Event

Does being a member of a minority community offer particular perspectives on compromise?

This talk will focus on the role played by a number of important German Jews during a period in German history when empire, democracy, and rights were hotly debated. At the center of this story are two legal scholars involved in defining the nature of the regime and formulating their own stances on the question of compromise in the empire: Georg Jellinek, son of the Viennese son of the Viennese rabbi Adolf Jellinek, and from 1891 ordinarius for public and international law at the University of Heidelberg, who wrote the defining “Theory of the Law of State” for the German Empire; and Hugo Preuß, son of a prosperous Jewish family from Berlin, scholar of constitutional law and municipal politician in the capital, who would later be central to the drafting of the Weimar constitution.

Through them we will explore the idea of political compromise, the challenges such ideas face, and the ways in which German Jews navigated their questions and shaped the answers in response.

Philipp Nielsen is a lecturer in contemporary history at the University of Groningen in the Netherlands. He has a BSc from London School of Economics and Political Science, and a PhD from Yale University. Nielsen specializes in the intellectual, cultural, and political history of modern Europe, with particular emphasis on German and Jewish history. His first monograph, Between Heimat and Hatred: Jews and the Right in Germany, 1871-1935 (Oxford University Press, 2019) traces the involvement of German Jews in nonliberal political projects from the founding of the German Empire to the Nuremberg Laws. He has co-edited volumes on the connection between architecture, democracy and emotions, and emotional encounters in history. He is currently working on a manuscript the history of compromise in German political thought and practice.

This will be the annual Silvers Visiting Scholar Lecture.