Andreas Rödder

Senior Fellow

Biography

Andreas Rödder holds the chair for Modern and Contemporary History at the Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz and was the Helmut Schmidt Distinguished Visiting Professor at Johns Hopkins SAIS, a visiting professorship supported by the DAAD and the German Federal Foreign Office. His main fields of interests cover the history of Victorian England, German history and international politics in the 20th century, in particular the history of 1989/90 and contemporary history after 1990. His current research project investigates the history of Europe’s global impact since the 19th century in order to provide a fresh answer to the difficult question what Europe has given to the world and what has it taken from it.

Andreas Rödder has written six major books, including Stresemann’s Legacy. Julius Curtius and German Foreign Policy 1929-1931 (“Stresemanns Erbe. Julius Curtius und die deutsche Außenpolitik 1929-31”, 1996), The Political Culture of the English Conservatives between Rural Tradition and Modern Industrial Age 1846-1868 (“Die radikale Herausforderung. Die englischen Konservativen zwischen ländlicher Tradition und industrieller Moderne“, 2002), a history of the Federal Republic of Germany, 1969-1990 (Die Bundesrepublik Deutschland 1969-1990, 2004), and a history of German Reunification (Deutschland einig Vaterland. Die Geschichte der Wiedervereinigung, 2009). 21.0. A short history of our time (“21.0 Eine kurze Geschichte der Gegenwart”) was published in 2015 and lauded as “mastering the apparently impossible”. His most recent scholarly book, “Who’s afraid of Germany? History of a European Problem” (Wer hat Angst vor Deutschland? Geschichte eines europäischen Problems, 2018) combines the history of German power in Europe with an analysis of the discrepancy between German self-concepts and European perceptions of Germany since the 19th century: what Germans regarded as their undeniable rights, others considered as German ambition for hegemony.

Andreas Rödder gained his final degree (Staatsexamen) from the University of Tübingen in 1991 and his PhD from the University of Bonn in 1995. Thereafter, he was Assistant and Associate Professor at the University of Stuttgart, where he gained his Habilitation in 2001. Since 2005, Andreas Rödder has been Professor of Modern and Contemporary History at the Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz. He was Visiting Fellow at the Historisches Kolleg in Munich (2001/02 and 2017/18), Visiting Professor at Brandeis University, Massachusetts, USA (2004), and Gerda Henkel Visiting Professor at the London School of Economics and the German Historical Institute London, UK (2012/13).

In addition to his academic work, Andreas Rödder is highly experienced in policy counseling and political commentation. He has been a member of the board of the Konrad-Adenauer-Foundation since 2006, participated in the Chatham House Commission on Democracy and Technology (2019/20), has been appointed to the Commission on Integration established by the German Federal Government in 2019, and is regularly invited to high-level off-the record conversation circles. In 2011 and 2016 he ran as shadow minister for education in the electoral campaign in the state of Rheinland-Pfalz, and in 2019, he published his manifesto of a contemporary Conservatism („Konservativ 21.0. Eine Agenda für Deutschland“).