Dominik Rigoll is a Research Fellow at the Leibniz-Zentrum für Zeithistorische Forschung (ZZF) in Potsdam, Germany, since 2015. Prior to joining the ZZF he was lecturer at Friedrich-Schiller-Universität Jena, visiting fellow at Princeton University and Fernand-Braudei-Fellow at Institut d'histoire du temps present, Paris. His research deals with politics of internal security and social cohesion, nationalism and communism, antinationalism and anticommunism in 19th and 20th century Germany and France.
- On the Creation, Destruction and Reformation of Democratic Protectionism: Human Rights Leagues in France and Germany, in: Uwe Backes/Thomas Lindenberger (eds.), Civil Democracy Protection. Success Conditions of Non-Governmental Organizations in Comparison, New York 2024, pp. 13-33.
- Attiser la peur de l’Autre : Les anticommunismes en Allemagne occupée et divisée, 1943-1961, in: Olivier Dard et al. (eds.). L’anticommunisme en France et en Europe 1917-1991, Rennes 2025, pp. 41–54.
- Der Nationalismus und die Rechte, in: Claudia C. Gatzka/Sonja Levsen (eds.), Neue Wege zu einer Geschichte der Bundesrepublik, Suhrkamp, Frankfurt am Main 2025, pp. 112-137.
Historicizing Nationalist Internationalism. Kurt P. Tauber's Empirical and Theoretical Legacy for Today's Research on the Transnational Far Right
In 1967, the political scientist Kurt P. Tauber, who had emigrated from Austria to the USA in 1939 as the child of a Jewish family, published a brilliant study on post-war German nationalism. The study also contained two chapters on the transnational activities of the German far right that are both empirically rich and analytically strong. In ‘Nationalist Neutralism and Soviet Policy’, Tauber examines the connections of West German nationalists to Central and Eastern Europe, which stand in the tradition of the good relations that some German nationalists maintained with the Tsarist Empire, for example. In ‘The International of Nationalism’, he shows how German nationalists not only worked towards a ‘Nation Europa’ and ‘Eurafrika’, but also towards a global propaganda agency (‘Natinform’). Tauber was the first to show that the history of organized nationalism in post-war Europe, in which historians are now becoming more and more interested, can only be understood by including these transcontinental dimensions. He can therefore be a useful reference point for today's research on the transnational far right after 1945.