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Jeffrey Herf (born 1947) is a professor of history at the University of Maryland. His specialty is in 20th century European intellectual history, especially in Germany.

Herf received his PhD. from Brandeis University in 1980. Before joining the faculty at the University of Maryland, he taught at Ohio University in Athens, Ohio. He has published essays in The New Republic, Die Zeit, Partisan Review and elsewhere.

In his 1984 book, Technology, Culture and Politics in Weimar and the Third Reich, Herf coined the term “reactionary modernism” to describe the mixture of robust modernity and an affirmative stance toward progress combined with dreams of the past - a highly technological romanticism - which was characteristic of the German Conservative Revolutionary movement and Nazism.

Herf has described himself as a "liberal hawk."

Herf was the George Herbert Walker Bush / Axel Springer Fellow at the American Academy in Berlin, Germany, for Fall 2007.

This author page uses material from the Wikipedia article "Jeffrey Herf", which is released under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share-Alike License 3.0