Manfred Henningsen
Background: I grew up in the 1940s in the northern-most part of Germany, near the Danish border. The nearby city of Flensburg was the last capital of the Third Reich. I experienced as a young boy the end of the Nazi empire as the collapse of all German state authority; the retreat of the German occupation armies from Scandinavia; the arrival of tens of thousands of German refugees from the East; the establishment of a British occupation regime; the gradual attempt at creating new political structures; and the refusal of older Germans to accept responsibility for a macro-criminal regime that they had helped to bring to and keep in power. All of these childhood experiences have preoccupied my scholarly agenda more and more in recent years. In a way, moving to the USA in 1969 (and Hawai'i in 1970) has intensified those interests, because as a German I was constantly asked and questioned about the Nazi chapter in German history.
Research Interests: My research interests were in the past focused on the history of Western political thought from ancient Greece to the present and the political-cultural differences between Europe and the USA. In the last 15 years I have developed a major interest in the question of how regimes of terror come into being. Originally starting with the Nazi regime, I have begun to compare German terror with other regimes of terror in Europe, Africa and Asia. Most recently I have written about the question whether American slavery should be discussed in the context of comparative regimes of terror.
Selected Publications:
"Totalitarismus und politische Religion," in the German cultural journal Merkur (2002);
"Politics and Catastrophe. Why is the World so Obsessed with German History?" in Witoszek/Traedgard (eds.), Community and Crisis: the Cases of Germany and Sweden (New York 2002);
"The Place of the Holocaust in the American Economy of Evil," in: Trommler/Shore (eds.), The German-American Encounter (New York/Oxford 2001);
"The Political Philosopher in the Public Sphere," in: Statham (ed.), Public Philosophy and Political Science (Lanham/Boulder 2002);
"The Collapse and Retrieval of Meaning," in The Review of Politics (2000);
Introduction to Eric Voegelin, Modernity without Restraint (University of Missouri Press 2000);
"The Improbability of a Clash of Civilizations," in Bochumer Jahrbuch zur Ostasienforschung (BJOAF 23, 1999);
"The Emerging Universalism of Eric Voegelin," in The Political Science Reviewer (1998);
"The Political Constitution of Europe," in Merkur (1998);
"Die Regime des Terrors," in Merkur (1997).
Courses taught:
POLS 610 Contemporary Political Theory (the spectrum of theories and philosophies).
POLS 611 The Tradition of Political Philosophy (a course that traces the notion of politics through Western history by using texts from ancient Greece and Rome, medieval Europe, modern France, Italy, Britain and Germany).
POLS 710 Political Thought (I repeatedly taught under this number classes on comparative genocide with different foci).
In the undergraduate curriculum I regularly teach the survey course on Western political theory from ancient Greece to the present; I occasionally teach the course on American political theory; and I freqently teach the only course on contemporary European politics (showing American students how different European politics is from US politics).
Curriculum Vitae