Peter Paret (1924–2020)

Peter Paret was Mellon Professor in the Humanities Emeritus at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton and Raymond A. Spruance Professor of International History at Stanford University. His principal areas of research were the history of war, particularly in the 18th and early 19th century, and the history of European culture from the 18th to the 20th century. He was born in Berlin in 1924 and is a graduate of the University of London (Ph.D., 1960). Before joining the Institute in 1986, he held positions at Princeton University, the University of California, Davis, and Stanford University. In the academic year 2008-09 he gave the Lees Knowles Lectures on the History of War at Cambridge University - the expanded text of which was published in 2009 - and organized an exhibition on the work of the sculptor Ernst Barlach that opened on March 1, 2009 at the Art Museum of Princeton University. Among his ten monographs are Clausewitz and the State (1976); The Berlin Secession (1980); Art as History (1988); and An Artist Against the Third Reich: Ernst Barlach, 1933-38. He has also published two volumes of essays: Understanding War (1992) and German Encounters with Modernism, 1840-1945 (2001). In 2012 he coauthored Myth and Modernity: Barlach's Drawings on the Nibelungen with Helga Thieme. He was awarded the Great Cross of the Order of Merit of the Federal Republic of Germany in 2013, having been an officer of the Order for the past decade. In 2017 he won the Pritzker Literature Award. He died in Salt Lake City, Utah, on September 11, 2020 at age 96.