Konrad H. Jarausch was born on the day the Atlantic Charter was proclaimed, then spent more than five decades asking how democracies could recover after catastrophe. The German-American historian, a leading interpreter of modern Germany and Europe, died in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, on September 1, 2026. He was 85.

That coincidence of birth and history became more than a biographical curiosity. Born in Magdeburg in 1941, Jarausch grew up amid the consequences of the Second World War and never knew his father, who died during the conflict. He later made the burden of Germany's past the central problem of a scholarly life: how institutions and educated elites failed, how dictatorship shaped ordinary lives, and how a political culture might learn democratic habits after ruin.

As a young man, Jarausch crossed the Atlantic and built his education in the United States. He earned a master's degree from the University of Wisconsin in 1964 and a doctorate in German history there in 1969. His University of North Carolina curriculum vitae traced his first long faculty appointment to the University of Missouri, where he taught from 1968 until 1983. That year he became UNC's Lurcy Professor of European Civilization.

At Chapel Hill, Jarausch co-directed the UNC-Duke Center for European Studies from 1994 to 1998 and guided scores of doctoral students. He also led the German Studies Association and the Conference Group for Central European History, giving institutional form to the exchange at the heart of his work.

From 1998 to 2006, Jarausch helped lead the Center for Contemporary History in Potsdam, now the Leibniz Centre for Contemporary History. His German publisher credited him with bringing Anglo-American methods and international scholars into the institute, strengthening digital links among historians, and helping develop Zeithistorische Forschungen. A Leibniz Centre for Contemporary History account described his perspective as both German and American.

Jarausch's bibliography followed the same restless movement across methods and borders. Early work examined imperial politics, students, and the professions. Later books turned to reunification, East Germany, memory, the Third Reich, and the difficult process of cultural democratization. The titles ranged from The Enigmatic Chancellor and The Rush to German Unity to Shattered Past and After Hitler. In Out of Ashes, published in 2015, he placed Europe's destruction and reconstruction within a single twentieth-century narrative.

He repeatedly widened the frame without losing sight of individual lives. Broken Lives, published in 2018, drew on dozens of autobiographies to compare the experiences and later memories of ordinary Germans. In an interview with Deutschlandfunk Kultur, he explained that such retrospective accounts could reveal both shared patterns and the ways people revised their own stories over time. The historian's task, in his view, was not merely to collect memories but to test how they were formed.

That self-questioning became personal in The Burden of German History: A Transatlantic Life, published in 2023. His German publisher then worked with him on a revised and expanded edition, Die Last der Vergangenheit, which appeared in 2025. In announcing his death, Vergangenheitsverlag emphasized the connecting work that defined his career: explaining Germany to Americans, America to Germans, and historical experience to later generations.

Jarausch's books remain tools for that work. His studies of universities and professions show how learning can coexist with political failure. His histories of division and reunification track the remaking of German institutions. At UNC and in Potsdam, the centers, journal, digital networks, and historians he helped cultivate continue the transatlantic conversation he sustained for more than half a century.