Arno J. Mayer
Encyclopedia
Arno Joseph Mayer is a United States
Marxist historian
originally from Luxembourg
, who specializes in modern Europe
, diplomatic history
, and the Holocaust
, and is currently Dayton-Stockton Professor of History, Emeritus, at Princeton University
.
in May 1940. He became a naturalized US citizen in 1944.
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) and Harvard University
(1958–1961). He has taught at Princeton University
since 1961.
and what he calls "The Thirty Years' Crisis" between 1914 and 1945. 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. Mayer has argued that he calls the "Thirty Years' Crisis" was caused by the problems of a dynamic new society produced by industrialization facing a rigid political order. 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.
In a 1967 essay "The Primacy of Domestic Politics", Mayer made a Primat der Innenpolitik ("primacy of domestic politics") argument for the origins of World War I. Mayer rejected the traditional Primat der Außenpolitik ("primacy of foreign politics") argument of traditional diplomatic history under the grounds that it failed to take into account that in Mayer's opinion, all of the major European countries were in a "revolutionary situation" in 1914, and thus ignores what Mayer considers to the crucial impact that domestic politics had on foreign-policy making elites. In Mayer's opinion, in 1914, the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland
was on the verge of civil war and massive industrial unrest, Italy
had been rocked by the Red Week
of June 1914, the French Left and Right were waging a war to the death with each other, Germany
was faced with ever-increasing political strife, Russia
was facing a huge strike wave, and Austria-Hungary
was confronted with rising ethnic and class tensions. Moreover, Mayer insists that liberalism
and centrist ideologies in general were disintegrating in face of the challenge from the extreme right in the UK, France
and Italy while being a non-existent force in Germany, Austria-Hungary and Russia. Mayer ended his essay by arguing that World War I should be best understood as a pre-emptive "counterrevolutionary" strike by ruling elite
s in Europe to preserve their power by distracting public attention onto foreign affairs.
In his 1967 book Politics and Diplomacy of Peacemaking: Containment and Counter-Revolution at Versailles, Mayer argued that the Paris Peace Conference
was a struggle between what he calls the "Old Diplomacy" of the alliance system, secret treaties and brutal power politics and the "New Diplomacy" as represented by Vladmir Lenin's Decree on Peace
of 1917 and Woodrow Wilson
's Fourteen Points
, which Mayer sees as promoting peaceful and rational diplomacy. Mayer argued that in 1919, the world was divided between the "forces of movement" behind the "New Diplomacy", representing liberal and left-wing forces and the "forces of order", representing conservative and reactionary
forces behind the "Old Diplomacy" Mayer sees all foreign policy as basically a projection of domestic politics, and much of his writing on international relations
is devoted towards explaining just what domestic lobby was exerting the most influnce on foreign policy at that particular moment of time" In Mayer's view, the "New Diplomacy" associated with Lenin and Wilson (whose 14 Points Mayer sees as a hasty liberal attempt to respond to Lenin's Peace Decrees) was associated with Russia and America, both societies that Mayer has argued either had destroyed or lacked the partial "modernized" societies that characterized the rest of Europe Mayer sees US diplomacy at Versailles as an attempt to posit a "new", but "counter-revolutionary" style of diplomacy against "revolutionary" Soviet 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. The principal reason for this according to Mayer was he considered to be the irrational fears generated by the Russian Revolution, thus leading to an international system designed to contain the Soviet Union
. A major influence on Mayer is the late British historian E. H. Carr. In 1961, Mayer played a key role in having an American edition of his friend and mentor's book, What is History?
published. Many of Mayer's writings on international affairs in the interwar era take as their starting point Carr's 1939 book The Twenty Year's Crisis.
In his 1981 book, The Persistence of the Old Regime, Mayer argued that there was an "umbilical cord" linking all the events of European history from 1914 to 1945. In Mayer's opinion, World War I was proof that: "The forces of the old order were sufficiently willful and powerful to resist and slow down the course of history, if necessary by recourse to violence". Mayer argued that because of its ownership of the majority of the land in Europe and because the middle class were divided and politically undeveloped, the nobility continued as the dominant class in Europe. Mayer argued that faced with the challenge of a world in which they had lost their function, the aristocracy both embraced and promoted reactionary beliefs such as Nietzsche
and Social Darwinism
together with a belief in dictatorship and fascist dictatorship in particular. In Mayer's view, "It would take two world wars and the Holocaust...finally to dislodge the feudal and aristocratic presumption from Europe's civil and political societies".
