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Alison Frank Johnson is a Professor of History. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
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FM: Your work has covered some surprising topics, from Austrian oil ambitions to the marketing of mountain air. How do seemingly obscure historical stories help us better understand today’s world?
AFJ: I’m not sure exactly how to answer that question, as you can tell from my long silence.
The more obscure — in some sense — the more likely they are to be perspectives I haven’t thought of before. And one of my goals as an educator is to get students not only to understand where they come from and their own perspectives but also to borrow other people’s perspectives, other people’s problems, other people’s concerns, which I think increases their ability to be empathetic human beings which is one of — in my mind — my most important goals as an educator.
FM: You’ve researched quite a few topics that have a lot of current relevance but from a historical perspective — for instance, capital punishment, oil, and climate change. The list goes on. I’m curious how that study has influenced your own views and perspectives as we go about navigating these things today.
AFJ: It is sometimes easier to think through problems if you can think through them in a place and time that feels distant. You can allow yourself to look at something with more detachment if it doesn’t feel like it is politically motivated in the present.
If I’m talking to you about the approach to capital punishment in 1848, then we can think about pros and cons of rushing through last-minute executions before regime change in a way that might be able to get you think about the wisdom of doing that — the ethics of doing that — differently than if I am talking to you about something that’s happening, for example, at the end of the Trump administration and you feel immediately defensive if you are a supporter of President Trump because it feels like I am just making this point to attack President Trump.
FM: Is it possible to think about these things as not in the present if it’s the same stuff that’s happening?
AFJ: Well, historians have a scholarly obligation to care about what the evidence says — when we like it, and when we don’t like it. That is a skill that I think people aren’t always able to exercise in the present. I think that many of us are struggling in this moment to force ourselves to consider all of the evidence whether we like it or not but rather look for evidence that supports an argument that we already want to make.
It’s not that I don’t expect people to draw conclusions — it’s that, as a history teacher, my students won’t listen to me if they think that I am using history to make a point about the present. I have to show them that the arguments I’m making about the past, I’m making based on evidence, not based on my own politics. And that, I hope, then in turn will lead them to think — maybe differently or maybe with more conviction — about the present.
Honestly, at this point, if I could just get people to care more about evidence, that would already be a win.
FM: You’re working on a new book on post-war Germany and Austria. Tell me about it.
AFJ: So, I discovered quite by accident that there were three churches in territory that used to be part of the Habsburg monarchy — one is now in Germany, one is in Austria, and one is in Italy — that displayed the human remains of children that local legends held had been murdered by Jews. And that they were on display until the 1960s or in one case the 1980s, and they were buried — the last one was buried in 1989.
First, I couldn’t believe that this physical representation of blood libel was still on display 20 years after the end of the Second World War, right? And some of them had been on display for 500 years.
And then, I was really curious about what happened in the 1960s slash 1989 so that somebody was like “No, okay, yeah. We didn’t get rid of these during the Napoleonic occupation, we didn’t get rid of these when all of the Jews in our country were emancipated, or after the first World War when we had a democratic government elected for the first time, or after World War II during the denazification. But, today is the day, right?” What is it that makes somebody wake up in 1967 and say, “Okay, I’m actually — now I’m ready”?
FM: What is it?
AFJ: I think often it comes down to a coalition of a local Catholic person with some authority and a Jewish partner operating behind the scenes to help that person understand the tremendous moral urgency of doing something. But, the details are quite different in each of the three cases.
FM: What does this research look like? Is it you in the archives pulling files, or is it you going to these towns and visiting?
AFJ: I’m an archive rat, so my inclination is to want to look in archives for everything. For this particular project, I’ve had to do a lot more talking to people than I normally do and I found less material in archives than I would normally want to find.
To the extent that there has been research done, it’s being done by local scholars, and so I’ve really been trying to talk to them, trying to understand the places. These stories seem very deeply embedded in their locations and their towns. And I'm an outsider, so I'm very dependent on the generosity of people from these places to try to help me understand what makes them tick and what this actually means to them. I don't want to sweep in from Harvard and say, “you've been behaving badly, and now I'm going to expose you.” I want to try to understand what's happened. It's a story that in my mind has to combine some praise for people who took action, with some recognition for the tremendous pain caused by the late date at which that action was taken.
FM: You've taught students about how fairy tales like the Brothers Grimm shaped national identity in Germany. What’s your favorite fairy tale?
AFJ: I guess I like Hansel and Gretel, because the siblings stick together. There are a lot of fairy tales that pit siblings against one another, or where all of the siblings are wretched and then there's one, usually the youngest sibling, who has any value whatsoever as a human being. And Hansel and Gretel are a team.
FM: In college, you studied both German and Russian. What made you specialize in German?
AFJ: It was really hard to get to Russia, and German-speaking countries were as close as I could get without needing a very special visa.
I started college in the fall of 1989 and I really wanted to study abroad in 1991-92 — so, if you think about what's happening in what was becoming the former Soviet Union in 1991, it was really hard to go there. This is a sort of fun fact: the Russia program at my college sent students to Kyiv — which is, of course, in Ukraine, not in Russia — but that’s how simple-minded we were in the 80s and early 90s.
And my father, who was a scientist, wouldn’t let me go to Kyiv because he said it was too close to Chernobyl. So, Russia was off the table for study abroad, and Austria was close to Russia in my imagination. And so I went and then I just kind of got hooked.
