Henk de Berg | |
|---|---|
 | |
| Born | Harderwijk, Netherlands |
| Occupation | Cultural theorist |
| Academic background | |
| Education | Leiden University |
| Academic work | |
| Institutions | University of Sheffield Leiden University |
Henk de Berg (born 1963) is a Dutch cultural theorist and a professor of German at the University of Sheffield. His younger brother is the computer scientist Mark de Berg.
De Berg studied at the University of Leiden and the University of Siegen, receiving his PhD in comparative literature from Leiden in 1994. In 1996, he moved to the UK to take up a post in the German department of the University of Sheffield. He was appointed Professor of German in 2004.
Initially, Henk de Berg’s main research area was the sociology of literature. He became known for his work on the “Leiden model” in Systemtheoretische Literaturwissenschaft, a model of (literary) communication that draws on ideas of Niklas Luhmann, J. L. Austin, and Quentin Skinner. In the early 2000s, his interests shifted to the study of culture more generally. His introductory book on classic psychoanalytic literary criticism received a Choice Outstanding Academic Titles award.
In 2024, Henk de Berg published Trump and Hitler: A Comparative Study in Lying, which compares and contrasts Donald Trump and Adolf Hitler as political performance artists. The argument put forward by the book is firstly that the two men use similar rhetorical strategies and secondly that while the problems faced by the Weimar Republic were more pronounced, it makes sense to draw parallels between the circumstances Hitler and Trump exploited to come to power (economic dislocation, dented national confidence, social division, male anxiety, loss of faith in the traditional political system, and an enabling conservative elite). By contrast, de Berg considers the characterization of Trump as “a fascist” historically misleading and politically counterproductive.