Violence radically changes the way people see their neighbors, and themselves. That is the disturbing pattern historian Max Bergholz uncovered after years spent studying one small Balkan town, where a peaceful, ethnically mixed community collapsed in 1941 into waves of massacres within days. His method for understanding how that happens has just won him the 2026 Dan David Prize, the world’s largest history award.
His breakout book – Violence as a Generative Force – argues that violence does not simply erupt from old hatreds or existing tensions. It can create new enemies, new identities, and new reasons to keep fighting. It follows the people of Kulen Vakuf, a town on the Bosnia-Croatia border that became the site of massacres in 1941.
Bergholz, who has been a professor of history at Concordia University in Montreal since 2011, reaches his conclusions through micro-history: rather than starting with armies, governments, or sweeping historical forces, he focuses on one small place and a finite group of people and follows their lives closely enough to see how a larger history takes shape inside them.
“I’m most interested in trying to understand what draws people into violent conflict, especially in multi-ethnic or multicultural settings, how they behave, how violence changes them, and how they remember this violence,” he says.
In the region he studies, memory rarely stays still. It gets used: “I seek to uncover how one wave of violence can be used by generations later to justify why violence is needed again, usually in ways that evade personal responsibility and emphasize one group’s victimhood while demonizing another.”
His approach has already carried him beyond the Balkans. A month before this conversation, Bergholz was in the Basque Country, invited by a colleague he’d never met to speak to Spanish and Basque historians who are trying to make sense of their own histories of terrorism and intercommunal violence from the 1960s onward.
“I never expected that people in the Basque region of Spain would find what I’m working on useful and somehow inspiring for their research,” he says. “And that’s not the first time that’s happened.”
It is hard not to hear echoes closer to home. I ask him about the parallels.
“All histories have to be rooted in very specific contexts. But there are certainly very serious parallels, analogies, and points of comparison that can be drawn with other contexts,” he responds. “The Middle East and Israel-Palestine would certainly be one that I think... resonates, even though it deals with a different part of the world. People are people everywhere, and no place or people in our world has some kind of special propensity for violence. Its eruption and dynamics always have to be explained with logic and rationality.”
Bergholz uses ‘radical empathy’ to uncover the human complexity of violence
His breakout book tells the story of Kulen Vakuf, a small town straddling a border zone between Bosnia and Croatia. In 1941, it went from peaceful and multiethnic to the site of shocking intercommunal massacres that killed more than 3,300 people in less than three months. Bergholz didn’t choose it for being exceptional. He chose it for what a small place lets a historian see.
“I’ve always been drawn to the history of small places and small communities, because I feel that it’s only at that level that individuals come into sharp focus,” he says. “We can see their faces, we can see their emotions, we can see the streets they live on, the fields they plow, the animals that they take care of. Individuals at the end of the day are what make history, not abstract processes. Wars don’t make history; rather, people make wars, and then those wars change how people operate, and think, and remember.”
For Bergholz, the small scale isn’t only a research method. It’s also a storytelling obligation. The best historians, he says, are the ones whose books readers don’t want to put down.
“There have to be characters, there has to be a strong sense of place, we need history to engage all our senses, our eyesight, our hearing, our sense of smell. All of that has to be conveyed when we write.”
Getting that close to people comes with a cost, though. It means seeing them as they actually were, rather than in the role a more black-and-white historical narrative might seek to assign them.
To take up that challenge, Bergholz employs what he calls “radical empathy.” This concept does not mean excusing violence or treating all actions as morally equivalent. Rather, it requires a historian to resist reducing people to fixed categories of victim and perpetrator and to take seriously the full human complexity of those whose lives he is trying to understand.
“It’s kind of a shorthand for a series of interrelated stances that I think we as historians have to take up when we study violence, and when we study the memory of violence,” he says.
“When we look at people who participate in violence, we have to be able to consider them as both perpetrators and victims, because more often than not, people embody both of those categories, sometimes simultaneously, and sometimes at various points over a continuum of time.”
He puts the demand in personal terms. “I have to treat people whose behavior may offend me as human beings, as no different than me, and as no different than the victims whose lives I more easily empathize with. I have to see victims not simply as saints or martyrs, or people who only deserve sympathy; I have to see them as complete human beings, which means I have to be capable of telling history when they might also perpetrate violence.”
This does not stop with his subjects: “It also turns the mirror right back onto who we are as historians, and other people who are interested in the past.”
Bergholz’s research challenges black-and-white narratives of violence
July 27 is a contested date across much of the former Yugoslavia. The date is the anniversary of the Communist-led 1941 uprising against Nazi and Fascist occupiers and their local collaborators. It was remembered for decades while the communists were in power as the day the forces of good rose up to resist and defeat the forces of evil.
Bergholz’s research complicates that inheritance. Some of the people who joined the uprising, his book shows, went on to commit atrocities of their own, not for abstract ideological objectives but along ethnic and religious lines, often seeking revenge for previous acts of violence to which they and their communities had been subjected. He wrote his book to document a more complete story of violence and restraint across the different groups involved without handing anyone a clean verdict.
That refusal has made the book useful far beyond the academic world.
“I noticed that people on both sides of the political spectrum in Croatia seem to find something in my work that is important – and this is the idea that this painful and disputed history can’t be seen as such a black-and-white story,” he says. “The story I tell allows for some kind of new reference point for a history that is made up more of zones of gray rather than of black and white.”
Some politicians in Croatia’s parliament, he says, cited the book on this exact anniversary, not to win an argument with it, but rather because it won’t let anyone win one cleanly.
“If you actually read from page one to the final page of the book, you must engage with the story of the other. You must engage with the story of your own victimhood and the story of your own violence, and the same is true for every other group.”
The book’s reach has also surprised him. When scholarship like this reaches people in positions of power, he says, that’s something else.
“When it reaches the hands and the minds of people who are decision-makers and political leaders, that’s a different story. The scholarship then has a kind of force to it that is greater than most scholarly works.”
For Bergholz, that force comes partly from the rigor of the research and partly from the human scale of the storytelling. But perhaps most of all, it comes from refusing to allow one narrative to have the final word.
“It’s not to say that those more nationalist histories of this violence are completely wrong. They’re not. They’re simply just missing essential parts.”
Getting the prize now has a very practical consequence for Prof. Bergholz. “The prize is very important for me now because I’m getting ready to move to Croatia with my family, where I’ll be living for the next year while I work on a new book,” he says. “I’ve managed to get a year away from my teaching, and to do this kind of scholarship, you need time. You don’t need a lot of money, but you need time more than anything. And so the Dan David Prize is very important for that reason.”
The new book, Our Truths: Violence and the Challenge of a Common Humanity, applies the same method to a longer stretch of time: the Croatian town of Glina, and three governments, from 1945 to today, each handling the memory of the town’s 1941 violence in its own way.
Same instinct as before, stretched out further: one place, watched across regimes, to see who gets to write the story of what happened there, when that story changes, and with what consequences for future violence.
It brings him back to the idea at the heart of his work, one that may be easier to articulate than to practice.
“Radical empathy,” he says, is “a political choice. It’s not about this side or that side; it’s about a commitment to humanity, and to telling histories of violence in such a way that is respectful of everyone’s humanity.”
He doesn’t pretend it is easy, especially for people who don’t have the luxury of studying violence from a safe distance.
“It doesn’t surprise me at all that most people can’t even contemplate it,” he says. “It’s probably the greatest challenge there is, but at the end of the day, it’s still waiting there for us, whether we want to acknowledge it or not.