Arno J. Mayer

Course

In the years 1930, in front of the rise of the Nazism, its family emigrates with the the United States (of which he becomes citizen in 1944). It follows its studies to the Université of Yale starting from 1949 and presents a thesis in 1959, Wilson versus Lenin: political origins off the new diplomacy , devoted to the upheavals of the international relations caused by the policy of Wilson on the one hand, the Russian Revolution on the other hand, at the conclusion of the First World War.

His/her father is the founder of the Sionisme in Luxembourg. Although unbeliever, Arno Mayer went there in 1950 to make the experiment of the integral Collectivisme in a Marxist Kibboutz. Being defined itself as Marxist, Arno Mayer undergoes many pressures in the years 1950, in the context of the Maccarthisme. It occupies successively the Chaire S of history of the universities of Wesleyan (1952 - 1953), Brandeis (1954 - 1958), Harvard (1958 - 1961) and Princeton (which it occupies since 1961). In 1970 it spends one day in prison, at the time of an action of civil Désobéissance against the participation of a department of the University of Princeton in the Guerre of Vietnam.

Research

In Furies: Violence, revenge, terror at times of the French revolution and the Russian Revolution , published in the United States in 2001, Arno Mayer seeks to give an account of the contingent character of the revolutionary Terreur, produces at the same time collapse of the legal systems in time of war civil and international pressures aiming at restoring “the old mode”.

Arno Mayer, also part-time lecturer to the Collège de France, finally became in the United States a very famous historian. It can to be considered, as well as Gabriel Gorodetsky or that Jonathan Haslam, like heir direct to design methodological interactive adopted by historian British Edward Hallett Carr, which considered that “what interests the history, it is the relation between the private individual and the general”, adding that “the historian cannot more disjoin them or give to step on the other which he cannot separate the fact from his interpretation”.

Arno J. Mayer lines up resolutely among the functionalist ones in its work on the Shoah, i.e. among the historians considering that the decision to destroy the Jews was made only in 1941 - and even the autumn 1941, according to Mr. Mayer. Pierre Vidal-Naquet, in foreword with the French edition, approves this analysis, but critical the theory of Mr. Mayer, according to whom the Einsatzgruppen did nothing but cause and encourage pogroms during the first weeks. Pierre Vidal-Naquet also speaks “false step” in connection with an other theory about Mr. Mayer, according to whom, if all the not recorded deportees with Auschwitz were well killed, all were not gauzes. Other historians carried criticisms much harder on part of its interpretations of Shoah and its choices of bibliography for the Final solution in the history (not to mention the report/ratio Gerstein, but to make appear a work of Paul Rassinier) were very highly criticized, by Lucy S. Dawidowicz in particular.

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