Jochen Hellbeck

RESEARCH INTERESTS

My research explores individual life stories and the making of the self in modern Europe, with a particular focus on the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany. I have consistently sought to recast prevailing interpretations of the twentieth century by bringing into view what those interpretations have obscured: the distinctly Soviet interiority of personal life under Stalin, calling into question the widespread assumption that private thought under Stalinism was either impossible or, by definition, anti-Soviet; and the Battle of Stalingrad through the eyes of the city’s Soviet defenders, whose perspectives have long been overshadowed by the battle’s significance for Germany. Most recently, World Enemy No. 1 has challenged interpretations of the Holocaust that locate its origins primarily in Hitler’s antisemitism and the persecution of Jews as a racial enemy, by demonstrating the central place of the Soviet communist regime in the Nazi project of racial and political annihilation.

I am currently working on the Soviet/Russian/Jewish writer and war reporter Ilya Ehrenburg, and on a history of the Second World War.

As a member of the Rutgers graduate faculty I work with students interested in modern Russia and the Soviet Union, and in transnational explorations of Communism, WW II, and the Cold War. I encourage applicants to the graduate program in any of these areas to email me before the application deadline.

COURSES REGULARLY TAUGHT

Undergraduate

Graduate

SELECT PUBLICATIONS

WEBSITES

Facingstalingrad.com

In 2009 and 2010, I visited former soldiers who had fought at Stalingrad in their homes in Russia and Germany. Their portraits, memories, and voices became the basis for Facing Stalingrad, an online oral history project that brings together the personal experiences of those who lived through the battle.

Sovietsurvivors.com

This website assembles more than 700 interviews with survivors of Nazi occupation across the Soviet Union, whose voices were recorded by historians from Moscow, Kiev, and Minsk during and shortly after the Second World War. The value of these eyewitness accounts is inestimable: they feature the voices of witnesses to history who have yet remained outside the historical record. A team of researchers working under my direction has digitized the interview transcripts, which are housed in archives in Russia, Ukraine, and Belarus, and prepared them for this online presentation. The interview transcripts are presented in the original Russian or Ukrainian language, about 50 have been additionally translated into English and German.

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