Editor’s note: Arno Mayer has died at the age of 97. This essay was originally published in February 2023 and looks at what made him such a brilliant historian.
The American historian Arno J Mayer belongs to an extraordinary generation of German-speaking Jewish scholars – George L Mosse, Raul Hilberg, Peter Gay and Fritz Stern among others – who were born in Europe between the end of the First World War and Hitler’s rise to power, reaching their maturity during the Second World War. The cataclysms of the 20th century forged their mental habitus and gave them a sharp sense of history. For them, history is not an object of peaceful and detached contemplation; it is a realm of sudden bifurcations, of unexpected turns that break continuities and change everything. It is also a realm of human tragedy. Mayer’s peculiarity among them lies in the breadth of his perspective and the variety of his interests. To present him as a “specialist” on particular topics – diplomacy, revolutions, the Holocaust, Zionism, political violence – risks eclipsing the most striking feature of his work: “Europe” itself, the history of the old continent conceived and interpreted as a crucible of interactions, exchanges and, often, deadly entanglements.
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