Gustav Mayer (historian)

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Gustav Mayer, 1931

Gustav Mayer (born October 4, 1871 in Prenzlau , † February 21, 1948 in London ) was a German journalist and historian of the labor movement.

Life

Gustav Mayer, who grew up in a Jewish merchant family, studied history and economics and received his doctorate as a social economist in Basel in 1893 with a thesis on Lassalle . Mayer worked from 1896 to 1906 as a foreign correspondent for the Frankfurter Zeitung in Holland , Belgium and France .

Mayer politically sympathized with the revisionist wing of the Social Democratic Party of Germany , but was not a member of the party.

Following his journalistic work, Mayer was a brief professor in Brussels . From 1906, his marriage to Henriette “Flora” Wolff (1882–1963), who came from a wealthy family, enabled him to pursue a second career as a private scholar and historian. Mayer became one of the first historians of the German labor movement . His attempt to do his habilitation at Berlin University in 1918, however, failed due to resistance from the national-conservative historian Dietrich Schäfer . It was not until 1919 that the social democratic minister of culture, Konrad Haenisch, secured him an extraordinary professorship for the history of democracy and socialism at the University of Berlin, against the wishes of the philosophical faculty .

Mayer wrote several biographies of leaders of the German labor movement and edited several volumes with documents on the history of the labor movement. In particular, his two-volume biography by Friedrich Engels is still an important standard work. After his release in the wake of the National Socialist “ seizure of power ” in 1933, he emigrated to the Netherlands and in 1936 to Great Britain , where he lived until his death.

His estate is at the Internationaal Instituut voor Sociale Geschiedenis in Amsterdam .

Fonts

  • Johann Baptist von Schweitzer and the Social Democracy. A contribution to the history of the German labor movement . Gustav Fischer, Jena 1909 (Reprint Detlev Auvermann, Glashütten im Taunus 1970).
  • Friedrich Engels . A biography Volume 1: Friedrich Engels in his early days. Volume 2: Engels and the Rise of the Labor Movement in Europe. 2nd Edition. Martinus Nijhoff, Haag 1934/1934 (first edition 1920; pulped 1933).
  • Ferdinand Lassalle : Postponed letters and writings. Edited by Gustav Mayer. 6 vols., Deutsche Verlagsanstalt, Berlin 1921–1925, Historical Commission Munich .
  • Bismarck and Lassalle. Their correspondence and their conversations . JHW Dietz Nachf., Berlin 1928.
  • Memories. From journalist to historian of the German labor movement . Europaverlag, Zurich 1949.
  • Radicalism, socialism and bourgeois democracy . Edited and with an afterword by Hans-Ulrich Wehler . Suhrkamp Verlag, Frankfurt am Main 1969 (edition suhrkamp 310).

literature

Web links

Wikisource: Gustav Mayer  - Sources and full texts

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Gustav Mayer: Memories. From journalist to historian of the German labor movement . Verlag der Zwölf, Munich 1949, p. 375 (publisher's afterword).
  2. ↑ Michael Grüttner u. a .: The Berlin University between the world wars 1918–1945 . Berlin 2012 ( History of the University of Unter den Linden , Volume 2), p. 123.
  3. ↑ Michael Grüttner u. a .: The Berlin University between the world wars 1918–1945 . Berlin 2012 ( History of the University of Unter den Linden , Volume 2), p. 123 ff.
  4. ↑ Facsimile reprint: Verlag Ullstein, Frankfurt / M. / Berlin / Vienna 1975 (Ullstein book 3113 and 3114).
personal data
SURNAME Mayer, Gustav
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German journalist and historian
DATE OF BIRTH October 4, 1871
PLACE OF BIRTH Prenzlau
DATE OF DEATH February 21, 1948
Place of death London