Peter Schöttler


Peter Schöttler is a German historian working in France and Germany. He was a research director at the Centre national de la recherche scientifique in Paris and teaches now at the Freie Universität Berlin, where he has held an honorary professorship since 2001.
Schöttler was born in North Rhine-Westphalia, but grew up in Brussels, thus becoming bi-lingual. He studied at Ruhr-Universität Bochum, close to his birthplace, and then in Paris at the École Pratique des Hautes Études. In history he was a student of Hans Mommsen in Bochum and Michelle Perrot in Paris; he studied philosophy under Louis Althusser. He has been an interpreter and translator of the work of major 20th century historians, notably Marc Bloch and Lucien Febvre, co-founders of the journal Annales and the associated Annales School. He has also translated Fernand Braudel and has explored and popularized the work of Lucie Varga, the first woman member of the Annales group of historians.
Schöttler has taught at different German and Austrian Universities and at the École des hautes études en sciences sociales. In 1990/91 he was a member at the Institute for Advanced Study et in 1996/97 a Visiting Fellow at Princeton University. Since 2008 he is a Visiting Scholar at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science in Berlin.
At the 1998 Deutscher Historikertag Schöttler, Götz Aly and Michael Fahlbusch were involved in the debate concerning the role of German historians during the Third Reich. The trio suggested that Theodor Schieder, Werner Conze and Karl-Dietrich Erdmann were complicit with the Nazi regime rather than inwardly withdrawn intellectually through inner emigration.

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