In his 1988 book Why Did the Heavens Not Darken? Mayer argues that Adolf Hitler
ordered the Final Solution
in December 1941 in response to the realisation that the Wehrmacht
could not take Moscow
, hence ensuring Nazi Germany
's defeat at the hands of the Soviet Union. In Mayer's opinion, the "Judeocide", as Mayer calls the Holocaust was the horrific climax of the “Thirty Years' Crisis” that had been raging in Europe since 1914.
The Holocaust, which Mayer refers to as the "Judeocide", is viewed by him primarily an expression of anti-communism
. In his book, Mayer wrote:
of exploiting the memory of the Holocaust to further its foreign policy objectives In Mayer's opinion, Hitler's war was first and foremost against the Soviets, not the Jews. According to Mayer, the original German plan was to defeat the Soviet Union, and then to deport all the Soviet Jews to a reservation
behind the Urals
In regards to the functionalist-intentionalist divide that pervades Holocaust historiography
, Mayer's work can be seen as a bridge between the two schools. Mayer argues that there was no masterplan for genocide, and that the Holocaust cannot be explained solely in regards to Hitler's world-view. At the same time, Mayer agrees with those intentionalist historians such as Andreas Hillgruber
(with whom Mayer otherwise has little in common with) in seeing Operation Barbarossa
, and the Nazi crusade to annihilate "Judeo-Bolshevism" as the key development in the genesis of the "Final Solution to the Jewish Question".
, in summing up U.S. reviews of the book, noted that some of the more "printable" responses by U.S. historians included: "a mockery of memory and history" and "bizarre and perverse." Reviewers criticized Mayer's account of the Holocaust as focused too heavily on Nazi anti-communism at the expense of a focus on antisemitism.
Two critics of Why Did the Heavens Not Darken? were U.S. historians Daniel Goldhagen
and Lucy Dawidowicz
. Both questioned Mayer's account of the murder of Jews during the early phases of World War II, arguing the organised and systemic role played by the Nazis was much greater. Both accused Mayer of attempting to rationalize the Holocaust, comparing him to ultra right-wing historians such as Ernst Nolte
. The Israeli historian Yehuda Bauer
wrote that Mayer "...popularizes the nonsense that the Nazis saw in Marxism and Bolshevism their main enemy, and the Jews unfortunately got caught up in this; when he links the destruction of the Jews to the ups and downs of German warfare in the Soviet Union, in a book that is so cocksure of itself that it does not need a proper scientific apparatus, he is really engaging in a much subtle form of Holocaust denial"
Holocaust deniers have often quoted out of context Mayer’s sentence in Why Did the Heavens Not Darken? that “Sources for the study of the gas chambers at once rare and unreliable” As the authors Michael Shermer
and Alex Grobman
have noted, the entire paragraph from which the sentence comes from states that the SS destroyed the majority of the documention relating to the operation of the gas chambers in the death camps, which is why Mayer feels that sources for the operation of the gas chambers are "rare" and "unreliable" One of Mayer's leading defenders, the journalist D.D. Guttenplan wrote in Mayer's defense that he believed that there was much to Mayer's thesis about the Holocaust as a result of the Nazi obsession with "Judeo-Bolshevism", and that Mayer had been unjustly and harshly treated by a conservative U.S. Jewish establishment and by anti-communist historians.
The American historian Peter Baldwin
noted certain parallels between Mayer’s views in Why Did the Heavens Not Darken? and those expressed by the German radical right-wing historian Ernst Nolte. Baldwin noted that both see the inter-war period as one of intense ideological conflict between the forces of the Right and Left, that World War II was the culmination of this conflict, and both see the Holocaust as a by-product of the German-Soviet war. However, Baldwin went to note the central difference between Nolte and Mayer in that for the former the Soviets were aggressors who essentially got what they deserved in the form of Operation Barbarossa while for the latter the Soviets were victims of a monstrous regime. Much of the controversy around Why Did the Heavens Not Darken? was due to the simple fact that through this book the general public first learned of the functionalist view that there was no masterplan for the Holocaust going back to the days when Hitler wrote Mein Kampf
. In Baldwin's opinion, Goldhagen and others were probably right in criticizing Mayer's view about the timing of the decision to launch the Holocaust; on the other hand, Baldwin considered that Goldhagen missed Mayer's overall point about the connection between the war against the Soviet Union and the Holocaust. Another area of controversy centered around Mayer’s claim that most of the Jews who died at Auschwitz
were the victims of diseases, rather than mass gassings, a claim that has been cited by David Irving
as one of his reasons for embracing Holocaust denial. The Dutch-Canadian architectural expert Robert Jan van Pelt
has noted that Mayer's book with its claim that there were more "natural" then "unnatural" deaths at Auschwitz is as close as a mainstream historian has ever come to supporting Holocaust denial
. The U.S. journalist D.D. Guttenplan
, who was otherwise highly sympathetic towards Mayer's theory of the Soviet citizens (Jewish and non-Jewish) and Jews in general, as fellow victims of the Holocaust, called this statement "indefensible".
