https://www.newstatesman.com/ideas/2023/12/arno-j-mayer-twentieth-century

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.

Born in Luxembourg in 1926 to a family of the Jewish cultivated middle class (Bildungsbürgertum), Mayer and his family fled France amid the Nazi invasion in June 1940. After being denied entry to Spain and Morocco for lack of visas, they were arrested for several weeks in Algeria and eventually arrived in the United States in 1941. In 1944, when he was 18 years old, Mayer obtained American citizenship and enlisted in the army. Owing to his linguistic skills, he was assigned to Fort Ritchie, Maryland, where intelligence officers interrogated high-ranking German POWs. The following year he started his studies at the City College of New York, which he continued at the Graduate Institute of International Studies in Geneva, and then concluded at Yale, where he obtained a PhD in history. After teaching for nearly ten years at Wesleyan, Brandeis, and Harvard, he moved to Princeton University in 1961, where he taught until his retirement...

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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arno_J._Mayer