Richard Bessel is Professor of Twentieth Century History at the University of York. He works on the social and political history of modern Germany, the aftermath of the two world wars and the history of violence. He is a member of the Editorial Board of History Today.  During 2012 he was a Senior Fellow at the Freiburg Institute for Advanced Studies. His most recent book is about Germany in 1945, and more generally on the emergence of the German people from the violence and trauma of Nazism and war. As such, this forms part of a broader research interest on the social, cultural and psychological legacies of the violence of the Second World War across Europe.