John Connelly

I grew up in a working-class family in an ethnically mixed neighborhood of Philadelphia, where people imbibe strong senses of identity. My own being partly German, I worked during high school to finance summer trips to Austria; fluency in German aided admission to Georgetown’s School of Foreign Service in 1978. Having become interested in Europe behind the Iron Curtain, I spent my junior year working in West Berlin, travelling frequently into the GDR. Then I studied history and Polish in Cold war Krakow, on scholarship. From 1985 I pursued work on European communism at Ann Arbor and Harvard; my dissertation on Stalinist higher education policies expanded into a book after I began teaching at UC Berkeley (1994). I then turned to comparative study of religion and violence in Central Europe, identifying trends leading to the breakthroughs to conciliation at Vatican II (they came from antifascist German-Jewish converts). In 2020 I published a lengthy study of East Europe’s evolution toward nation statehood, and now plan to extend my interest in national development from small states to Germany’s empires, whose energies were spent not so much exploiting peoples at distance, but in remaking neighbors in the imperial people’s own image.