Arno J. Mayer

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Arno Joseph Mayer (June 19, 1926 -) is Luxembourg-born American historian of modern Europe, diplomatic history, and the Holocaust. A self-proclaimed "left dissident Marxist", Mayer's major interests are in modernization theory and what he calls "The Thirty Years' Crisis" between 1914 and 1945.

Mayer received his education at the City College of New York and Yale University. He has been professor at Wesleyan University (1952-1953), Brandeis University (1954-1958), Harvard University (1958-1961) and Princeton University (1961-).

In Mayer's view, Europe was characterized in the 19th century by rapid modernization in the economic field by industrialization and retardation in the political field. In particular, Mayer feels that the aristocracy in all of the European countries held far too much power, and it was their efforts to keep power that led to World War I, the rise of fascism, World War II, and the Holocaust. Mayer sees the Holocaust as primarily an expression of anti-communism and argues in Why Did the Heavens Not Darken? that Adolf Hitler only ordered the Holocaust in December 1941, as gesture of despair when it became clear that the Wehrmacht could not take Moscow, hence ensuring Nazi Germany's defeat at the hands of the Soviet Union.

Many have criticized this account, arguing that Mayer plays up anti-communism at the expense of Anti-Semitism as an explanation for the Holocaust. Others have argued that the historical evidence shows that Hitler was not convinced that the war was lost as early as December 1941, and that Mayer's theory is anachronistic.^{[citation needed]} Along the same lines, the American historian Christopher Browning has contended that the decision to launch the Holocaust was probably taken sometime in September 1941.

Mayer sees the Paris Peace Conference as a struggle between what he calls the "Old Diplomacy" of the alliances, secret treaties and brutal power politics and the "New Diplomacy" as represented by Vladmir Lenin's Peace Degrees and Woodrow Wilson's Fourteen Points, which Mayer sees as promoting peaceful and rational diplomacy. In Mayer's view, the greatest failure of the Versailles Treaty was that it was a triumph for the "Old Diplomacy" with a thin "New Diplomacy" veneer.

[edit] Work

Political Origins of the New Diplomacy, 1917-1918, 1959.
"Post-War Nationalisms, 1918-19" pages 114-126 from Past and Present, Volume 34, 1966.
Politics and Diplomacy of Peacemaking: Containment and Counter-Revolution at Versailles, 1918-19, 1967.
Dynamics of Counter-Revolution in Europe, 1870-1956: An Analytical Framework, 1971.
"Lower Middle Class as Historical Problem" pages 409-436 from Journal of Modern History, Volume 47, 1975.
"Internal Crisis and War Since 1870" from Revolutionary Situations in Europe, 1917-22 edited by Charles L. Bertrand, 1977.
The Persistence of the Old Regime: Europe to the Great War, 1981.
Why Did the Heavens Not Darken? The "Final Solution" in History, 1988.
"Memory and History: On the Poverty of Forgetting and Remembering about the Judocide" pages 5-20 from Radical History Review, Volume 56, 1993.
The Furies: Violence and Terror in the French and Russian Revolutions, 2001.

[edit] References

Blackbourn, David & Eley, Geoff The Peculiarities of German History: Bourgeois Society and Politics in Nineteenth Century German History, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984.
Fry, Michael and Gilbert, Arthur "A Historian and Linkage Politics: Arno J. Mayer" pages 425-444 from International Studies Quarterly, Volume 26, 1982.
Lundgreen-Nielsen, Kay "The Mayer Thesis Reconsidered: The Poles and the Paris Peace Conference, 1919" pages 68-102 from International History Review, Volume 7, 1985.
Righart, Hans "`Jumbo-History': perceptie, anachronisme en `hindsight' bij Arno J. Mayer en Barrington Moore" pages 285-295 from Theoretische Geschiedenis, Volume 17, 1990.
Thompson, E. P. The Poverty of Theory and Other Essays, London: Merlin Press, 1978.