Historian Jerry Muller, who is professor emeritus at the Catholic University of America (Washington, DC), will use his Dahlem Humanities Center Lecture to talk about the impact that the philosopher, sociologist of religion, and scholar of Jewish studies Jacob Taubes had on life at Freie Universität Berlin. Born into a distinguished line of Talmudic scholars in Vienna, Taubes moved to Switzerland with his parents in 1936. After obtaining his doctorate and completing rabbinical school, he went to the United States in 1947, having also spent time in Jerusalem. Following many years at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and Harvard, Princeton, and Columbia in the US, he made his way to Freie Universität Berlin. A well-versed scholar in many areas with a vast number of connections, Taubes spread ideas between intellectual circles on both sides of the Atlantic and played a significant role in the student uprisings at Freie Universität in the 1960s. As well as focusing on the university’s history – especially the development of the humanities, internationalization, radicalization, and deradicalization on campus – the talk will shed a light on intellectual life in West Berlin and the Federal Republic of Germany from the 1960s to the 1980s.

Jerry Muller is professor emeritus of history at the Catholic University of America in Washington, DC. His current research falls on the border between history, social science, philosophy, and public policy. He writes and teaches about a variety of historical and contemporary subjects, including capitalism; nationalism; conservatism; the history of social, political, economic, and religious thought; and modern German and Jewish history. Alongside his book Professor of Apocalypse: The Many Lives of Jacob Taubes, which was published by Princeton University Press in 2021 and released in German by Suhrkamp in 2022, he has also written the books The Tyranny of Metrics (2018), Capitalism and the Jews (2010), and The Mind and the Market (2002).