The work and influence of a historian can not only be measured by the number of publications, but also by whether he was able to shape terms that have established themselves in scientific discourse and are associated with his name.

Konrad Jarausch has succeeded in doing this several times.

In 1998 he formulated the term “welfare dictatorship” for GDR socialism.

In a time of social upheaval in East Germany, determined by mass unemployment, in which many former GDR citizens glorified the security of the old conditions, the term welfare dictatorship aptly captured the contradiction between custody and repression.

In order to adequately describe the behavior of German universities and their students in 1933, Jarausch chose the term “self-alignment”.

And with the not uncontroversial catchphrase of “coping with the past twice,” he finally referred to the specifically German challenge of having to deal with two experiences of dictatorship at the same time.

Inspired by Fritz Fischer

At the beginning of his career there was a biography of Theobald von Bethmann Hollweg with the programmatic title "The Enigmatic Chancellor", which was dedicated in particular to the responsibility of the Reich Chancellor, who was in office from 1909 to 1917, for the outbreak of the First World War. With the work, inspired by a lecture by Fritz Fischer, which Jarausch had heard as a twenty-three year old "teaching assistant" in Madison, he received his doctorate in 1969 at the University of Wisconsin.

Jarausch's early commitment to quantitative methods in historical studies is less well known at a time when there was still a "widespread aversion of humanists to numbers, tables and graphs", as stated in the foreword to the volume he published in 1976 on "Problems and Possibilities" of quantification in the science of history. In 1996 the pioneer of digital humanities was one of the founders of the review platform H-Soz-Kult.

Jarausch describes himself as an American; he lived most of his life in the United States. Born in Magdeburg, he first went to Wyoming as a campus gardener in 1960 at the age of nineteen. However, he always remained connected to his German origins and increased his commitment as a transatlantic communicator, especially after the fall of the Berlin Wall - to use a term that he himself avoided in favor of the “peaceful revolution”.

In 1998, with reference to the interdisciplinarity of his research and his excellent contacts to international science, he was appointed as co-director of the Center for Contemporary History in Potsdam. The institute was founded on the recommendation of the Science Council as a rescue company for contemporary historians of the non-university research institutes of the GDR, the first director was Jürgen Kocka. At the time of Jarausch's appointment, the continued existence of the young institution was uncertain. Jarausch made a significant contribution to the consolidation of the center, which was accepted into the Leibniz Association in 2009. Jarausch retained his professorship at Chapel Hill.

He shaped a whole generation of doctoral students on both sides of the Atlantic who came to appreciate the "Jarausch model", which combines the best of both academic worlds. Even after his retirement in 2006, he has always encouraged the intellectual exchange of young generations of scientists. Konrad Jarausch will celebrate his eightieth birthday on August 14, 2021.