Manfred Henningsen
Manfred Henningsen was born in 1938 in Flensburg, Germany, and grew up in the post-war atmosphere he describes in this book.
He studied in West Berlin in 1959, two years before the Wall was built, but spent his major graduate life and work at the University in Munich from 1958 to 1969, where in 1967 he received his PhD in political science under the guidance of Eric Voegelin. In 1969, he received a junior fellowship at Stanford’s Hoover Institution and, in 1970, accepted an offer from the Department of Political Science at the University of Hawaii at Manoa in Honolulu, where he taught until his retirement in 2020 for 50 years.
He has given lectures in Austria, Finland, Poland, Italy, Thailand, Japan, Indonesia, the People’s Republic of China, the Ukraine, and Germany.
He has published books in German on Toynbee’s philosophy of history, on European concepts of American culture, and on American political culture itself. In addition, he published numerous articles on the history of Western political thought, the Holocaust, and other genocides.
In 1974, he married a young African American woman, Kareda Ratcliff. This relationship made him forever interested in the dynamics of American racism from the colonial to the present period.