Dr Peter Thompson

Senior Lecturer in German

I have been teaching at the University of Sheffield since 1990, when I was appointed to build up the provision of politics and history options within the Department. My background is a somewhat unusual one: I left school at 16, joined the army for 5 years and then worked as a lorry driver, before commencing undergraduate study as a mature student in 1983 at Portsmouth Polytechnic. My interests have always been in the post-war history of the GDR and German unification, but my main area of research at present is in the field of Ernst Bloch studies, encompassing not only his period in the GDR from 1949 to 1961 - when he was Professor of Philosophy at Leipzig University and centrally involved in oppositional Marxist activities of the Harich-Gruppe of the mid 1950s – but also in the philosophical impact of his theories of Hope, Utopia and his view of the central role of faith in social transformation. I have also now established The Centre for Ernst Bloch Studies at Sheffield.

Since 1990 I have published on the history of ideas, political developments in the GDR and post-unification Germany, Brecht, ecology and philosophy, and the PDS/Linke. In 2005 I published The Crisis of the German Left, which deals with the history of Stalinism in the workers´ movement and its continuing influence on the post-unification Left. I am also one of the founding editors of the journal DEBATTE, which has been running since 1993 and deals with German and wider Central European Affairs.

Future projects include a monograph on the `Privatisation of Hope´ - which will deal with the relevance of Bloch´s ideas in the context of the globalisation of the economy but also of the atomisation of communal values.

In 2007 I published a chapter on Wolf Biermann using Blochian analysis in David Robb: "Protest Song in East and West Germany since the 1960s"

In addition I am a media commentator on German affairs, having appeared in several Radio 4 programmes and a Channel 4 documentary on British attitudes to the Third Reich. I have also published a Face to Faith column in the Guardian on Ernst Bloch and Atheism.

NEWS!! The Department of Germanic Studies is delighted to announce that Dr Thompson has been given a three-year British Academy Research Development Award (BARDA) totalling £86,606, to commence in October 2008 to work on a project entitled Ernst Bloch and the Return of Religion. The funds will be used to support the work of the Centre and to enable Dr Thompson to take sabbatical leave in order to work on an edited volume and a monograph on Bloch.

!! Duke University Press have now agreed to publish the volume "Ernst Bloch and the Privatisation of Hope" in their SIC series, edited by Slavoj Zizek. Contributors will include Slavoj Zizek, Juergen Moltmann, Jan Robert Bloch, Roland Boer, Tom Nairn, Philip Goodchild and others. This will appear in 2009 to mark the 50th anniversasry of the publication of Bloch's "Das Prinzip Hoffnung".

List of Publications

The Centre for Ernst Bloch Studies

Guardian Face to Faith on Ernst Bloch and Atheism