Faculty
James Tent, Ph.D.
Chair, Professor and University Scholar
University of Wisconsin
jtent@uab.edu
James F. Tent, a historian of Modern Germany, Department Chair and University Scholar, has focused his research on the evolution of German society and politics since 1945. His first major work, Mission on the Rhine: Reeducation and Denazification in American-Occupied Germany (University of Chicago Press, 1982) examined America's efforts to strengthen democratic practices and methods in postwar Germany and in the early years of the Federal Republic. In talking about West Germany's progress in developing a civic culture since 1945, the then U.S. Ambassador to Bonn, Richard Burt, cited Tent's work in addressing areas where Germans and Americans entered into cooperative programs to rebuild and modernize German educational institutions. Tent completed a major study of Germany's largest university: The Free University of Berlin: A Political History (Indiana University Press, 1988), which appeared simultaneously in German translation. He was present in Berlin when the Free University celebrated its fortieth anniversary on December 7, 1988, and presented this history to the university's president and to the President of the Federal Republic, Richard von Weizcker. At Tent's urging and with the help of the Alabama Congressional delegation, then President Reagan recognized the Free University's contributions to the principles of individual rights and freedom in a public declaration during its anniversary celebrations. Tent edited the unpublished papers of Dr. E.Y. Hartshorne, a distinguished officer in the American humanitarian relief operations in postwar Germany. He was involved in a major historical controversy with Canadian author James Bacque, who claimed that General Dwight Eisenhower had created a myth of food shortage in order to justify the starvation of German prisoners of war. Tent's research demonstrated how serious that food crisis was. It appeared as a leading chapter in Professor Stephen E. Ambrose and Gnter Bischof, eds., Eisenhower and the German POWs (Louisiana State University Press, 1992). Tent has completed a book about Allied intelligence and combined arms efforts during the war to secure the Normandy Invasion against German naval counterattacks. This work represented a major new interpretation of the greatest amphibious landing in history. The book, E-Boat Alert: Defending the Normandy Invasion Fleet appeared in May 1996 with the Naval Institute Press. Tent was a historical consultant to Britain ITN Television on Erboa in 1998.
Tent's latest completed project has been to publish the edited papers of a distinguished American academician-turned-official: Academic Proconsul: Harvard Sociologist Edward Y. Hartshorne and the Reopening of German Universities, 1945 - 1946; His Personal Account, WVT Verlag, Trier, 1998. This edited work presents Hartshorne's secret reports, diaries, and correspondence during the time he was a higher education control officer with the American Military Government in Occupied Germany. It has won critical acclaim in the German press.
The University Press of Kansas has just published Tent's latest work, a study on the fate of German citizens persecuted under the Nazis as being half Jewish. The title is In the Shadow of the Holocaust: Nazi Persecution of Jewish-Christian Germans. Another major research project focuses on American humanitarian relief operations in post-1945 Germany with emphasis on the American Friends Service Committee (Quakers) and other charitable organizations which served after the war. In January 1996, Tent gave a nationally publicized address in Berlin in the presence of German President Rainer Herzog at the opening of an exhibit on the accomplishments of American and British Quakers after 1945. His monograph Den Deutschen Freund Sein (Friends of the Germans), about the American Friends Service Committee's activities in postwar Germany accompanied that historical exhibit in Berlin which then traveled to twenty-one German cities in 1996 and 1997. It is now being exhibited in five cities in the United States.
For questions concerning his research, please contact Dr. Tent.
