Background
Berghahn, Volker Rolf was born on February 15, 1938 in Berlin. Came to the United States, 1988. Son of Alfred and Gisela (Henke) Berghahn.
( How and why did Europe spawn dictatorships and violence...)
How and why did Europe spawn dictatorships and violence in the first half of the twentieth century, and then, after 1945 in the west and after 1989 in the east, create successful civilian societies? In this book, Volker Berghahn explains the rise and fall of the men of violence whose wars and civil wars twice devastated large areas of the European continent and Russia--until, after World War II, Europe adopted a liberal capitalist model of society that had first emerged in the United States, and the beginnings of which the Europeans had experienced in the mid-1920s. Berghahn begins by looking at how the violence perpetrated in Europe's colonial empires boomeranged into Europe, contributing to the millions of casualties on the battlefields of World War I. Next he considers the civil wars of the 1920s and the renewed rise of militarism and violence in the wake of the Great Crash of 1929. The second wave of even more massive violence crested in total war from 1939 to 1945 that killed more civilians than soldiers, and this time included the industrialized murder of millions of innocent men, women, and children in the Holocaust. However, as Berghahn concludes, the alternative vision of organizing a modern industrial society on a civilian basis--in which people peacefully consume mass-produced goods rather than being 'consumed' by mass-produced weapons--had never disappeared. With the United States emerging as the hegemonic power of the West, it was this model that finally prevailed in Western Europe after 1945 and after the end of the Cold War in Eastern Europe as well.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0691141223/?tag=2022091-20
( In 1958, Shepard Stone, then directing the Ford Foundat...)
In 1958, Shepard Stone, then directing the Ford Foundation's International Affairs program, suggested that his staff "measure" America's cultural impact in Europe. He wanted to determine whether efforts to improve opinions of American culture were yielding good returns. Taking Stone's career as a point of departure and frequent return, Volker Berghahn examines the triangular relationship between the producers of ideas and ideologies, corporate America, and Washington policymakers at a peculiar juncture of U.S. history. He also looks across the Atlantic, at the Western European intellectuals, politicians, and businessmen with whom these Americans were in frequent contact. While shattered materially and psychologically by World War II, educated Europeans did not shed their opinions about the inferiority, vulgarity, and commercialism of American culture. American elites--particularly the East Coast establishment--deeply resented this condescension. They believed that the United States had two culture wars to win: one against the Soviet Bloc as part of the larger struggle against communism and the other against deeply rooted negative views of America as a civilization. To triumph, they spent large sums of money on overt and covert activities, from tours of American orchestras to the often secret funding of European publications and intellectual congresses by the CIA. At the center of these activities were the Ford Foundation, the Congress for Cultural Freedom, and Washington's agents of cultural diplomacy. This was a world of Ivy League academics and East Coast intellectuals, of American philanthropic organizations and their backers in big business, of U.S. government agencies and their counterparts across the Atlantic. This book uses Shepard Stone as a window to this world in which the European-American relationship was hammered out in cultural terms--an arena where many of the twentieth century's major intellectual trends and conflicts unfolded.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0691074798/?tag=2022091-20
Economic historian university professor
Berghahn, Volker Rolf was born on February 15, 1938 in Berlin. Came to the United States, 1988. Son of Alfred and Gisela (Henke) Berghahn.
From the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in 1961 and his Doctor of Philosophy, under supervision of Francis L. Carsten, from the University of London in 1964.
His research interests have included the finance de siècle period in Europe, the origins of World War I, and German-American relations. He received his Master of Arts Prior to teaching in the United States, Berghahn worked in the United Kingdom and Germany. In 1988, he accepted a position at Brown University, and moved to Columbia ten years later.
Berghahn now holds the chair of Seth Low Professor of History at Columbia, and is also a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society.
Der Stahlhelm: Bund der Frontsoldaten 1918-1935 (1966)
Der Tirpitz-Plan (1971)
Germany in the Age of Total War (with Martin Kitchen), (London: Croom Helm. Totowa New Jersey: Barnes and Noble, 1981)
Modern Germany (1982)
The Americanization of West German Industry, 1945–1973 (1986)
Imperial Germany: 1871–1914 economy, society, culture, and politics (1994)
Quest for Economic Empire, educated
(1996)
Der Untergang des alten Europas, 1900-1929 (1999)
America and the Intellectual Cold Wars in Europe (2001)
Der Erste Weltkrieg (2003)
Europe in the Era of Two World Wars: From Militarism and Genocide to Civil Society, 1900-1950 (English translation 2005)
Gibt es einen deutschen Kapitalismus?: Tradition und globale Perspektiven der sozialen Marktwirtschaft (2006).
( How and why did Europe spawn dictatorships and violence...)
(This edition has a new introduction and a revised first c...)
( In 1958, Shepard Stone, then directing the Ford Foundat...)
Fellow Royal History Society. Member German History Society (president 1986-1988), American History Association, German Studies Association.
Married Marion Ilse Koop, December 29, 1969. Children: Sascha, Vivian, Melvin.