023, in Hebrew) as well as the (co-)editor of several volumes, including Beyond “Ordinary Men”: Christopher R. Browning and Holocaust Historiography (Schoeningh Verlag, 2019) (with Juergen Matthaeus), Resisting Persecution: Jews and Their Petitions during the Holocaust (Berghahn, 2020) (with Wolf Gruner), and Rethinking Modern Jewish History and Memory Through Photography (SUNY, 2025) (with Ofer Ashkenazi).

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