My friend and colleague Jan Plamper, who has died aged 53 of cancer, was a historian of emotions and the senses, and a pioneer in this relatively new approach to studying the past, which seeks to uncover how people experienced the events through which they lived, and also to understand why people do what they do. His book The History of Emotions: An Introduction (2015) is already a classic.
Jan specialised in Russian/Soviet and German history, and Das Neue Wir (The New Us, 2019) is a fascinating manifesto on modern Germany shaped by migration. It was published in Jan’s English translation as We Are All Migrants: A History of Multicultural Germany only a few months before his death.
