Peter Paret

Peter Paret (April 13, 1924 – September 11, 2020) was a German-born American cultural and intellectual historian, whose two principal areas of research were war and the interaction of art and politics from 18th to 20th century Europe. He also wrote on related subjects.

Early life Paret was born in 1924 in Berlin, the son of Hans Paret and Suzanne Aimée Cassirer. On his father's side, he is descended from a French family that emigrated to Germany in 1679. Thirteen of Paret's ancestors, including his great-grandfather and grandfather, were Protestant ministers. His father, severely wounded in the First World War, studied philosophy before turning to business, and after the Second World War became head of the firm Beuck and Paret, business consultants. Paret's mother, who began to study medicine after her marriage, came from a Jewish family well known for the past two centuries in manufacturing (weaving looms, steel cables), finance, publishing, and scholarship. Her father, Paul Cassirer, publisher and art dealer, was an important force for modernism in the arts in Germany. The philosopher Ernst Cassirer was her uncle. In 1932, Paret's parents were divorced, and his mother with her young daughter moved to Vienna, where she continued her studies with Sigmund Freud. Paret followed in January 1933. In the following year, his mother married the psychoanalyst and educational reformer Siegfried Bernfeld and with her husband and children moved to France, and in August 1937 to the United States, where they settled in San Francisco.

In 1986 Paret became the Andrew W. Mellon Professor in the Humanities at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton. He retired in 1997. He continued to write, lecture and publish. Among his recent work is Clausewitz in His Time (New York: Oxford, 2015), an expanded German edition of which, Clausewitz in seiner Zeit, appeared in 2017. He edited a volume of two essays by Hans Delbrueck (1848–1929) and himself, Krieg, Geschichte, Theories, Miles Verlag, Berlin 2018, and besides reviews in The Journal of Central European History and The Journal of Military History published an article on the function of history in Clausewitz's understanding of war in The Journal of Military History, October 2018. He celebrated his 95th birthday in April 2019 but continued to work. For example, an article, expansion of a lecture he gave at Princeton University in March 2019, which develops a new concept of Clausewitz's biography, appeared in the January 2020 issue of The Journal of Military History. A short article "From Document to Interpretation", will appear in the July 2020 issue of the journal. He introduced the 2020 Yearbook of the Clausewitz Research Association in Burg, Germany, and also published an article in the issue.

Paret died in September 2020 at the age of 96.

Honors and awards

Paret was a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, a Member of the American Philosophical Society, which has awarded him its Thomas Jefferson Medal, an Honorary Fellow of the London School of Economics, and an Honorary Member of the German Clausewitz Society, which in 2020 awarded him its Silver Pin of Honor. He has received an honorary doctorate from the Humboldt University, Berlin, as well as three other honorary degrees, and the German government awarded him the Cross, Order of Merit First Class, German Federal Republic (2000), and the Great Cross of the Order of Merit, German Federal Republic (2013). In 2017, he received the $100,000 Pritzker Literature Award for Lifetime Achievement in Military Writing.

Publications

A complete bibliography of Paret's publications is available on the home page of the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton. A list of all monographs and edited volumes, including foreign-language editions, complemented by a short biography appeared in The Second Generation: Émigrés from Nazi Germany as Historians, ed. A. Daum, H. Lehmann, J. Sheehan, New York 2016, pp. 420‒22; this volumes also includes an autobiographical essay entitled "External Events, Inner Drives" (pp. 72‒78).