33rd Annual Symposium of the Friends of the GHI

2025 Prize Winner: Matthew Todd Hershey, Inclination Toward Death: Suicide, Sacrifice, and State Collapse in First World War Germany, Department of History, University of Michigan, 2024.

The Fritz Stern Dissertation Prize is kindly sponsored by the Friends of the German Historical Institute. Since 1997 the Friends of the German Historical Institute have awarded the Fritz Stern Dissertation Prize for the best doctoral dissertation on a topic in German history written at a North American university. For his Fritz Stern Prize lecture titled "The Spirit of 1918: A Historical Chronicle of Loss, Horror, and Possibility," Dr. Hershey will present an analytic, historical chronicle of Imperial Germany’s defeat and ultimate collapse at the end of the First World War—and the cumulative national rejection of national suicide that undergirded both in 1918. Beginning in the winter of 1917-1918 during the last period of high morale both at the front and at home, the talk traces how the preparations for and initial successes of the spring offensive marked the final period of a decidedly tenuous optimism in Imperial Germany, before giving way to an intensifying survivalist pessimism which spread throughout a critical mass of the army between May and August, but only reached the highest levels of military command and political authority months later, at the end of September. In tracing this social, emotional, and ultimately political collapse across the micro-, meso-, and macro-levels throughout the war’s final year, the talk simultaneously examines how and why the Imperial German regime ended in the course of the First World War; how this violent end inflected the specific conditions of possibility for the new Weimar regime; and, ultimately what this history of death and erasure can illustrate about the methodological possibilities of history and the meta-historical nature of social and political power.