Arno J. Mayer

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Arno J. Mayer (2013).

Arno Joseph Mayer (born June 19, 1926 in Luxembourg ) is an American historian with a focus on modern European history, the history of diplomacy and the Second World War as the final stage of the Second Thirty Years War from 1914 to 1945. He taught at Wesleyan University ( 1952–1953), at Brandeis University (1954–1958), at Harvard University (1958–1961) and from 1961 at Princeton University .

Life

Arno J. Mayer fled with his family at the age of 14 from the National Socialists to the USA, whose citizenship he acquired in 1944. As a member of the United States Army , he was transferred to the secret military camp 1142 in June 1945 , where he looked after Wernher von Braun and other high-ranking prisoners from Germany as a moral officer .

He then studied at the City College of New York and from 1949 at Yale University politics and history. In 1950 he gained experience in a kibbutz because his father was the founder of the Zionist movement in Luxembourg and campaigned for a binational, democratic and secular Israeli-Palestinian state by promoting the slogan of Palestine as “a country without a people for a people without Country ”refused. In 1959 he was working on Wilson versus Lenin. Political origins of the new diplomacy, PhD from Yale University 1917-1918 . In this work, against the backdrop of the Cold War and the McCarthy era that has just ended , he deals with the overthrow of international relations at the end of the First World War caused by Woodrow Wilson on the one hand and the Russian Revolution on the other . Mayer personally endeavored to find a position between Wilson and Lenin similar to that of the French politicians Jean Jaurès or Léon Blum .

From the 1960s onwards he published works on the revolutionary movements since the French Revolution , on the persistent forces of the Ancien Régime , which he regarded as Europe-wide and which he saw at work in Germany - reinforced by the Peace Treaty of Versailles - up to the time of National Socialism , about industrialization , about the rising bourgeoisie and the counterrevolutionary forces between 1870 and 1956, which would also have played a role on the American side in the Vietnam War .

In contrast to Norbert Elias, he does not trust the civilizing effect of social progress on the individual's passion for violence. With reference to Vilfredo Pareto , he considers civilization merely to be a varnish that only superficially coats behaviors that tend to break out at any time.

For him, Mayer calls the discussion with Karl Marx of The Eighteenth Brumaire by Louis Bonaparte and the correspondent article for the New York Tribune about the social upheavals brought about by industrialization in British India. Karl Kautsky taught him to see Marx critically. In the 1970s, reading the works of Antonio Gramsci, which he had made available to him in the USA, had "an earthquake" effect on him, as did his work on the aristocracy and the middle classes. The crisis in European society 1848-1914 (1981 / dt. 1984) influenced. His command of French, German and Italian had strengthened his international point of view, so that any intensive preoccupation with national history remained alien to him. What is important to him is the “comparatism” conveyed through Marc Bloch , a comparative approach to historical phenomena that guides knowledge and is intended to prevent him from turning historical to formal conclusions. A kind of confession: “When faced with the great problems of history, we are all revisionists, which is the nobility of our role, namely to be dependent on new facts, new concepts, new methods, new perspectives on the world - connected with the contexts in which historians write . This revisionism was one of my beliefs early on and made me refrain from reasoning, knowing that what I would say would be revised and corrected by others. "

In 1979 he was accepted into the American Academy of Arts and Sciences .

Short reception

The two books published by Mayer in Germany in 1984 and 1989 - Adelsmacht und Bürgerertum and Der Krieg als Kreuzzug - are different from z. B. in France only accessible in libraries and antiquarian.

The war as a crusade

In connection with the Jewish catastrophe in the “Third Reich” , Mayer speaks of the fact that it was “removed from its secular historical context” and made “part of the providential history of the Jewish people”. That have

“Found a lasting and unctuous expression in the religiously overloaded term ' Holocaust ' [...]. The Holocaust mythology, which is gradually taking shape and has become an idée force , has pieced together a collective, normative memory topos from the haunted and transparent memories of survivors, which does not encourage critical and context-related reflection on the Jewish tragedy. "

That is why Mayer uses the term “Judeozid” to denote this genocide. Mayer assumes that Hitler's plan to gain “living space in the East” and to overthrow the Soviet regime first created “the necessary geopolitical, military and ideological preconditions for the Judeocide”. “If the National Socialists hadn't waged an all-out war in Eastern Europe, they wouldn't have been able to build this unprecedented realm of death.” For Mayer, the responsibility of the Wehrmacht in the extermination of the Jews is beyond question. Because she shared the National Socialist roots of anti-Semitism and anti-communism with the old elites. With some statements in The War as a Crusade , which were detached from their context , right-wing extremists believed they could ammunition to deny Auschwitz.

