Dr. Klaus Eisele retired

At the start of the winter semester 2022/23, the longest-serving historian in the Department of History, Dr. Klaus Eisele, retired. Dr. Eisele studied history and medieval studies in Karlsruhe. He was involved as an assistant under Prof. Dr. Walter Bußmann (1914-1993) in the creation of Volume 5 of the "Handbook of European History". In the early 1990s, under Prof. Dr. Rudolf Lill (1934-2020), Eisele was part of the founding staff of the Research Center Resistance to National Socialism in the German Southwest at the then Institute of History. In this capacity, as the conceptual head of local and regional history, he was involved in numerous contemporary history documentation, research, publication, and public history projects, including the first-ever compilation of July 20, 1944 co-conspirators in the German Southwest, on the city history of Offenburg, and on the history of the pastorate of the Ev. Landeskirche during the Nazi era. Eisele received his doctorate with the innovative electoral history thesis "Karlsruhe in the Crisis Years of the Weimar Republic and the Rise of the NSDAP 1928-1930." His undergraduate teaching of contemporary history has introduced generations of history students in Karlsruhe to history as a science and to topics in regional and general contemporary history. Eisele remains affiliated with the department as an adjunct professor.