My friend and colleague Jan Plamper, who has died aged 53 of cancer, was a historian of emotions and the senses, and a pioneer in this relatively new approach to studying the past, which seeks to uncover how people experienced the events through which they lived, and also to understand why people do what they do. His book The History of Emotions: An Introduction (2015) is already a classic.
Jan specialised in Russian/Soviet and German history, and Das Neue Wir (The New Us, 2019) is a fascinating manifesto on modern Germany shaped by migration. It was published in Jan’s English translation as We Are All Migrants: A History of Multicultural Germany only a few months before his death.
As professor of history at Goldsmiths, University of London, from 2012 until 2021, Jan initiated pioneering MA programmes in Queer History and Black British History, and established collaboration with the German Academic Exchange Service, which encourages the movement of early career scholars between countries and institutions.
He also supported the Centre for the Study of the Balkans, which I directed, and helped me prepare Research Excellence Framework submissions, which saw the Goldsmiths history department rise in the rankings. He compared the exercise to Soviet-style bureaucracy (and jokingly called me the “Ref Tsar”), but credited it for prompting UK universities to appoint international scholars such as himself. In 2021 he accepted a chair in history at Limerick University, having previously played a prominent role in mobilising academic opposition to redundancies at Goldsmiths.
The eldest son of Harald Plamper, a public manager and university administrator, and Gudrun (nee Damm), a language teacher, Jan was born in Laichingen, a small town in West Germany. Growing up in a society coping with a difficult past had a profound impact on him. Fluent in several languages and an engaged intellectual, he was particularly invested in Russian and Jewish history and culture.
Jan attended secondary schools in Tübingen and in the US (in Storrs, Connecticut) and studied history at Brandeis University, then went on to do a PhD at the University of California, Berkeley. His doctorate was later published as The Stalin Cult: A Study in the Alchemy of Power (2012). In the early 1990s, in lieu of German military service, he was permitted to volunteer as a carer for elderly survivors of the Holocaust and the Siege of Leningrad, and around this time he also started working with the Russian human rights organisation Memorial, which won the Nobel peace prize in 2022.
He held postdoctoral fellowships in Tübingen and Berlin, before joining Goldsmiths in London. Prestigious research fellowships in Germany followed, notably at the Wissenschaftskolleg (Institute for Advanced Studies) in Berlin, but an established post in his native country eluded him despite his international reputation.
Jan worked until the end: together with a colleague he was writing another study on emotions, kept a diary of his cancer treatment, and published articles critical of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
Jan is survived by his second wife, the animation artist Evgenia Gostrer, whom he married in 2019, two daughters, Olga and Lisa, from his first marriage, to Irina Kremenetskaia which ended in divorce, his father and three brothers Paul, Christoph and Alexander. His mother and younger sister, Hedwig, both predeceased him.