The book is important because Mayer elaborates the term “ Second Thirty Years War 1914-1945” and introduces it into the historical scientific discussion.

Aristocratic Power and the Bourgeoisie - Crisis in European Society 1848-1914

Mayer analyzes the social structures and behavior of the epoch and comes to the conclusion that the bourgeoisie of that time was still dominant in most of the important countries (described here are Germany, Austria-Hungary, Russia, France and Great Britain), but in their position of power subordinated to threatened aristocracy. Some exceptions are France as a republic and Great Britain as a mere de jure monarchy, where, however, backward-looking forces also had a minority influence. At the end of the introduction, Mayer writes: "... until 1914 the old elites were preparing to consolidate their social and cultural primacy by strengthening their political influence. The way in which they did this heightened internal and international tensions until they culminated in the world war, which heralded the final act of the fall of the Ancien Régime in Europe. "

Personal experience of civil disobedience

Mayer reports how he was sentenced to one day in prison for " civil disobedience " in Princeton in 1970 . He had been made aware by students that at a distance of 700 m from his office in a university building, highly qualified physicists and mathematicians for the United States Department of Defense were searching for and encrypting targets for the bombing in Vietnam. At first he did not want to believe it until the students provided evidence. He was so shocked because he had been speaking in his lectures for years about how unlikely it was that the Munich residents could not have known anything about the Dachau concentration camp . And now he had to be instructed by his students about the building in his immediate vicinity, which was reinforced with barbed wire, guard dogs and spotlights. A handful of professors and nearly 150 students one day denied access to those working there, which brought them all to court. On the way to prison, each convicted person should have been accompanied by two witnesses as agreed. Nobody wanted to join him, so he went with a colleague who was also convicted and his wife. For Mayer, proof of the Cold War climate in Princeton too.

Publications

  • Political Origins of the New Diplomacy, 1917-1918. 1959.
  • Post-War Nationalisms, 1918-19. In: Past and Present. Volume 34, 1966, pp. 114-126.
  • Politics and Diplomacy of Peacemaking. Containment and Counter-Revolution at Versailles, 1918-1919. 1967.
  • Dynamics of Counter-Revolution in Europe, 1870-1956. An Analytical Framework. 1971.
  • Lower Middle Class as Historical Problem. In: Journal of Modern History. Volume 47, 1975, pp. 409-436
  • Internal Crisis and War Since 1870. In: Charles L. Bertrand (Ed.): Revolutionary Situations in Europe, 1917-22. 1977.
  • The Persistance of the Old Regime: Europe to the Great War , 1981.
  • Why Did the Heavens Not Darken? The Final "Solution in History" , 1988.
    • The war as a crusade. The German Reich, Hitler's Wehrmacht and the “Final Solution”. Rowohlt, Reinbek 1989, ISBN 3-498-04333-1 .
  • Memory and History. On the Poverty of Forgetting and Remembering about the Judeocide. In: Radical History Review. Volume 56, 1993, pp. 5-20
  • The Furies. Violence and Terror in the French and Russian Revolutions. 2001.
  • L'Autre Amérique. Les America's contre l'état de guerre. Éditions Textuel, 2002 (in collaboration with Judith Butler , Noam Chomsky , Angela Davis , Mike Davis , Ronald Dworkin , Naomi Klein , Michael Mann , Manning Marable , Edward Said , Jeffrey St. Clair , Gore Vidal , Immanuel Wallerstein , Michael Yates et Howard Tin ).
  • Plowshares into Swords: From Zionism to Israel , Verso Books (London-New York) 2008, ISBN 978-1-84467-235-6 .

Web links

Commons : Arno J. Mayer  - Collection of images, videos and audio files

Footnotes

  1. ↑ Bastian Berbner: Second World War: Imagine you are a Jew. And you have to make friends with a Nazi . In: The time . No. 50, December 1, 2016
  2. ↑ Arno J. Mayer: The war as a crusade. The German Reich, Hitler's Wehrmacht and the “Final Solution”. 1989, p. 15.
  3. ↑ The data presented here largely follow the French interview published in Genèses, 2002-4 (n0 49): Un historien dissident? Entretien avec Arno J. Mayer
  4. ↑ The war as a crusade. P. 43 f.
  5. ↑ The war as a crusade. P. 16.
  6. ↑ The war as a crusade. P. 521.
  7. ↑ h-ref: The abused professor .
  8. ↑ The war as a crusade. Pp. 50-71
personal data
SURNAME Mayer, Arno J.
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Mayer, Arno Joseph (full name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION American historian
DATE OF BIRTH June 19, 1926
PLACE OF BIRTH Luxembourg