Lily Shandalove interviewed Robert Braun about his research funded by
a 2022 France-Berkeley Fund grant. Robert Braun, an associate professor in sociology at UC Berkeley, to learn more about his current research on“Intergroup Solidarity and Social Integration: Micro-level evidence from the Holocaust in Belgium, France, the Netherlands and Poland.”As a recent PHD graduate from Cornell University, Braunhas taught at many schools beyond Berkeley includingNorthwestern, and has now written two books. The time spent in this interview was focused on Braun’s research interests, his academic journey, and his experience as an undergraduate and postgraduate.
Can you start with introducing yourself and giving us a little background on your academic
journey and how you have gotten to where you are now?
RB: My name is Robert Braun, I am an associate professor of sociology, at UC Berkeley. I started out as an
undergraduate student in history, but switched halfway through my undergraduate career to the social
sciences because I was more interested in sort of general, bigger picture kind of patterns. So I ended up
becoming a sociologist and then I worked for a couple of years at a newspaper in the Netherlands.
That was something I always thought I wanted to do, work as a journalist, but I absolutely hated
the job. So I went back and, one of the concerns I had about being a journalist was that it was too fast, too
quick of a turn around, you never really had the time to dig in and really figure out what was going on.
So that made me think that maybe writing a dissertation would be another way of doing that. So I decided
to apply to graduate school and applied all over the world and happened to end up in the United States
getting an offer from Cornell.
It was an easy choice as Cornell was the only offer I did get. My first job out of graduate school
was as an assistant professor at Northwestern University, and then after two years, I moved to UC
Berkeley because of a spouse relationship.
Can you give us a little summary of the research you are currently doing at Berkeley, and the
other research you have worked on?
RB: The work I am doing with Claire is a projection on Jews during the Holocaust. It tries to explain why
some communities stepped up and sheltered Jews when they were persecuted by Nazis, and why some
communities did not. I'm looking at a really fine grained level, so why certain neighborhoods or certain associations or certain towns do have such different responses to the persecutions. And for that, I compiled a lot of quantitative data based on registration lists, to figure out where Jews were living and who ended up being deported so that I can figure out where persecution levels were higher versus lower so that I could see those are places where where it's more likely that rescue takes place, and these are places where rescue probably didn't play a very important role. And that brought me in touch with Claire Zalk, the historian who I'm working with. Because while I was doing that in the Netherlands and Belgium, she was doing a very similar thing in Poland and France. So we met each other and thought, hey, that's interesting, we're doing exactly the same thing in different places. And that's how we sort of decided to combine forces and sort of see whether we could bring these two data sets that we collected together, harmonize them, and sort of come up with a broader, quantitative history of the Holocaust.
For my other research, I am working on what I hope will be a history of fear in Europe from the
1860’s to 1930’s. I am doing this through a distinct lens by looking at it via the boogeyman in children’s
stories. I grew up being told versions of these stories, with the boogeyman, or the man in the bowtie, as a
threat by my parents not to break curfew or go too far from home or I would be thrown in a well. This
strategy of storytelling was extremely effective, and has had a huge impact on my life. Now, when I see
people wearing bow ties, I know they won’t throw me in a well, but my first response is this primitive
fear, that something is wrong. So now I am taking this experience and looking at 40 towns in Europe at
four points in time, and this research will hopefully become another book.
Can you expand a little more on where your interest for this project originates from?
RB: This has a pretty personal connection, so I was in my first year at Cornell for grad school, and you getsort of this carte blanche in terms of what you want to work on, right? When you do your PhD in the United States, you can work on whatever you want to work on, and that's great, but it's also very intimidating and daunting, and I was completely lost during my first year. So I went back to Amsterdam over winter break and was meeting up with friends and I was basically complaining about my life. And my friend at some point said, why don't you just work on what you think is the most important topic?And I was like, yeah, if only it was so simple, but then I walked home that night and then I thought, well, what would that be? And I was walking in Amsterdam and this is of course a city in which these deportations happened, right- and not so long ago, they're really sort of still there. Yet at the same time, it, if you walk in Amsterdam, it's hard to imagine that a genocide took place there. It is such a safe, sort of boring kind of place, you wouldn't expect something like that to be happening, yet one and a half generations ago, that was the case.
So that's how I started thinking about it. You have many ideas, a lot of them fail, but this one, for
some reason, it wouldn't go away. And it always stuck with me, up until this very day.
Based on what you have said about having varied interests in academia, and struggling to find
something you were passionate about, what would you say are the biggest challenges you have
encountered in your research?
RB: So I think there's two, and they're both related to the same thing. So what makes the research that I'm
doing with Claire distinct is that it uses quantitative methods and statistics to study a topic that
traditionally has not been studied in that way. And, that, on one hand, creates challenges because it'ssometimes hard to communicate with the scholarly community that you want to be part of, the varied ideas on the use of statistics and data. Or there's also, of course,an argument that it's unethical to count lives in the way that I did, because in some ways you're doing what Hitler's bureaucrats did. So some people also, for that reason, have sort of ethical issues with it, so it is hard to communicate across these divides.
And the other thing related to this is, I had a moment at some point when I was doing my research
when I came to the archives, and I was having a bad Monday morning. And I saw these piles of paper and
my thought was, “Look at all those piles of paper, shoot, do I have to go through that?” And then
immediately I had the realization that these piles of paper, of course, are human lives and are actually
people who died. And that's anything but a joke and I strongly believe you should not have that response
to that kind of documentation. And that sort of made me question myself a little bit in that I thought, well,
maybe I am sort of the person that Hannah Arendt and Sigmund Baumann writes about. Maybe I'm just
doing the exact same thing. So that was another sort of more personal challenge I have faced as I
complete this research.
What are the next steps with this research? What do you hope comes out of this project you are
working on with Claire?
RB: So there's right now- although we were perhaps among the first who did this kind of work- there are
more people doing these local level comparisons in different countries. But they often focus on one
country at the time, so they do it in Germany or in Luxembourg. I think what we are mainly interested in
is doing these subnational comparisons in multiple countries at the same time so that we can get a
comprehensive understanding of the relationship between subnational dynamics, organizations and
communities, and the national bureaucracies that were actually doing the persecuting. It's not so clear
what it all adds up to, so I think one of the goals is to transcend all these small local level findings and
turn them into something that adds up to something bigger.
What is your advice for anyone, especially an undergraduate student, who is interested in
getting involved in research?
RB: So I think the big first step is that you would want to go to graduate school. Right here in the United
States, at least that's a common way to get into research. And for that, it's important that you establish
close relationships with a faculty member who can write a good letter for you, but also who can train you
a little bit in the craft of research. So I think that spending time doing that and going out of your way to
approach a professor to work with them is an incredibly important step to take. And I would say that the
one thing you should always keep in the back of your head as a student is that academics really love to
talk about their research, so don’t be afraid to approach us, because they will love to talk to you about
their research because that's what's on their mind. And of course from there, really honing in on what you
are interested in studying. And then of course, there's also all of these programs, like FBF, that are super
useful as well in terms of matching people to faculty. So my main two points of advice would be to
establish a strong connection with a faculty member who can help show you what research is and can also
vouch for you when you're applying to PhD programs.