Arno J. Mayer, unorthodox historian of the European crises, dies at 97

Arno J. Mayer, a historian whose unorthodox reading of the first half of the 20th century challenged conventional views on World War I, World War II and the Holocaust, died on December 17 at a retirement home in Princeton, NJ. He was 97 years old. .

His son Daniel confirmed the death.

Dr. Mayer, born in Luxembourg, fled to America with his Jewish family just before the Nazi invasion in 1940. He was one of the last survivors of a generation of emigrated historians, many of whom were Jews. Raul Hilberg, Peter Gay And Fritz Stern – trying to make sense of the cataclysm they and the world had just experienced.

By training he was a diplomatic historian, although he expanded well beyond his original field of expertise. His early research focused on the origins of World War I, while his later writings reached forward to the Holocaust and the founding of Israel as well as back to the French Revolution.

Yet a common idea ran through his long career, which included seven books and teaching at Brandeis, Harvard, and Princeton: that the period from 1914 to 1945 constituted a “second Thirty Years’ War” as disastrous and widespread as the war that the Second World War devastated. Europe in the 17th century.

Dr. Mayer considered himself a Marxist, and although far from doctrinaire, he adopted from Marx the idea that society must be understood as a whole, and that history is the result of tensions between its component parts, such as class and social structures.

From this perspective, he argued that the three-decade crisis was the result of modern, bourgeois-liberal capitalism coming into conflict with Europe’s still entrenched aristocratic elites – what he called “The Persistence of the Old Regime.” the title. from a book he published in 1981.

Through painstaking research in archives in Britain, France and Germany – he was fluent in all three – he showed that the First World War was not the result of diplomatic failures, but of ‘preventive counter-revolutions’ in each country, intended to prevent war. allay mass unrest at home by directing public energy abroad.

The peace negotiations and agreements that ended the war, he continued, were in large part a continuation of the conflict between the old and new orders by other means – and the resulting incoherence meant that a new, even greater conflagration would to follow.

But unlike some Marxist historians, Dr. Mayer the deterministic thinking; according to him, nothing was inevitable and everything was contingent.

That principle lay behind his most controversial work, “Why Did the Heavens Not Darken?: The ‘Final Solution’ in History” (1988).

Dr. Mayer argued that while anti-Semitism was widespread within German society, it was only one of many reasons for the Nazis’ rise to power and subsequent invasion of the Soviet Union. Just as important was the specter of Soviet communism, which led the old German elite to support Hitler in the first place.

“If Hitler’s worldview had an epicenter,” he wrote, “it was his deep-seated hostility toward contemporary civilization, not his hatred of the Jews, which was grafted onto it.”

While the Nazis had already imprisoned and murdered countless Jews, Dr. Mayer that it was only when the invasion of the Soviet Union faltered at the end of 1941 that Hitler and his circle decided on a systematic extermination plan, which Dr. Mayer mentioned the genocide of the Jews.

While several leading historians have challenged Dr. Mayer – the Polish Jewish historian Nechama Tec called the book “a welcome addition to the existing literature” – many others have vehemently denounced it. In a lengthy review in The New Republic, Daniel Jonah Goldhagen, then a graduate student at Harvard, called it “a travesty of memory and history.”

The Anti-Defamation League went further and added Dr. Mayer in a 1993 report to the list of “Hitler’s apologists” and accused him of having written “historical scholarship that relativizes the genocide of the Jews.”

And indeed, several prominent Holocaust deniers cited quotes from the book to support their arguments, although in all cases they were out of context and missed Dr. grossly misrepresented Mayer.

But Dr. Mayer persisted, arguing that his opponents had created a “cult of memory” around the Holocaust that resisted and even punished any attempt to explain the Holocaust as a historical event.

“After fifty years, the question is no longer whether or not we should revaluate and historicize the Judeocide,” he wrote in the foreword to the book, “but rather how we can do so in a responsible manner.”

Arno Joseph Mayer was born on June 19, 1926 in Luxembourg City, the son of Frank and Ida (Liebin) Mayer. His father was a wholesaler.

The Germans invaded Luxembourg on May 10, 1940, and within hours the Mayer family – Arno, his parents, his paternal grandfather and his sister Ruth – fled south through France in their two-door Chevrolet.

Arno’s maternal grandparents stayed behind and were eventually sent to the Theresienstadt concentration camp in what is now the Czech Republic. His grandfather died there; his grandmother survived.

The family tried to enter Spain but were turned away. They then boarded a ship to Algeria, eventually reaching Casablanca, Morocco, where they secured exit papers to the United States.

The Mayers settled in New York City. In 1944, when Arno turned 18, he enlisted in the Army and was sent to Fort Knox to train as a member of a tank crew.

Just before his unit was to leave for combat in Europe, he was transferred to a facility in Maryland. Camp Ritchie, where high-value German prisoners of war were held. He was appointed as a sort of moral officer attached to the rocket scientist Wernher von Braunwho the United States hoped would work for the military after the war.

“I was officially initiated into the irony of the Cold War when I was given strict orders not to challenge any of their justifications for serving Hitler,” he wrote in “Why Did the Heavens Not Darken?”

He studied business at the City College of New York, graduating in 1949. But a nagging desire to understand the war he had just experienced, and the Holocaust he had barely survived, pushed him to graduate school at Yale, where he received his PhD. in political science in 1953.

A year later he joined the Brandeis faculty. He taught there and at Harvard before moving to Princeton in 1961. In 1993 he took emeritus status.

He married Nancy Grant in 1955. They divorced in 1965. He and his son Daniel are survived by another son, Carl; his sister, Ruth Burger; and five grandchildren.

Dr.’s father Mayer was a staunch left-wing Zionist, as was Dr. Mayer early in his career. He worked on a communist kibbutz in Israel in the early 1950s and became friends with the philosopher Martin Buber.

But over time he became deeply critical of the Israeli state, believing it had betrayed the vision of its founders in favor of a militarized, segregated society dependent on nationalists and ultra-religious forces – an argument he laid out in 2008 in his book ‘Ploughshares Into Swords’. : From Zionism to Israel.”

Once again he was criticized for his views. And again he stood his ground, declaring that his antipathy to what Israel had become was consistent with his worldview as a child of a small, landlocked country forced to flee by war between larger powers. He was, he emphasized, “particularly immune to the appeal of all nationalisms.”