Gerald Feldman

Gerald Donald Feldman (April 24, 1937 – October 31, 2007) was an American historian who specialized in 20th-century German history. He was professor of history at the University of California, Berkeley, and received several prizes and honors, including the Order of Merit of the Federal Republic of Germany.

Biography Feldman was born on April 24, 1937, in New York City, the son of Isadore Feldman and Lillian (Cohen) Feldman. He grew up in the Bronx in a Jewish family of modest financial means. He studied at Columbia University, graduating magna cum laude, then went to Harvard University for graduate study. He was awarded a Ph.D. in 1964. In 1963 he started as assistant professor at the University of California, Berkeley. In 1966 he published his dissertation, entitled Army, Industry, and Labor in Germany, 1914–18, a study of the militarization of German society through the collaborative interaction of the country's heavy industry with its socialist labor movement during World War I. In 1977 he published Iron and Steel in the German Inflation, 1916–23 which focused on the history of Germany's heavy industry in the Weimar Republic. His The Great Disorder. Politics, Economics, and Society in the German Inflation, 1914–24 (1993) focused on the inflation from the war economy to the post war hyperinflation. He participated in a 2001 symposium on Nazi confiscation of Jewish property, where he was acknowledged as "one of the pioneers" in the investigation of the symposium's topic.

At the University of California, Berkeley he fostered the growth of the Center for German and European Studies, which became the Institute of European Studies. He had a particular interest in promoting connections between academics in the U.S. and Europe, leading him to serve as an advisory board member and president of the "Friends" group for the German Historical Institute in Washington, DC, an organization that facilitates interactions between German and American historians. In 2004 he became a member of the Bavarian Academy of Sciences and Humanities. In 2000 he was awarded with the Order of Merit of the Federal Republic of Germany. A History of the Deutsche Bank, 1870–1995 (Lothar Gall, Gerald D. Feldman, Harold James, Carl-Ludwig Holtfrerich, Hans E. Büschgen, 1995), C.H. Beck, Financial Times/Booz Allen Hamilton Business Book Award, 1995 Hugo Stinnes. Biographie eines Industriellen 1870–1924 (1998), C.H. Beck, Die Allianz und die Deutsche Versicherungswirtschaft 1933–1945 (2001), C.H. Beck, Allianz and the German Insurance Business, 1933–1945 (2001), Cambridge University Press,