Michael S. Neiberg:
Author and Historian
MAIN RESEARCH AREAS
I work mostly in the era of the two world wars. I have a background in both social and military history. My methodological appraoch aims to blend the two. I also work internationally and transnationally. A full list of books I have written edited can be found here
Potsdam: The End of World War II and the Remaking of Europe (Basic Books, 2015)
This book is the first to look at the Potsdam Conference since 1975, and the first to look at it outside the Cold War context. Rather than simply repeat what the leaders of the Soviet Union, the United States, and Great Britain said to one another during the conference, this book sees the world of 1945 as the leaders themselves understood it.
They did not go to Potsdam to start a Cold War. They went to solve the problems of 1945 as they understood them. In their minds, they were trying to right what they saw as the wrongs committed by a generation of diplomats before them in Paris in 1919.
The problems they faced at the end of the Second World War were essentially the same problems from the end of the First: how to deal with the problem of Germany; how to settle the borders of Eastern Europe; and how to solve the financial crisis that a world war created.
The worldviews of the leaders at Potsdam in 1945 had all been shaped by their experiences form 1914-1918. Several, like American Secretary of State James Byrnes, British Prime Minister Winston Churchill, and British finance expert John Maynard Keynes, had attended the Paris Peace Conference of 1919. They knew that Europe could not survive another disaster like that one.
They met at Potsdam to try to fix the problems that had caused two world wars. This book examines the political, social, economic, and historical contexts that surrounded the end of the Second World War. Potsdam symbolized the end of the terrible era of total war in Europe that began with an assassin on a street corner in Sarajevo in 1914.
The Blood of Free Men: The Liberation of Paris, 1944 (Basic Books, 2012)
As the Allies struggled inland from Normandy in August of 1944, the fate of Paris hung in the balance. Other jewels of Europe—sites like Warsaw, Antwerp, and Monte Cassino—were, or would soon be, reduced to rubble during attempts to liberate them. But Paris endured, thanks to a fractious cast of characters, from Resistance cells to Free French operatives to an unlikely assortment of diplomats, Allied generals, and governmental officials. Their efforts, and those of the German forces fighting to maintain control of the city, would shape the course of the battle for Europe and color popular memory of the conflict for generations to come.
In The Blood of Free Men, celebrated historian Michael Neiberg deftly tracks the forces vying for Paris, providing a revealing new look at the city’s dramatic and triumphant resistance against the Nazis. The salvation of Paris was not a foregone conclusion, Neiberg shows, and the liberation was a chaotic operation that could have easily ended in the city’s ruin. The Allies were intent on bypassing Paris so as to strike the heart of the Third Reich in Germany, and the French themselves were deeply divided; feuding political cells fought for control of the Resistance within Paris, as did Charles de Gaulle and his Free French Forces outside the city.
Although many of Paris’s citizens initially chose a tenuous stability over outright resistance to the German occupation, they were forced to act when the approaching fighting pushed the city to the brink of starvation. In a desperate bid to save their city, ordinary Parisians took to the streets, and through a combination of valiant fighting, shrewd diplomacy, and last-minute aid from the Allies, managed to save the City of Lights.
A groundbreaking, arresting narrative of the liberation, The Blood of Free Men tells the full story of one of the war’s defining moments, when a tortured city and its inhabitants narrowly survived the deadliest conflict in human history.
Dance of the Furies: Europe and the Outbreak of War, 1914 (Harvard University Press, 2011)
The common explanation for the outbreak of World War I depicts Europe as a minefield of nationalism, needing only the slightest pressure to set off an explosion of passion that would rip the continent apart.
But in a crucial reexamination of the outbreak of violence, Michael Neiberg shows that ordinary Europeans, unlike their political and military leaders, neither wanted nor expected war during the fateful summer of 1914. By training his eye on the ways that people outside the halls of power reacted to the rapid onset and escalation of the fighting, Neiberg dispels the notion that Europeans were rabid nationalists intent on mass slaughter. He reveals instead a complex set of allegiances that cut across national boundaries.
Neiberg marshals letters, diaries, and memoirs of ordinary citizens across Europe to show that the onset of war was experienced as a sudden, unexpected event. As they watched a minor diplomatic crisis erupt into a continental bloodbath, they expressed shock, revulsion, and fear. But when bargains between belligerent governments began to crumble under the weight of conflict, public disillusionment soon followed.
Yet it was only after the fighting acquired its own horrible momentum that national hatreds emerged under the pressure of mutually escalating threats, wartime atrocities, and intense government propaganda.
Dance of the Furies gives voice to a generation who found themselves compelled to participate in a ghastly, protracted orgy of violence they never imagined would come to pass.