Prof Jürgen Osterhammel (Konstanz)
Modern and Contemporary History
“Jürgen Osterhammel (born 1952) has decisively contributed to reinstating the world-historical perspective in German history not only in the theory, but also the practice of historiography. In an extensive series of monographs (which have also been translated into Chinese, Japanese, Korean and English), he sees world history not as the sum of national histories, but as a complex of relationships and contrasts that can be read and understood as the global history of civilisation. His book “Die Verwandlung der Welt. Eine Geschichte des 19. Jahrhunderts” (Munich, 2009), which came out in its fifth edition in 2010, was received with exceptional enthusiasm by critics, for Jürgen Osterhammel knows how to tell history in story-form without sacrificing analytical trenchancy and in so doing demonstrate to a wider public that the fragmented world can still be seen as a single whole.” (The jury's reasoning)