Professor Anson Rabinbach was one of the leading Jewish-American historians of the past 40 years, specialising in the history of 20th-century Europe, in particular, Austria and Germany. He was the Philip and Beulah Rollins Professor of History at Princeton University. He is best known for his writings on labour, Nazi Germany, Austromarxism and modern European thought.
Anson Gilbert Rabinbach was born in the Bronx in New York City in June 1945, the son of Gabriel and Esther (Kleinman) Rabinbach, Jewish immigrants from what is now south-eastern Poland. Both were garment workers and members of the Communist Party. His father Gabriel was involved in the German Revolution of 1918-19, briefly lived in Birobidzhan (the autonomous Jewish region of the Soviet Union), and after emigrating to the United States was associated with the Yiddish-language communist newspaper Morgen Freiheit.
He received his BA from Hofstra University in Nassau County, New York, in 1967. He went on to earn an MA (1970) and PhD (1973) from the University of Wisconsin–Madison under the supervision of the leading German-Jewish cultural historian George Mosse, who became a lifelong influence. Rabinbach wrote his MA thesis on the migration of Galician Jews in the Habsburg monarchy. His doctoral dissertation was published in 1983 as The Crisis of Austrian Socialism: From Red Vienna to Civil War, 1927–1934.
Rabinbach first taught at Hampshire College in Amherst, Massachusetts, as an assistant professor in the 1970s. From 1980 to 1984 he was a lecturer in the Department of History at Princeton University. From 1984-95 he taught at the Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art in New York, where he was professor of history, and twice served as acting dean of humanities and social sciences. In 1996 he returned to Princeton as the Philip and Beulah Rollins Professor of History, a chair he held until his retirement in 2019.
Professor Rabinbach was a leading historian of European fascism and National Socialism. As he explained: “National Socialism was a cultural synthesis fusing diverse and incompatible elements from a modern industrial society with a fundamentally unstable admixture of romantic anti-capitalist, nationalist, technocratic, quasi-socialist, radical völkisch, and bio-racial elements.”
In his view, National Socialist ideology “effectively reconciled contradictory elements in German culture”. A fellow historian said: “He took seriously that Nazism was a cultural revolution, not just a brute ideology.”
In Rabinbach’s book, In the Shadow of Catastrophe: German Intellectuals between Apocalypse and Enlightenment (1997), he writes that these thinkers saw catastrophes such as the Second World War as “at once a deep rupture in the course of modernity and as the apotheosis of Western thought”. He argued that “Nazism was a unique modernist project”, including its racial-utopian and genocidal aspects. This interest culminated in his 900-page The Third Reich Sourcebook (2013), co-edited with Sander Gilman, which covers almost all aspects of society in Nazi Germany, from the cult of the leader and racial theory to antisemitism and sexuality, industrial policy and the use of mass media. His last book, Staging the Third Reich: Essays in Cultural and Intellectual History (2020), was a collection of some of his best essays over 40 years on Nazi culture, antifascism, and the after-effects of Nazism on postwar German and European culture.
At Princeton, Rabinbach taught courses on 20th- century Europe, European intellectual and cultural history and fascism. From 1996 to 2008 he was director of Princeton University’s programme in European Cultural Studies.
He was a visiting professor at the University of Jena, the University of Bremen, Smolny College of Saint Petersburg State University, and l’École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales.
He published six books and edited another four. In addition, he published a number of major articles with titles such as Eichmann in New York: The New York Intellectuals and the Hannah Arendt Controversy and The German as Pariah: Karl Jaspers and the Question of German Guilt, and The Challenge of the Unprecedented: Raphael Lemkin and the Concept of Genocide.
His range of interests was formidable. As his long-time friend, David Abraham said in a memorial tribute: “Andy was always game for serious intellectual-political conversation, whether over Vienna, Weimar, or Jerusalem, the 1920s or 2020s.” Steven Aschheim, emeritus professor of European cultural and intellectual history at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, first met Rabinbach at Madison in the 1970s. They remained friends for almost half a century.
After Rabinbach’s death, Aschheim praised his friend’s “deep inner strength and iron discipline that only became apparent to me as his cruel illness set in”.
Rabinbach was not just an academic. He was a classic New York intellectual who wrote for many of the leading magazines and newspapers of the time, including Dissent, The Nation, The Times Literary Supplement and the New York Times. His last book review, A very Viennese Whitewash, was published in the TLS on May 2 this year.
It was a typically erudite, passionately argued piece on Jews and antisemitism in Vienna in the 20th century, from modernism to Bruno Kreisky and Waldheim.
From 1980 to 2009 Rabinbach was married to the feminist psychoanalyst Jessica Benjamin, with whom he had two children. He lived in New York City but died in Rome at the age of 79. He is survived by his sons Jake and Jonah, daughters-in-law Shannon Esper and Sophia Baptista, grandchildren Otis, Bernadine and Moses, and his former wife, Jessica.
DAVID HERMAN
Anson Rabinbach: born June 2, 1945. Died February 2, 2025
