Defortification of the German City, 1689-1866

Project Lead: Yair Mintzker

Yair Mintzker is an assistant professor of history, specializing in German-speaking Central Europe from the seventeenth to the nineteenth centuries. His broad interests include urban history as well as intellectual, cultural, and political history of Early Modern and Modern Europe.

Prof. Mintzker’s dissertation, The Defortification of the German City, 1689-1866  tells the story of the metamorphosis of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century German cities from walled to defortified places. In the coming years, Prof. Mintzker plans to turn his dissertation into a book while also beginning to work on a book on one of the most notorious events in eighteenth-century Germany: the trial and execution of Joseph Süss Oppenheimer (“Jud Süss”), in 1730s Stuttgart.