Brandon Bloch

Biography

I am a historian of modern Europe, with an emphasis on Germany and its global entanglements. My research and teaching foreground themes of democracy, human rights, memory politics, and social thought. I am especially interested in how European national and religious identities have evolved against the backdrop of territorial conflict, divided sovereignties, ethnic cleansing, and genocide.

My first book, Reinventing Protestant Germany: Religious Nationalists and the Contest for Post-Nazi Democracy (forthcoming with Harvard University Press, August 2025), takes a fresh look at the formation of West Germany’s post-1945 democracy on the ashes of Nazi dictatorship. It argues that political transformations in Germany’s Protestant churches—historically aligned with conservative ethno-nationalism—were central to the construction of post-Nazi democratic institutions and national identities. The book follows a cohort of Protestant pastors and lay intellectuals who served as collaborators, witnesses, and occasional resisters under National Socialism. After 1945, Protestant activists recast a long tradition of German Protestant nationalism to imagine their church as a source of democratic values. Protestant political movements played critical roles in the expansion of West Germans’ constitutional rights during postwar debates about family law, conscientious objection, and executive emergency powers. At the same time, these campaigns relied upon highly selective accounts of the church’s history under Nazism, thereby contributing toward the persistence of antisemitism, xenophobia, and confessional animosities in postwar Germany.

A new project in development, tentatively titled Homelands: German Expellees and the Global Campaign to End Forced Migration, links my interest in Germany’s reckoning with its Nazi past to global human rights history. This research inquires into the political and legal aftermaths of the expulsion of over twelve million ethnic Germans from East-Central Europe after the Second World War, among the largest forced population transfers in history. In particular, I examine how expellee interest groups and humanitarian organizations in postwar West Germany and Austria advocated for the transformation of international law around questions of ethnic cleansing, the “right to the homeland,” and the right of return. I have also published on modern European political and social thought, including the first English-language review of Jürgen Habermas’s recent magnum opus, This Too a History of Philosophy.

My teaching fields include modern European and German history; Nazi Germany and the Holocaust; European intellectual and cultural history; and histories of genocide, war crimes, and human rights.

Education

Ph.D., Harvard University
B.A., University of Pennsylvania

Selected Publications

• “Reclaiming ‘National Autonomy’: Theodor Veiter and the Habsburg Legacy in Postwar International Refugee Law,” in Beyond Left and Right?: Antiliberal Internationalism in the Twentieth Century, ed. Marjet Brolsma et al. (forthcoming with Routledge)
• “Democratic Illusions: The Protestant Campaign for Conscientious Objection in the Early Federal Republic of Germany,” Central European History 56, no. 1 (March 2023): 71-91.
• “In the Presence of Absence: Transformations of the Confessional Divide in West Germany after the Holocaust,” in Germany and the Confessional Divide: Religious Tensions and Political Culture, 1871-1989, ed. Mark Edward Ruff and Thomas Großbölting (New York: Berghahn Books, 2022), 216-241
• “‘The Limits of Human Jurisdiction’: Protestantism, War Crimes Trials, and Human Rights in Occupied Germany,” Journal of Modern History 93, no. 2 (June 2021): 363-400
• “The Unfinished Project of Enlightenment,” Boston Review, June 18, 2020
• “The Origins of Adorno’s Psycho-Social Dialectic: Psychoanalysis and Neo-Kantianism in the Young Adorno,” Modern Intellectual History 16, vol. 2 (Aug. 2019): 501-529
• “Justifying Democracy: Johannes Heckel, Ernst Wolf, and the Recasting of Luther’s Theology of Resistance in Postwar Germany,” in Cultural Impact of the Reformation, ed. Klaus Fitschen et al., vol. 1 (Leipzig: Evangelische Verlagsanstalt, 2019), 451-460

Selected Awards

• DAAD and Center for German and European Studies Research Grant, 2024-25 (with Liina-Ly Roos and Leonie Schulte)
• Institute for Research in the Humanities Faculty Fellowship, 2024
• Dorothy and Hsin-Nung Yao Teaching Award, 2023
• DAAD and Center for German and European Studies Research Grant, 2022-23 (with Giuliana Chamedes, Kathryn Ciancia, and Francine Hirsch)
• First Book Award, UW-Madison Center for the Humanities, 2022
• German Historical Institute Postdoctoral Fellowship, 2020-21 (declined)
• Certificate of Teaching Excellence for Lecturers and Preceptors, Harvard University, 2019, 2020
• Krupp Foundation Dissertation Completion Fellowship, 2017-18
• Edmond J. Safra Center for Ethics Graduate Fellowship, 2016-17
• Berlin Program for Advanced German and European Studies, 2015-16

History Courses

• History 120 – Europe and the Modern World, 1815 to the Present – Syllabus 2024 (pdf)
• History 201 –  The Weimar Republic and the Rise of Nazism – Syllabus 2022 (pdf)
• History 410 –  Modern Germany, 1870 to the Present – Syllabus 2021 (pdf)
• History 600 –  Genocide, War Crimes Trials, and Human Rights in the Twentieth Century – Syllabus 2024 (pdf)
• History 845 – Empire and Nation in Modern Central Europe