"EXPERIENCE AND SOCIABILITIES OR THE LIMITS OF NATIONAL-SOCIALISM"

Abstract

Ian Kershaw stands out as one of the leading historians of the present time whose field of study takes as research object the period that comprised the Third Reich (1933-1945). He began his academic trajectory as a medievalist (analyzing the German peasantry). Later he turned his attention to analyzing the societies of the twentieth century, especially the German one. Still in relation to its professional activity we can emphasize its consultant in some series produced by the BBC network on Nazism and the fact to have lectured in University of Sheffield (South Yorkshire, England) retiring in 2008. In the last years part of its work was translated and published in Brazil allowing greater dissemination of his work and his discussions in relation to this theme. In this sense, his criticisms of the use of the concept of "totalitarianism" to define German society in the 1930s and 1940s and the assimilation of the Nazi phenomenon with the so-called Stalinism present in some of his books have provoked productive discussions in our academic environment.