Also, there was a particular professor at my college at the time, Gail Newman, who was just an incredible teacher, and I took a class with her on German literature and translation. I would have taken any class that she offered, because she was my North Star of my education. And the easiest way to take a lot of classes with her was to learn German.
I started learning German my sophomore year in college, and that’s a message for all of you Harvard College undergraduates. You think you're so old when you’re a sophomore and it's too late to start a new language, but it’s not. You could start a new language, and then you could chair the department of that language at Harvard 30 years later.
FM: What’s your favorite part about the German language?
AFJ: That you can tell how to pronounce things just from seeing how they’re written. That is an incredible benefit in learning a foreign language. German pronunciation is very predictable. I love it.
FM: You’re the Faculty Fellow for the men’s lacrosse team. Have you always been a lacrosse fan?
AFJ: No!
A funny thing happened last fall — meaning 2023, not 2024. I offered my German history lecture. I went in on the first day of class. All of the students were male, and all but three of them had matching backpacks. It quickly became clear that they all played lacrosse. So, once you have 11 lacrosse players in your class — or 12, or whatever it was — you get a little more curious about lacrosse.
So, I went to a lacrosse scrimmage. I took my son, who was 11 at the time. One of my students, who was in my class, broke several ribs, was carried off in a stretcher, so that was a bit of a shock. But then I went to all of their home games in the spring, and I figured out a little bit about the sport.
My son actually started playing lacrosse because of his exposure to the men’s lacrosse team, so now I’m a big fan.
FM: To go back to history, if you could spend a day with any historical figure from German-speaking Europe, who would it be and why?
AFJ: Can we set aside the possibility of seeing Hitler and assassinating him? Because I think everybody would say —
FM: Let’s set that aside.
AFJ: It’s almost irresistible to say Mozart, because it would be fun to meet someone like this, although I suppose I’d rather hear him play the piano.
FM: Are you a musician?
AFJ: I used to be.
Alright, you know who I'll say? I'll say Sophie Scholl.
She was executed by the Nazis. She was a university student at LMU, the University of Munich. She and her brother and some friends of theirs put up anti-Hitler graffiti during the Second World War. They distributed flyers, and they were caught distributing their sixth flyer. They threw it into this big, open courtyard within the main university building. I have this vision of them fluttering down from the balcony and to the main floor, and they were seen and turned in and tried and executed almost immediately.
I would want to talk to Sophie Scholl, because she was a brave and interesting person, because I have spent my career at universities and she's a university student. But I would also really want to be able to tell her that people remember her, and if I keep talking about that, I will start crying.
FM: On that note, teaching history — especially with the topics you work on — involves grappling with some pretty difficult conversations. How do you approach that as you go about your research and teaching?
AFJ: Those are the conversations that are worth having, right? The difficult ones.
Nothing feels more successful as an educator than creating an environment in which people can have the courage to talk through things that are actually difficult and controversial — can say something knowing that one of their classmates might convince them that what they just said was wrong. That's what I want.
I want you to say, “But, what about this?” And then someone else responds to that in a way that gets you to think, “Huh? That’s actually not very convincing to me anymore” without making you feel like you're under attack. Because the thing that we’re here to do is to learn, not just display what we already know.
And I find — so far in my career — my students have understood that and have treated one another with respect even when they disagree, and that's the only environment in which you can change somebody's mind.
FM: What do you like to do in your free time?
AFJ: I love to spend time with my kids. I like to read fiction.
FM: What’s your favorite fiction?
AFJ: An incredibly good book that I read recently was “The Postcard” by Anne Berest. It's originally written in French — I read an English translation. That was really good. I recommended that to a lot of people.
I've read 29 books since January 1. So, I really plow through books. That’s something relatively new, because one of my other favorite things to do is to watch garbage television. But I’ve tried to wean myself from that and switch to novels instead.
FM: You’ve recently been in the public eye quite a bit, from Crimson op-eds to TV interviews. What about the current moment motivates you to speak up?
AFJ: The selfish piece of it is I don’t want to look back later and have to explain to somebody why I didn’t speak up. So, that’s a very basic way of thinking about it.
People that I respect and admire have been attacked without justification in ways that I think reveal a great deal of bigotry. I have to be someone that those people know will stick up for them if they're under attack. These are situations in which sometimes they can’t defend themselves, and I can’t stand the thought of one of my colleagues — not to mention one of my friends — being attacked and feeling like nobody cares or nobody has the courage to defend them because then they’ll get attacked too. And the truth is? You defend one of these colleagues, you get attacked too. You wouldn’t believe the hate mail that I’ve gotten for saying things that are pretty vanilla in some ways.
Also, students are being students. I don’t have to agree with everything that they say to want to fight for their right to say it. Students making trouble is as old as universities existing. How can we say all of a sudden that they’re not allowed to do that? Who’s going to keep us honest? They might be wrong, okay, but what if we’re wrong? What if the older generation is the one that’s wrong? You have to be able to withstand listening to young people complain about certain things that you take for granted.
That’s like, literally, the job of young people and I just don’t understand how — well, I guess I’ll go ahead and say it. I do not understand how the federal government of the United States with the largest, most powerful military in the world can look at a graduate student and say that they’re a national security risk because they’re opinionated. It’s crazy.
I’m always going to say something and sometimes I wish I hadn’t, but that doesn’t stop me from saying it again the next time.
—Magazine writer Neil H. Shah can be reached at neil.shah@thecrimson.com. Follow him on X @neilhshah15.
