Our next guest in die KLAU MICH show, Friday 15, 13:50 at the Ständehaus, Kassel:

Götz Haydar Aly (born May 3, 1947 in Heidelberg, Baden-Württemberg) is a German journalist, historian and social scientist.

After attending the German School of Journalists, Aly studied history and political science in Berlin. As a journalist, he worked for the taz, the Berliner Zeitung and the FAZ.

Presently, from 2004 to 2005, he is a visiting professor for interdisciplinary Holocaust research at the Fritz Bauer Institut in Frankfurt am Main.

Aly researches the history of the Holocaust and the participation of social elites in Nazi destruction policies. In 2005 he gained public attention in Germany for the popular success of his book Hitlers Volksstaat (Hitler’s People’s State). In it, Aly characterises Nazi Germany as a “convenience dictatorship” that until late in the war retained broad public support, in particular by making possible an unprecedented social mobility for the lower classes, by introducing redistributive fiscal policies and by greatly extending the German welfare state.

No less polemic is his essay “Unser Kampf, 1968″ where he establishes unpleasant continuities between the generations of 1933 and 1968.

Goetz Aly recently received the Ludwig-Börne-Preises 2012.