Prof. Peter Pulzer (1929–2023) was born in Vienna. In the aftermath of the November pogroms, he fled Nazi persecution with his family in 1939 and settled in the UK. As Gladstone Professor Emeritus of Government at the University of Oxford and Emeritus Fellow of All Souls College, he was a pioneering scholar of antisemitism. He was closely involved with the Leo Baeck Institute London, serving as former Chair and Honorary Lifetime President.
Peter Pulzer studied Economics and Political Science from the University of London and studied history at King’s College, Cambridge, where he graduated with a PhD. He was appointed University Lecturer in Politics at Christ Church, Oxford in 1962, where he remained until 1984.
Though he became first known in the UK for his analysis of electoral politics, his influential book The Emergence of Political Anti-Semitism in Germany and Austria 1867–1914, published in 1964, was critically acclaimed in the academic word. It soon became regarded as seminal research into antisemitism in Central Europe and still is today. Later books, both monographs and edited volumes, on Jewish history and its intersection with German and Austrian politics followed, such as Jews and the German State (1992, 2ndedition 2003) and Jews in the Weimar Republic (1998). In 1985, he joined All Souls College as Gladstone Professor of Government and Public Administration. He became an Emeritus Fellow at the College in 1996.
Peter Pulzer’s work recognised the many nuanced layers and varieties of antisemitic discourse throughout central Europe and studied its political and social manifestations. At the same time, he was convinced, and argued so in his books, that antisemitism as part of a wider assault against liberalism, constitutionalism and the rule of law.
Throughout his life, he was closely involved in the German- and Austrian-Jewish émigré community in the UK. For many years, Pulzer served as the LBI London’s chairman, leaving a strong mark on both the institute and research on German-Jewish history. He supported countless of emerging scholars of German and European history through his work at the University of Oxford and the LBI London. As Raphael Gross, former director of the LBI London remarked in an obituary to Pulzer, “Under Peter Pulzer’s aegis the institute’s subject-matter was approached in an accordingly broad spirit: more than German Jewry was at stake; research under the auspices of the London LBI concerned all areas of Europe’s German-language Jewish history and culture—and beyond.”
After retiring from Oxford in 1996 Pulzer was made a professorial fellow at the Institute for German Studies at the University of Birmingham. In 2008, he received the Ehrenzeichen für Verdienste um die Republik Österreich, the Decoration of Honour for Services to the Republic of Austria.
Peter Pulzer died in January 2023 at the age of 93.
Selected Works
- The rise of political anti-Semitism in Germany and Austria. J. Wiley, New York 1964, translated into German in 1966 (Die Entstehung des politischen Antisemitismus in Deutschland und Österreich 1867–1914. Sigbert Mohn, Gütersloh) and published as a revised and expanded edition in 2004 (Vandenhoek & Ruprecht, Göttingen 2004).
- Political representation and elections in Britain (= Studies in political science. Vol. 1). Allen & Unwin, London 1967.
- Jews and the German state. The political history of a minority, 1848–1933. Blackwell, Oxford 1992.
- German politics, 1945–1995. Oxford University Press, Oxford 1995.
- Germany 1870–1945. Politics, state formation, and war. Oxford University Press, Oxford 1997.
- (with Wolfgang Benz and Arnold Pauker) Jüdisches Leben in der Weimarer Republik / Jews in the Weimar Republic (= Schriftenreihe wissenschaftlicher Abhandlungen des Leo Baeck Instituts. Band 57). Mohr Siebeck, Tübingen 1998.
- (with Kurt Richard Luther) Austria 1945–95. Fifty years of the Second Republic. Ashgate, Aldershot 1998.
- Fog in Channel. Anglo-German perspectives in the nineteenth century. German Historical Institute, London 2000.