Professor Nick Stargardt
Professor of Modern European History
Magdalen College
Director of Graduate Studies
01865 (2)76074
Prof Stargardt's research is in modern German history, understood within a European context. He started out as an intellectual and political historian of the late 19th and early 20th century, and since 1994 has turned increasingly to the history of children and childhood, and to the social and cultural history of Nazi Germany.
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The Volk at war: What were Germans fighting for in the Second World War
2017|Chapter|Beyond the Racial State: Rethinking Nazi Germany -
The German War: A Nation Under Arms, 1939–45
2015|BookAnd when did Germans first realise that they were fighting a genocidal war? Drawing on a wealth of first-hand testimony, The German War is the first foray for many decades into how the German people experienced the Second World War.History -
Wartime Occupation by Germany: Food and sex
2015|Chapter|The Cambridge History of the Second World War: Volume 2, Politics and IdeologyThe Cambridge History of the Second World War is an authoritative new account of the conflict that unfolded between 1939 and 1945. With contributions from a team of leading historians, the three volumes adopt a transnational approach to offer a comprehensive, global analysis of the military, political, sociological, economic and cultural aspects of the war. Volume 1 provides an operational perspective on the course of the war, examining strategies, military cultures and organisation and the key campaigns, whilst Volume 2 reviews the 'politics' of war, the global aspirations of the rival alliances, and the role of diplomacy. Volume 3 considers the war as an economic, social and cultural event, exploring how entire nations mobilized their economies and populations and dealt with the catastrophic losses that followed. The volumes conclude by considering the lasting impact of World War Two and the memory of war across different cultures of commemoration.History -
For Führer and Fatherland: The German war, 1939-1945
2013|BookHistory -
La dernière armée d’Hitler: adolescents allemands pendant la Seconde Guerre mondiale
2012|Chapter|L'enfant soldat. XIX-XXIe siècle. Une approche critiqueObjet de toutes les attentions des instances internationales et humanitaires, l’enfant-soldat est une figure incontournable dans la réflexion sur le phénomène guerrier actuel. À ce premier archétype est fréquemment associé un continent, l’Afrique. Le recours à des enfants raptés, exploités, abusés, drogués parfois, apparaît comme un sommet d'horreur et heurte les consciences. Bousculant les stéréotypes, ce livre remonte aux origines de la guerre moderne, en passant par les guerres mondiales, d’un continent à l’autre, pour livrer une analyse fouillée de la figure de l’enfant-soldat et de ses représentations. Le recours aux autres sciences humaines et sociales (sociologie, science politique, anthropologie) lui permet de s’émanciper d’une vision purement historique, afin de saisir la dimension contemporaine de ce phénomène dans toute sa complexité. -
Hitler’s Last Army: German teenagers in the Second World War
2012|Chapter|L’enfant-combattant: XIXe-XXIe siècle, pratiques et représentations -
Beyond 'consent' or 'terror': Wartime crises in Nazi Germany
2011|Journal article|History Workshop JournalNicholas Stargardt addresses the question of the remarkable resilience of the German state and society during the Second World War. Like Italy, German cities were subjected to massive Allied air raids from 1942 onwards, but there was no German equivalent to the strike-wave that swept northern and central Italy in the spring of 1943, and it is this comparison which is the starting point for Nicholas Stargardt’s analysis of how German society coped with the crises of this period. He argues that it was that society’s capacity to recover from crises which made it possible for the regime to go on fighting the war till the end. He proposes that the dynamic quality of these crises takes us beyond the conventional explanations of state-society in terms of coercion and consent, and into an exploration of the transformation of subjectivities and social values, in particular the moral and psychological power of fear and hope. -
Clausewitz’s Final Posting
2011|Chapter|Gewalt und Gesellschaft: Klassiker modernen Denkens neu gelesen -
Children
2010|Chapter|Oxford Handbook of Holocaust StudiesThis article explores how historians, at least since the late 1980s, have subjected the experience of children to more searching analysis, without making their fate any less shocking. Nazism had a special interest in children, both in shaping the next generation of German children and in eliminating the offspring of Jews, Sinti, Roma, and other so-called degenerates. At every stage of persecution, children were targeted in specific ways, from ‘Jew benches’ in schools, through the medical killing of children in psychiatric asylums, to selection in the death camps. Children, however, were anything but passive victims. New research has revealed much about their experience of ghettoization, in particular their adeptness at smuggling, hiding, and adopting new identities, languages, and religious beliefs. -
The Troubled Patriot: German Innerlichkeit in World War II
2010|Journal article|German HistoryHow German society responded to the Holocaust, military defeat, Allied bombing and the mass flights from the Eastern territories in 1945 needs to be seen in relation to the larger question of morale and attitudes towards the continuation of the war per se. Any attempt to assess German morale inevitably involves psychological and emotional analyses, and this article explores how these issues operated at the level of individual subjectivity. It focuses on the personal diary of August Töpperwien, a German Protestant, who was not a Nazi and yet maintained a loyal patriotism to the end. In so doing, it probes the troubled conscience of someone whose conflicting senses of personal duty and political obligation found their vent in pages of silent self-reflection, and so reveal with an unusual clarity the underlying frames of moral reference, which so often remain implicit and unargued in the short-hand and commonsense of other diaries and family letters, let alone macro-level surveys of popular opinion. Many historians have followed the lead of Martin Broszat and accepted that, after the Battle of Stalingrad, German society was increasingly alienated not only by the demands of the Nazi regime but by the war itself, and retreated into privacy. Careful reading of a diary such as this one reveals that support for the Nazi regime and for the war were not the same thing, and questions how much interiority remained untouched by the emotional and moral claims of war. © The Author 2010. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the German History Society. All rights reserved.
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