Shane Niesen

Postwar Fascism in West Germany
PhD project 

This dissertation seeks to map out an intellectual history of fascism in West Germany by recapturing the perspectives of former Nazis who sought to preserve a fascist politics after World War II. By looking at conversations within organizations like the Socialist Reich Party, this project seeks to understand how its subjects responded to the defeat of National Socialism and how they related to issues of race or democracy in a postwar world. In short, this project seeks to understand how, in the postwar era, one could remain a Nazi or fascist, and the different ways in which these subjects interpreted their fidelity to the original National Socialist cause.

Shane Niesen is Doctoral Student in History at The University of Michigan (USA). During his stay at the ZZF Potsdam he is Visiting Fellow in Dept. V: Globalizations in a Divided World.