ethnicity and religion. His 1980 book on the history of the western Slavic peoples of Europe replaced the notion of a "history of the Slavic nations" with the "history of Slavic national consciousness." Rather than viewing ethnically-defined nations and nation states as historic inevitabilities, Graus tried to understand the evolution of national consciousness and sensibilities as historically contingent processes – an idea which, although met with some skepticism at the time, foreshadowed the work of contemporary scholars like Benedict Anderson and Herwig Wolfram. Graus was one of the very few, if not the only, prominent, leftist, Jewish medievalists working in West Germany and the German-speaking academy in the post-war period (historians working in the GDR were expected, of course, to present a socialist gloss on their work as a matter of policy). Over the course of his career, much of Graus's work, and particularly his interpretation of social and political institutions, sought to offer a counterbalance to the predominant models of what the Germans call Verfassungsgeschichte, represented by historians like Karl Bosl, Walter Schlesinger and Otto Brunner and which had a strongly conservative-nationalist underpinning. Graus was unsettled by these theories and worked to place the study of medieval social history on a different footing, although not always successfully. Selected works Volk, Herrscher und Heiliger im Reich der Merowinger: Studien zur Hagiographie der Merowingerzeit (Prague, 1965). Struktur und Geschichte: 3 Volksaufstände im mittelalterlichen Prag, Vorträge und Forschungen, Sonderband 7 (Sigmaringen, 1971), Die Nationenbildung der Westslawen im Mittelalter (Sigmaringen, 1980). (editor) Mentalitäten im Mittelalter: methodische und inhaltliche Probleme, Vorträge und Forschungen 35 (Sigmaringen, 1987). Pest - Geissler - Judenmorde : das 14. Jahrhundert als Krisenzeit, 3rd. ed (Göttingen, 1994). Czech medievalists Jewish historians Czech Jews Writers from Brno Writers from Prague 1921 births 1989 deaths Czechoslovak emigrants to Germany German expatriates in Switzerland Czechoslovak historians