Andrew Donson

View faculty office hours.

Andrew Donson’s focuses on politics, society, and culture in Germany around the First World War. His first book Youth in the Fatherless Land: War Pedagogy, Nationalism, and Authority in Germany, 1914–1918 (Harvard, 2010), covered schools, children’s literature, family economics, and political youth movements. His book manuscript under review, “The Freedoms of the November Revolution: German Society at the Birth of Democracy, 1918–1919,” covers not only these topics but ones for big people too: dancing, gambling, pornography, agricultural economics, urban trades, political parties, and women’s rights. He holds a dual appointment in the Program in German Studies, where for ten years he served as director. He served four years as Book Review Editor of First World War Studies. In his courses, he uses RTTP games developed by the Reacting Consortium at Barnard College. He also incorporates principles of early twentieth-century German reform-pedagogy, the subject of his first book.

Books

• Youth in the Fatherless Land: War Pedagogy, Nationalism, and Authority in Germany, 1914-1918 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010).
• “The Freedoms of the November Revolution: German Society at the Birth of Democracy, 1918-1919,” book manuscript, 100,000-words, currently under review.

Selected Articles:

• “‘No Desire to Work’ in the November Revolution: A Social and Economic Analysis,” Living the German Revolution, ed. Christopher Dillon, Steven Schouten, and Kim Wünschmann (Oxford: Oxford University Press, forthcoming, 2024).
• “Gewerkschaften gegen Arbeitsunlust in der Novemberrevolution,” in Gewerkschaften im revolutionären Europa, 1917-1923, ed. Stefan Berger, Anja Kruke, and Wolfgang Jaeger (Bonn: J.H.W. Dietz, 2020)
• “Growing Up in War: Youth and Childhood, 1914-1918,” 1914-1918 online (2014).
• “Mobilizing Education for War: Schools and Universities, 1914-1918,” 1914-1918 online (2014).
• “The Teenager’s Revolution: Schülerräte in the Democratization and Right-Wing Radicalization of Germany, 1918-1923,” Central European History 44 (2011): 1-27.
• “Why Did German Youth Become Fascists? Nationalist Males Born 1900 to 1908 in War and Revolution,” Social History 31 (2006): 337-58.
• “Models for Young Nationalists and Militarists: Youth Literature in the First World War,” German Studies Review 27 (2004): 575-94.