Rolf Peter Sieferle (1949–2016) was a German historian known for applying the methodology of the social sciences to contemporary topics including ecological sustainability and social capital. He was a pioneer scholar of German environmental history. His work was wide ranging, addressing German conservatism around the period of the First World War, Karl Marx, and the fall of Communism. He was an advisor on climate change to the

Angela Merkel Angela Dorothea Merkel (; ; born 17 July 1954) is a German former politician and scientist who served as Chancellor of Germany from 2005 to 2021. A member of the Christian Democratic Union (CDU), she previously served as Leader of the Op ...

government. Sieferle came of age with the generation of 1968 as a youthful Socialist. By the 1990s, he was increasingly critical of what he viewed as naïve idealism. During the 2015

European migrant crisis The 2015 European migrant crisis, also known internationally as the Syrian refugee crisis, was a period of significantly increased movement of refugees and migrants into Europe in 2015, when 1.3 million people came to the continent to request ...

, Sieferle wrote, “A society that can no longer distinguish between itself and the forces that would dissolve it is living morally beyond its means,” causing the ''Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung'' to describe him as “embittered, humorless, ever more isolated”. He committed suicide on 17 September 2016. His Finis Germania became a bestseller following his death despite the fact that it has been denounced as an "extremist tract" and deemed antisemitic by the literary establishment.

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