On April 1st, the Institute of European Studies (IES) at UC Berkeley, in collaboration with the German Historical Institute Washington, the Center for German and European Studies, the History department, and the German Department, hosted Thomas Kohut, Sue and Edgar Wachenhiem III Professor of History Emeritus at Williams College. Kohut, a distinguished historian with psychoanalytic training, delivered a lecture based on his 2020 book, Empathy and the Historical Understanding of the Human Past. The talk, attended by approximately 40 participants, explored the role of empathy in interpreting historical figures and their motives.
Kohut opened by distinguishing empathy from sympathy—an idea he emphasized throughout the lecture. He identified five common definitions of empathy across academic disciplines: sympathy, identification, merger, sharing, and perspective-taking—the latter being the most relevant for historians. Rather than analyzing the past solely through its consequences, Kahut argued that historians must strive to understand the past as it was experienced in the present moment by historical actors.
Empathy, he stressed, should be used in tandem with traditional historical methods. While it allows historians to gain insight into a subject’s motivations, it must be practiced deliberately and self-consciously to maintain critical distance. Kohut defined empathy as the attempt to feel as someone else, in contrast to sympathy, which is feeling for someone else. Importantly, he argued that empathy must be extended not only to victims but also to perpetrators—“explaining but not excusing, understanding but not forgiving”—in order to fully humanize the complexity of historical events.
One of the lecture’s central examples was the Wannsee Conference of January 20, 1942, where Nazi officials finalized plans for the Holocaust. Kohut challenged the conventional portrayal of the Nazis as unwavering and decisive, using an empathetic lens to reveal their underlying fear of public dissent. He drew attention to a key issue discussed at the conference—the treatment of individuals in mixed Jewish marriages or of mixed Jewish descent. This concern, he suggested, reflected anxieties stemming from the prior year’s cancellation of the Nazi euthanasia program due to widespread public protests. Through empathy, Kohut proposed, we can better understand the doubts and hesitations that shaped the Nazis’ actions, complicating the narrative of the so-called “Final Solution.”
In his concluding remarks, Kohut emphasized that empathy offers a legitimate and valuable mode of historical inquiry. While not superior to more distanced approaches, the empathetic perspective provides a different, yet equally valid, interpretation of the past. By enabling historians to grasp what might have happened within the minds of historical figures, empathy deepens our understanding of human behavior across time.