About
Matthew Hershey is a historian of modern Europe, primarily specializing in the history of the First World War and twentieth century German and European history, along with secondary specializations in the history of the Second World War and the Holocaust, as well as historical methodology and theory.
His dissertation, “Inclination toward Death: Suicide, Sacrifice, and State Collapse in First World War Germany,” currently being revised into a book manuscript, investigates the history of self-destruction in German-controlled territory from 1914 to 1918. Drawing on the surviving military, juridical, and medical records on German suicides; diaries, letters, photographs, and other personal documents held in both private and public archives, as well as published collections; the extant statistical data; and a variety of other governmental and military records, this work reconstructs the historically-situated meanings and experiences of wartime suicide, their relations to the concept of “sacrifice,” and how these relations ultimately influenced and inflected the political behavior of Germany’s denizens. Simultaneously, it examines the bureaucratic, archival, and historiographical processes through which the Imperial German state attempted to obscure these histories of self-destruction and the larger socio-emotional devastation left in their wake, the role those processes played in the history of the regime’s collapse, and their continuing effects in the current historical literature. Ultimately, the work explores how and why the Imperial German regime ended in the course of the First World War, how this violent end inflected the specific conditions of possibility for the new Weimar regime, and what this history of death and erasure can illustrate about the methodological possibilities of history and the meta-historical nature of social and political power.
In addition, as an independent historical research contractor, Dr. Hershey is currently contributing to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum's Encyclopedia of Camps and Ghettos, 1933-1945 project.
Recent Publications:
- "Moral Exculpation Along the Archival Grain: Self-censoring, War Trauma, and the Reporting of German Soldiers' Suicides, 1914–1918," in Archives and Emotions: International Dialogues Across Past, Present, and Future, eds. Ilaria Scaglia and Valeria Vanesio (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2024).
- “The Suicidal ‘Spirit of 1914:’ Self-Destruction, National Sacrifice, and the Spontaneous Mobilization in Germany,” Central European History Vol. 56, No. 4 (2023): 553-72.
Fields of Study
- Twentieth Century German and European History
- Warfare, Violence, and Thanatology
- Cultural and Social History
- The History of Emotions
- Historical Methodology and Theory
