Michael Mayer (historian)

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Michael Mayer (* 1974 in Darmstadt ) is a German historian . He is the son of the writer Inken-Maria Wendt and the grandson of the writers Herbert and Ingeborg Wendt .

Life

Michael Mayer studied modern and contemporary history, social and economic history, communication sciences and economics at the Johannes Gutenberg University in Mainz , the Université de Paris IV - Sorbonne and the Ludwig Maximilians University in Munich. He did his doctorate as part of a binational Franco-German doctorate (cotutelle-de-thèse) at the University of Munich with Horst Möller and at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales (EHESS) in Paris with Michael Werner . Michael Mayer worked as a research assistant at the Seminar for Social and Economic History at the University of Munich. Since January 2008 he has been a research assistant at the Institute for Contemporary History and worked in the department at the Foreign Office in Berlin. He was also a lecturer at the University of Potsdam . Michael Mayer is currently responsible for the contemporary history department at the Politische Akademie Tutzing . He is also a lecturer at the University of Augsburg and a liaison professor for the Friedrich Ebert Foundation .

Comparison of the 'Jewish policy' between Nazi Germany and Vichy France

In his main work, States as Perpetrators , Mayer compares the development in the German Reich from 1933 to 1945 with the semi-autonomous Vichy regime from 1940 to 1944. He examines the similarities and differences in Jewish policy with a focus on the motivation and actions of the ministerial bureaucracy of the two Countries. From when and why did the existing anti-Semitism become so radicalized that the Germans finally carried out the murder of European Jews in a historically unique way ?

Mayer sees two phases in the 'Jewish policy' of both countries. In the first phase Jews were deprived of their rights by laws and were marginalized. These measures, which aimed to “cleanse” the state of a supposedly Jewish “influence”, were noticeably similar in Germany and later in France. The author calls this form of hostility towards Jews a humiliating "segregation anti-Semitism". In both countries the governments, the ministerial bureaucracy and the churches carried out this apparently lawful, legally codified exclusion.

However, in the course of the 1930s, national socialist institutions had succeeded in taking the lead in the “ Jewish question ” in Germany and pushing back the ministerial bureaucracy. These new actors had tightened the "Jewish policy" and developed the "merely" discriminatory segregation of Jews further to their extermination. In terms of institutions, responsibilities and therefore also the people involved, there was a change from the mid-30s onwards, with the radical anti-Semitic Reich leadership prevailing.

A comparable development can be seen in the German occupation of France. Here, the military administration introduced the segregation of Jews in 1940, parallel to measures taken by the Vichy regime at the same time. In 1942 at the latest, however, the leadership in the “Jewish question” on the German side was transferred from the military to the Higher SS and Police Leader . According to this, the Jews in France were also treated in the German sense, that is, they were destined for extermination.

In Germany, two lines of development must be observed during the National Socialist era. For example, the traditional ministerial bureaucracy after 1933 implemented segregation anti-Semitism at the state level, which was based on diverse roots in German history and at the same time can be classified in a transnational, more or less Europe-wide tendency towards the exclusion of the Jewish population. A comparison with France shows that state policy towards Jews in the early years of the Nazi regime was dominated by the traditional ministerial bureaucracy. Only in the [further] course of the thirties did the German state develop a veritable "Nazi Jewish policy" in the sense of implementing a singular form of hostility towards Jews in state action.

Publications, participation

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Michael Mayer at the Institute for Contemporary History ( Memento from August 1, 2012 in the web archive archive.today )
  2. ↑ Michael Mayer at the University of Potsdam
  3. ↑ [1]
  4. ↑ Michael Mayer: States as perpetrators. See "Publications ...".
  5. ↑ p. 193
  6. ↑ Mayer: States, pp. 401f. [Addition] from the edit.
personal data
SURNAME Mayer, Michael
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German historian
DATE OF BIRTH 1974
PLACE OF BIRTH Darmstadt