Arno J. Mayer, a historian whose unorthodox studying of the primary half of the twentieth century challenged standard understandings of World Conflict I, World Conflict II and the Holocaust, died on Dec. 17 in a senior care facility in Princeton, N.J. He was 97.
His son Daniel confirmed the demise.
Dr. Mayer, who was born in Luxembourg, fled to America together with his Jewish household simply forward of the Nazi invasion in 1940. He was one of many final survivors of a technology of émigré historians, a lot of them additionally Jews — amongst them Raul Hilberg, Peter Gay and Fritz Stern — who tried to make sense of the cataclysm they and the world had simply skilled.
He was by coaching a historian of diplomacy, although he ranged far past his authentic area. His early scholarship centered on the origins of World Conflict I, whereas his later writing reached each ahead to the Holocaust and the founding of Israel and again as early because the French Revolution.
But a standard thought threaded via his lengthy profession, which included seven books and instructing positions at Brandeis, Harvard and Princeton: that the interval from 1914 to 1945 constituted a “second Thirty Years’ Conflict,” as calamitous and widespread because the one which ravaged Europe within the seventeenth century.
Dr. Mayer thought-about himself a Marxist, and although he was removed from doctrinaire, he took from Marx the notion that society should be conceived as an entire, and that historical past is the results of tensions amongst its constituent components, like class and social constructions.
From this vantage level, he argued that the three-decade disaster was the results of trendy, bourgeois-liberal capitalism coming into battle with the still-entrenched aristocratic elites of Europe — what he known as “The Persistence of the Outdated Regime,” the title of a e book he revealed in 1981.
By way of scrupulous analysis in archives in Britain, France and Germany — he was fluent within the languages of all three — he confirmed that World Conflict I used to be the consequence not of diplomatic failures however of “pre-emptive counterrevolutions” in every nation, meant to stave off mass unrest at residence by turning public energies overseas.
The peace negotiations and agreements that ended the conflict, he went on, had been largely a continuation of the battle between the previous and new orders by different means — and their ensuing incoherency meant that one other, even better, conflagration would comply with.
However in contrast to some Marxist historians, Dr. Mayer rejected deterministic considering; in his view, nothing was inevitable and every part was contingent.
That precept undergirded his most controversial work, “Why Did the Heavens Not Darken?: The ‘Last Resolution’ in Historical past” (1988).
Dr. Mayer argued that whereas antisemitism was rife inside German society, it was solely certainly one of many causes for the Nazis’ rise to energy and subsequent invasion of the Soviet Union. Simply as vital was the specter of Soviet Communism, which drove the previous German elite to help Hitler within the first place.
“If Hitler’s worldview had an epicenter,” he wrote, “it was his deep-seated animosity towards modern civilization, and never his hatred for Jews, which was grafted onto it.”
Whereas the Nazis had imprisoned and murdered numerous Jews already, Dr. Mayer argued that it was solely when the invasion of the Soviet Union faltered, in late 1941, that Hitler and his circle selected a scientific plan of extermination, which Dr. Mayer known as the Judeocide.
Whereas a number of outstanding historians supported Dr. Mayer’s thesis — the Polish Jewish historian Nechama Tec known as the e book “a welcome addition to the present literature” — many others denounced it vehemently. In a prolonged evaluation in The New Republic, Daniel Jonah Goldhagen, then a graduate scholar at Harvard, known as it “a mockery of reminiscence and historical past.”
The Anti-Defamation League went additional, including Dr. Mayer to its listing of “Hitler’s Apologists” in a 1993 report, accusing him of writing “historic scholarship which relativizes the genocide of the Jews.”
And certainly, a number of outstanding Holocaust deniers took quotations out of the e book to help their arguments, although in each case they had been out of context and grossly misrepresented Dr. Mayer’s level.
However Dr. Mayer endured, arguing that his opponents had created a “cult of reminiscence” across the Holocaust that resisted, and even punished, any try to elucidate it as a historic occasion.
“After 50 years the query is not whether or not or to not reappraise and historicize the Judeocide,” he wrote within the preface to the e book, “however moderately how to take action responsibly.”
Arno Joseph Mayer was born on June 19, 1926, in Luxembourg Metropolis, the son of Frank and Ida (Liebin) Mayer. His father was a wholesaler.
The Germans invaded Luxembourg on Might 10, 1940, and inside hours the Mayer household — Arno, his mother and father, his paternal grandfather and his sister, Ruth — had been fleeing south via France of their two-door Chevrolet.
Arno’s maternal grandparents stayed behind, and had been finally despatched to the Theresienstadt focus camp within the present-day Czech Republic. His grandfather died there; his grandmother survived.
The household tried to cross into Spain however had been turned away. They then boarded a ship to Algeria and finally reached Casablanca, Morocco, the place they secured exit papers to the US.
The Mayers settled in New York Metropolis. In 1944, when Arno turned 18, he enlisted within the Military and was despatched to Fort Knox to coach as a member of a tank crew.
Simply earlier than his unit was to go away for fight in Europe, he was reassigned to a facility in Maryland, Camp Ritchie, the place high-value German prisoners of conflict had been being held. He was assigned to be a kind of morale officer, hooked up to the rocket scientist Wernher von Braun, whom the US hoped would work for the navy after the conflict.
“I used to be formally initiated into the ironies of the Chilly Conflict after I was given strict orders to not dispute any of their justifications for having served Hitler,” he wrote in “Why Did the Heavens Not Darken?”
He studied enterprise on the Metropolis Faculty of New York and graduated in 1949. However a gnawing need to know the conflict he had simply been via, and the Holocaust he had barely survived, pushed him towards graduate examine at Yale, the place he obtained a doctorate in political science in 1953.
He joined the Brandeis college a yr later. He taught there and at Harvard earlier than transferring to Princeton in 1961. He took emeritus standing in 1993.
He married Nancy Grant in 1955. They divorced in 1965. Alongside together with his son Daniel, he’s survived by one other son, Carl; his sister, Ruth Burger; and 5 grandchildren.
Dr. Mayer’s father was an ardent left-wing Zionist, as was Dr. Mayer early in his profession. He labored on a Communist kibbutz in Israel within the early Nineteen Fifties and befriended the thinker Martin Buber.
However in time he grew deeply essential of the Israeli state, believing that it had betrayed the imaginative and prescient of its founders in favor of a militarized, segregated society beholden to nationalists and ultrareligious forces — an argument he unpacked in 2008 in his e book “Plowshares Into Swords: From Zionism to Israel.”
As soon as extra he drew criticism for his views. And as soon as once more he stood quick, declaring that his antipathy towards what Israel had develop into was of a chunk together with his worldview because the youngster of a small, landlocked nation compelled to flee by conflict amongst better powers. He was, he insisted, “singularly resistant to the attract of all nationalisms.”
