Steven Remy

University of Heidelberg today	Steven Remy Assistant Professor of History (Starts fall 2002) Office: *Office Hours:* Phone: email: remy.21@osu.edu
My principal current interests are the role of intellectuals in the transition from democracy to dictatorship and dictatorship to democracy and the politics of memory in modern European history. I have explored both of these themes in my forthcoming book The Heidelberg Myth: The Nazification and Denazification of a German University, 1933-1957, which will be published by Harvard University Press in 2002. The book is a study of academic culture in Germany during and after dictatorship. It focuses on the responses of professors at a single university - Ruprecht Karls Universitaet Heidelberg - to National Socialism and examines how professors recalled the Nazi dictatorship after 1945. I show that Heidelberg's professorate was extensively engaged with National Socialism. This engagement formed an important element in the social consensus behind Hitler and involved the direct participation of many scholars in justifying, shaping, and implementing the regime's policies. After the war, Heidelberg professors constructed elaborate narratives of defense and justification that served to absolve all but a few of connection to National Socialism. Collectively, these narratives formed the Heidelberg myth. The myth contributed to the collective amnesia about the Nazi past that characterized West German society in its formative years, shielded German universities from forthright reckonings with their own pasts, and informed a remarkably durable consensus among historians regarding the academic elite and the Nazi dictatorship. The durability of the Heidelberg myth testifies to the power of collective memory and the formidable tensions between memory, justice, and democracy in societies emerging from the shadows of dictatorship. I am currently planning a new project that examines the contribution of conservative German intellectuals to the construction of West Germany's democratic culture and to the emergence of the European Economic Community's institutions in the 1950s and 1960s. The first stage of this project will involve a panel proposal to the German Studies Association on conservative intellectuals in the Federal Republic of Germany from the 1950s to the present. My contribution will be an examination of the postwar career of Reinhard Hoehn, a former high-ranking SS officer and influential political and legal theorist. Like many intellectuals who had enjoyed stellar careers in Nazi Germany, Hoehn also enjoyed a career as a respected author in West Germany on political matters after 1945. I envision the paper becoming part of a book on this subject, perhaps in the form of a collection of case studies on lesser-known but influential conservative intellectuals and their responses to defeat, occupation, democracy, and "Americanization." Like "The Heidelberg Myth," this project is an expression of my interest in intellectuals in politics and the way memory in constructed and expressed in political culture.