Tobias Boes

Biography

Prof. Boes’s research focuses on the circulation of German culture in the world, and on the question of how German national identity is shaped by global forces. He is especially interested in the ways in which dynamics that characterized the so-called “first and second waves" of globalization (i.e. from about 1870 to 1970) anticipate current events.

His 2019 book Thomas Mann’s War provides the first comprehensive account in English of the pro-democracy activism of the Nobel Prize-winning author Thomas Mann during his American exile, which stretched from 1938 to 1952. The book also examines how Mann’s career anticipates that of intellectuals from developing nations in the twenty-first century, who like the German author need to address themselves to an anglophone audience because their books are banned or otherwise unavailable in their home countries.

Prof. Boes is currently working on a new book project that is tentatively titled Affirming Flames: Cultural and Intellectual Defenses of Democracy in the Fascist 1930s. His most recent research in this vein concerns the role that a number of mostly forgotten intellectuals from a variety of European countries—among them Germany, France, Belgium, Czechoslovakia, Ireland, and the United Kingdom—played in pro-democracy activism on the American town hall lecture circuit.

Boes is also an affiliate of Notre Dame’s Environmental Humanities Initiative with a particular interest in Germany’s evolving energy policies.

A native of West Berlin who came of age during the waning days of the Cold War, Prof. Boes grew up in the German-American community that surrounded the U.S. Army Berlin Brigade. His greatest professional goal is to pass on the spirit of intercultural friendship that characterized his childhood to a new generation of American students.

His public writing has appeared in Der Tagesspiegel, The L.A. Review of Books, Jacobin, and other outlets.