Office Hours: M, W 12:00 p.m. - 1:00 p.m., NCH 233. and by appointment

Fields/Specialties

• Transnational German History and Culture
• European Studies
• History and Theories of Fascism
• Democracy Studies
• Critical Theory
• Cultural Studies
• Historical Political Culture of Green Ideas and Practices
• Holocaust and Genocide, Perpetrator Studies

Education

• M.A. Free University of Berlin, 1996
• M.A. University of Michigan, 1996
• Ph.D. University of Michigan, 2005

Biography

Manuela Achilles is Professor of German and History, and Director of the Center for German Studies. Her work examines the political culture of Central Europe in transnational perspective with emphases on Weimar democracy, fascism, Holocaust memory, and sustainability. She is the author of Invisible Fatherland: Constitutional Patriotism in Weimar Germany (Cambridge University Press, Dec. 2025) and co-editor of Environmental Sustainability in Transatlantic Perspective: A Multidisciplinary Approach (Palgrave Macmillan, 2013). Her next book, Hitler and the Holocaust, is under contract with Bloomsbury Academic. Recent online essays includes: “Nazis into Victims: Holocaust Fiction without Perpetrators” (literaturkritik.de, 2024), and “The Israel-Hamas War: Where is Europe? (EuropeNow Daily, 2023, with Peter Debaere). 

Publications

Books and Journals

Invisible Fatherland: Constitutional Patriotism in Weimar Germany. Forthcoming with Cambridge University Press (December 2025).

Nationalism, Nativism, and the Revolt Against Globalization, Special Issue of EuropeNow (Journal of the Council for European Studies). Co-edited with Kyrill Kunakhovich and Nicole Shea; February 2018.

Environmental Sustainability in Transatlantic Perspective: A Multidisciplinary Approach. Co-edited with Dana Eley (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013 (Climate and Energy series).

Articles and Book Chapters

"Memory, Responsibility, and Transformation: Antiracist Pedagogy, Holocaust Education, and Community Outreach in Transatlantic Perspective." Coauthored with Hannah Winnick (Heinrich Boell Foundation/Obama Foundation), Journal of Holocaust Research, 35/2 (April 2021). Special issue on “Confronting Hatred: Neo-Nazism, Antisemitism, and Holocaust Studies Today."

"Anchoring the Nation in the Democratic Form: Weimar Symbolic Politics beyond the Failure Paradigm”, in: German Modernities from Wilhelm to Weimar: A Contest of Futures, ed. Geoff Eley, Jennifer Jenkins, Tracie Matysik (London, New York, Bloomsbury, 2016), 259-281.

"Nuclear Power? No, Thank You!" Germany's Energy Revolution Post-Fukushima," in: Achilles and Elzey (eds.), Environmental Sustainability in Transatlantic Perspective, (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), 104-127.

"With a Passion for Reason: Celebrating the Constitution in Weimar Germany," Central European History, Volume 43, Number 4 (December 2010), Special issue on the Culture of Politics / Politics of Culture in the Weimar Republic.

"Reforming the Reich: Democratic Symbols and Rituals in the Weimar Republic," in Kathleen Canning, Kerstin Barndt, and Kristin McGuire (eds), Weimar Publics / Weimar Subjects: Rethinking the Political Culture of Germany in the 1920s (New York: Berghahn Books, 2010), 175-191.

"Nationalist Violence and Republican Identity in Weimar Germany," in David Midgley and Christian Emden (eds), German Literature, History and the Nation. Papers from the Conference: "The Fragile Tradition" (Cambridge 2002), Oxford 2004, 305-328.

"Blutdurst' und 'Symbolhunger': Zur Semantik von Blut und Erde", in Walter Delabar, Horst Denkler, Erhard Schütz (eds), Spielräume des Einzelnen: Deutsche Literatur in der Weimarer Republik und im Dritten Reich, Berlin 2000, 185-315.

Book Reviews

Review of Anne Berg, Empire of Rags and Bones: Waste and War in Nazi Germany (New York: Oxford University Press, 2024), Journal of Military History (forthcoming, January 2026).

Review of Laura Hilton and Avinoam Patt (eds), Understanding and Teaching the Holocaust (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2020), Holocaust and Genocide Studies 37:3, December 2023.

Review of Benjamin Ziemann, Contested Commemorations. Republican War Veterans and Weimar Political Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2013), European History Quarterly, 46:1 (2016), 203-204.

Review of Shulamit Volkov: Walther Rathenau. Weimar's Fallen Statesman (New Haven: Yale UP, 2012); German History, March 3, 2015.

Review of Mark Edmundson, The Death of Sigmund Freud: The Legacy of His Last Days (New York: Bloomsbury, 2007), published on H-German (August 2011).

Review of Christian Emden, Walter Benjamins Archäologie der Moderne: Kulturwissenschaft um 1930 (Munich: Wilhelm Fink Verlag, 2006), published on H-German (October 2007).

Review of Pamela E. Swett, Neighbors and Enemies: The Culture of Radicalism in Berlin,1929- 1933 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), Social History 31:4 (2006), 497-499.

Review of Laurence A. Rickel’s Nazi Psychoanalysis (Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 2002, published on H-German (March 2004).

Online Essays and Blogs

"Trade Policy as an Assertion of Power: Reading Hirschman to Understand the Donald Trump Administration." Global Europe, Number 1 (October 2025), Research.

"Nazis into Victims. Holocaust Fiction Without Perpetrators: John Boyne’s "The Boy in the Striped Pajamas." Literaturkritik.de, Number 2 (February 2024). Themenschwerpunkt: "Faschistische Fantasien? Populärliteratur und Film im 20. Und 21. Jahrhundert."

"The Israel-Hamas War: Where is Europe?" Coauthored with Peter Debaere; in EuropeNow Daily, December 19, 2023.

Conversation with Richard J. Evans on the relevance of a past Cholera epidemic in the time of Coronavirus. Coauthored with Peter Debaere; Darden Water Blog, October 27, 2020.

"The Economy Under the Nazis: Keynesianism Avant La Lettre?", 2013. Coauthored with Peter Debaere, Darden Business Publishing, UVA-GEM 112.

Courses Taught

Teaching forms a central part of Achilles's academic work. One of her signature courses, Neighbors and Enemies, explores the tension in Germany between a chauvinist belief in German racial or cultural superiority and moments of genuine openness to strangers. Drawing on materials from history, philosophy, film, and literature, the course challenges students to consider the construction and deconstruction of images of the “enemy” from different angles. Her other seminars--on Germans and Jews, Germany and the Environment, and Hitler in History and Fiction--likewise practice the careful interdisciplinarity that characterizes her teaching. She also offers survey classes on German History, Nazi Germany, and Western Civilization. Together with Kyrill Kunakhovich, she has developed a large lecture course on Fascism in Global Perspective. Across all of her courses, Achilles teaching gravitates toward a co-creative style of instruction that pays particular attention to the representational regimes and affective logics that shape our understanding of the past.