PUBLIC LECTURE: White Revolutionaries: Paramilitary Violence and Terrorism in Interwar Central Europe

The Institute of Advanced Studies and the History Discipline at UWA present a series of ten public lectures attached to a new History Honours seminar. The series aims to present a context for contemporary terrorism by inviting lectures from scholars working on historical and contemporary terrorism movements. The lectures are open to all with an interest in political and social movements and their methodologies and repercussions.

Abstract: In this lecture, Dr Gerwarth will address the wave of nationalist terror that haunted the three major successor states of the collapsed Central European Empires (Germany, Austria, and Hungary) between 1918 and 1922. More specifically, he will assess the impact of the Great War on the radicalization of former front officers and army cadets, the role of anti-Semitism and anti-feminism, and the relationship of these clandestine paramilitary organizations with the emerging fascist movements of Central Europe.

Biographical note: Dr Robert Gerwarth is British Academy Postdoctoral Fellow and Faculty Lecturer in Modern European History at Oxford University. He was educated at Humboldt University Berlin (MA, 2000) and Oxford University (DPhil, 2003) and has held visiting positions at the NIOD in Amsterdam and at Harvard University. His first book (The Bismarck Myth. Weimar Germany and the Legacy of the Iron Chancellor) was published by Oxford University Press in 2005. Dr Gerwarth is currently working on the history of terrorism in twentieth-century Germany.

ALL WELCOME. NO RESERVATION REQUIRED.