Anson Rabinbach

Rabinbach was born in the West Bronx, New York City. His father was a Polish-Jewish communist revolutionary.[7] Rabinbach received his B.A. from Hofstra University in 1967. He went on to earn a Ph.D. from the University of Wisconsin–Madison in 1973. His dissertation, supervised by George Mosse, was published in 1983 as The Crisis of Austrian Socialism: From Red Vienna to Civil War, 1927–1934.[8]

Rabinbach taught at Hampshire College in Amherst, Massachusetts and at the Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art in New York City, where he was Professor of History and twice served as Acting Dean of Humanities and Social Sciences. From 1996 to 2019 he taught at Princeton University, where he is the Philip and Beulah Rollins Professor of History Emeritus.[3]

In 2012 a special issue of New German Critique was dedicated to Rabinbach's work and legacy. In their introduction to the issue, David Bathrick and Andreas Huyssen note Rabinbach's "compelling... staging of texts and debates written by or involving public intellectuals that have arisen in moments of crisis, catastrophe, or apocalypse," including his seminal writings on Theodor W. Adorno, Hannah Arendt, Walter Benjamin, Ernst Bloch, Martin Heidegger, Max Horkheimer, Karl Jaspers, and Raphael Lemkin.[9] In his 1997 book In the Shadow of Catastrophe: German Intellectuals between Apocalypse and Enlightenment, Rabinbach characterizes these authors' writings on Europe's cataclysmic twentieth century as "powerful philosophical attempts to translate that experience into a philosophical language whose legacy still exerts a powerful intellectual and sometimes even political influence today."[10] For his notable 1976 article "The Aesthetics of Production in the Third Reich," Rabinbach interviewed the notorious former Nazi architect and armaments minister Albert Speer.[11]

The historian Martin Jay has called Rabinbach's 1990 book The Human Motor: Energy, Fatigue, and the Origins of Modernity "a classic of cultural studies" that "revealed for the first time the importance of the late-19th-century European obsession with the laboring body and its vicissitudes."[12] The German historian Norbert Frei has written that Rabinbach is "widely known beyond the confines of his field" for this work, which has been also translated into German (2001) and French (2005).[13]

In 1987, for his research on Red Vienna, Rabinbach was awarded the Victor Adler State Prize of the Republic of Austria (Victor-Adler-Staatspreis für Geschichte sozialer Bewegungen),[14] the highest honor for the humanities in Austria. He is also the recipient of fellowships from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation,[15] the National Endowment for the Humanities,[16] the Fulbright Program (as a visiting professor at Smolny College in St. Petersburg, Russia),[17] and the American Academy in Berlin.[18]

At Princeton, Rabinbach taught courses on twentieth-century Europe, European intellectual and cultural history, and European Fascism. From 1996 to 2008 he was director of Princeton University’s Program in European Cultural Studies. He has been a visiting professor at the University of Jena, the University of Bremen, Smolny College of Saint Petersburg State University, and the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales.[1]

Rabinbach has been described as a "New York intellectual."[9] His popular writings and reviews have appeared in Dissent,[19] The Nation,[20] Times Literary Supplement,[21] and The New York Times.[22]

He was previously married to the feminist psychoanalyst Jessica Benjamin, with whom he has two children.[23] He lives in New York City.[1]

Books

• Rabinbach, Anson (1983). The Crisis of Austrian Socialism: From Red Vienna to Civil War, 1927-1934. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. ISBN 9780226701219.
• Rabinbach, Anson (1990). The Human Motor: Energy, Fatigue, and the Origins of Modernity. New York: Basic Books. ISBN 9780465031306.
• Rabinbach, Anson (1997). In the Shadow of Catastrophe: German Intellectuals Between Apocalypse and Enlightenment. Berkeley: University of California Press. ISBN 9780520226906.
• Rabinbach, Anson (2009). Begriffe aus dem Kalten Krieg: Totalitarismus, Antifaschismus, Genozid. Göttingen: Jena Center. Geschichte des 20. Jahrhunderts. Vorträge und Kolloquien; Bd. 5, Wallstein Verlag. ISBN 9783835304123.
• Rabinbach, Anson (2018). The Eclipse of the Utopias of Labor. New York: Fordham University Press, Forms of Living Series. ISBN 9780823278572.
• Rabinbach, Anson (2020). Staging the Third Reich: Essays in Cultural and Intellectual History. London: Routledge, edited by Stefanos Geroulanos and Dagmar Herzog. ISBN 9781000077490.

Edited books

• Rabinbach, Anson (1985). The Austrian Socialist Experiment: Social Democracy and Austromarxism, 1918-1934. Boulder, Colorado: Westview Press. ISBN 9780813301860.
• Rabinbach, Anson; Zipes, Jack (1986). Germans and Jews Since the Holocaust: The Changing Situation in West Germany. New York: Holmes and Maier. ISBN 9780841909250.
• Rabinbach, Anson; Bialas, Wolfgang (2007). Nazi Germany and the Humanities. Oxford: One World Press. ISBN 9781780744346.
• Rabinbach, Anson; Gilman, Sander (2013). The Third Reich Sourcebook. Berkeley: The University of California Press. ISBN 9780520276833.

Notable articles

• Rabinbach, Anson (1976). "The Aesthetics of Production in the Third Reich". Journal of Contemporary History. 11 (4): 43–74. doi:10.1177/002200947601100405. JSTOR 260191. S2CID 141309841.
• Rabinbach, Anson (2004). "Eichmann in New York: The New York Intellectuals and the Hannah Arendt Controversy". October. 104: 97–111. doi:10.1162/016228704774115735. JSTOR 3397616. S2CID 57559618.
• Rabinbach, Anson (2005). "The Challenge of the Unprecedented: Raphael Lemkin and the Concept of Genocide". Simon Dubnow Institute Yearbook. 4: 397–420.