UC Santa Barbara > History Department > Prof. Marcuse > Biography > Harold Marcuse Biographical Blurb

Dept. of History
University of California, Santa Barbara
work: (805) 893-2635; home: 968-6703
marcuse@history.ucsb.edu
hoempage: www.history.ucsb.edu/faculty/marcuse

Harold Marcuse Biographical Blurb (6/07)

  • in 1979: received a B.A. in physics from Wesleyan University in Connecticut
  • he then studied Art History and History at the universities of Freiburg, Munich and Hamburg in Germany.
  • 1986: received M.A. in History of Art from Hamburg University with a thesis about memorials commemorating the National Socialist period.
  • In 1984-85 he co-produced an exhibition "Stones of Contention" ("Steine des Anstosses") comparing the memorials and monuments established in various countries for the victims of the Holocaust, and the civilian and military dead of World War II.
    • The photographic exhibition was shown in more than twenty German cities from 1985 to 1993.
    • It became part of the controversy over US president Ronald Reagan's visits to Bergen-Belsen and Bitburg in 1985, and the debate over a proposed national victims memorial in Bonn.
  • 1987: Marcuse went to the University of Michigan, where he received his Ph.D in 1992 for a thesis on the history of the Dachau concentration camp from 1945 to the 1990s.
  • Since 1992 he has been at the University of California, Santa Barbara, where he is now an associate professor in the field of German History.
  • His book Legacies of Dachau: The Uses and Abuses of a Concentration Camp, 1933-2001" was published by Cambridge University Press in 2001. It combines a case study of Dachau with an examination of regional and national-level West German confrontations with the legacies of Nazism.
    • This book won the 2003 Hans Rosenberg Book Prize of the Conference Group for Central European History, for the best monograph on Central European history published in 2001-02.
  • Marcuse's other publications include essays and articles on how and why events of the Nazi and World War II eras have been represented in numerous countries.
  • The focus of his research has been how different groups in Germany have dealt or "come to terms" with the legacies of the Nazi era, and what effects that process has had and is having on the political culture of Germany.
    • Marcuse is also examining the middle- and longer term effects of various types of education about the Nazi era.