Historian Dan Diner takes over the Rosenzweig Professorship in Kassel in 2026

"With Professor Diner, the Rosenzweig Visiting Professorship has gained a personality who embodies the intellectual breadth and dialogical attitude that Franz Rosenzweig stood for," said the chair of the selection committee, Prof. Dr. Martina Sitt. "His work offers essential impulses for historical thinking that understands the present without losing sight of the experiences of the 20th century."

As part of the Rosenzweig Guest Professorship, Diner will explain how the history of Jewish experience sheds light on central historical questions - and why the history of the Jews can be read as a seismograph of modernity. He will also be holding seminars at the University of Kassel on topics such as "Schütterzonen: Empires in Nation-States - From Eastern Europe to Western Asia" and "Two Trials (1921/1927): On the Early History of the UN Genocide Convention 1948".

Dan Diner has a number of biographical links with Hesse: he completed his A-levels in Schlüchtern and studied law and social sciences at Goethe University in Frankfurt am Main, where he also gained his doctorate and habilitated. In the late 1970s, he held a guest professorship in the early years of the University of Kassel.

Diner's work combines event history with approaches to the history of memory and focuses on the fault lines of modernity, with German and European history and the history of the Middle East being among his central areas of research. Among his many publications, his editorship of the seven-volume "Encyclopaedia of Jewish History and Culture" stands out. The Professor Emeritus of Modern History at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem was Director of the Simon Dubnow Institute for Jewish History and Culture and Professor at the Department of History at the University of Leipzig from 1999 to 2014. He previously taught at the Universities of Essen and Tel Aviv and held visiting professorships and research stays in Oxford, Princeton, Stanford, Chicago, Uppsala and Lucerne, among others. He is a full member of the Saxon Academy of Sciences in Leipzig. By defining the Holocaust as a "rupture of civilization", Diner coined a central concept in the German culture of remembrance.

Background:
With the visiting professorship, the University of Kassel commemorates the work and legacy of the Jewish religious philosopher Franz Rosenzweig (1886-1929), who was born in Kassel. The visiting professorship has been awarded every summer semester since 1987 and serves to bring to mind the culture of European Jewry, which was largely destroyed by National Socialism, as well as to engage with the Jewish present.