Dr. Richard Frankel

Richard E. Frankel is Professor of modern German history and the holder of the Sagrera Family Memorial/BORSF Endowed Professorship in History. His research interests center on nationalism, antisemitism, and political culture. His first book, Bismarck’s Shadow: The Crisis of German Leadership and the Transformation of the German Right, 1898-1945, looked at how various political actors, primarily on the right, manipulated and used the image of Germany’s founder to advance their own agendas. Ultimately, it shows how the Bismarck Cult helped prepare the ground for the rise and success of Hitler and the Nazis. In 2019 he published a book for a non-academic audience titled States of Exclusion: A New Wave of Fascism (2019) that uses German history to help better understand the dangers facing America under Donald Trump. His newest book, Antisemitism Before the Holocaust: Re-evaluating Antisemitic Exceptionalism in Germany and the United States, 1880-1945 (Routledge, 2023) uses a comparative approach to understand the significance of antisemitism in both countries during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. He is currently working on a book-length project that explores the relationship between antisemitism and globalization from 1873 to 1914 with a focus on Germany and the United States.