, tracing what Mayer regards as the degradation and denegation of Jewry in general and Zionism
in particular in face of what Mayer sees as Israeli colonial aggression against the Palestinians. In a favorable review, the British writer Geoffrey Wheatcroft
called Plowshares into Swords an enlightening account of Israeli history that traced the "...chauvinistic and brutalising tendencies of Zionism". In a hostile review of Plowshares into Swords, the British scholar Simon Goldhill
called Plowshares into Swords a book of little value and criticized Mayer for his anti-Israeli
bias, arguing that Mayer ignored Arab anti-Semitism, falsely portrayed the Six Day War as an imperialist power play by the United States
, for claiming that all Western criticism of the Islamic world is self-interested, and for describing anti-Western feeling in the Arab world as "righteous anger"
Essays by Mayer
United States
The United States of America is a federal constitutional republic comprising fifty states and a federal district...
Marxist historian
Marxist historiography
Marxist or historical materialist historiography is a school of historiography influenced by Marxism. The chief tenets of Marxist historiography are the centrality of social class and economic constraints in determining historical outcomes....
originally from Luxembourg
Luxembourg
Luxembourg , officially the Grand Duchy of Luxembourg , is a landlocked country in western Europe, bordered by Belgium, France, and Germany. It has two principal regions: the Oesling in the North as part of the Ardennes massif, and the Gutland in the south...
, who specializes in modern Europe
Europe
Europe is, by convention, one of the world's seven continents. Comprising the westernmost peninsula of Eurasia, Europe is generally 'divided' from Asia to its east by the watershed divides of the Ural and Caucasus Mountains, the Ural River, the Caspian and Black Seas, and the waterways connecting...
, diplomatic history
Diplomatic history
Diplomatic history deals with the history of international relations between states. Diplomatic history can be different from international relations in that the former can concern itself with the foreign policy of one state while the latter deals with relations between two or more states...
, and the Holocaust
The Holocaust
The Holocaust , also known as the Shoah , was the genocide of approximately six million European Jews and millions of others during World War II, a programme of systematic state-sponsored murder by Nazi...
, and is currently Dayton-Stockton Professor of History, Emeritus, at Princeton University
Princeton University
Princeton University is a private research university located in Princeton, New Jersey, United States. The school is one of the eight universities of the Ivy League, and is one of the nine Colonial Colleges founded before the American Revolution....
.
Early life and academic career
Mayer was born into a Jewish family who fled to the United States during the Nazi invasion of LuxembourgGerman occupation of Luxembourg in World War II
The German occupation of Luxembourg in World War II was the period in the history of Luxembourg after it was used as a transit territory to attack France by outflanking the Maginot Line. Plans for the attack had been prepared by 9 October 1939, but execution was postponed several times...
in May 1940. He became a naturalized US citizen in 1944.
Mayer received his education at the City College of New York
City College of New York
The City College of the City University of New York is a senior college of the City University of New York , in New York City. It is also the oldest of the City University's twenty-three institutions of higher learning...
and Yale University
Yale University
Yale University is a private, Ivy League university located in New Haven, Connecticut, United States. Founded in 1701 in the Colony of Connecticut, the university is the third-oldest institution of higher education in the United States...
. He has been professor at Wesleyan University
Wesleyan University
Wesleyan University is a private liberal arts college founded in 1831 and located in Middletown, Connecticut. According to the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching, Wesleyan is the only Baccalaureate College in the nation that emphasizes undergraduate instruction in the arts and...
(1952–1953), Brandeis University
Brandeis University
Brandeis University is an American private research university with a liberal arts focus. It is located in the southwestern corner of Waltham, Massachusetts, nine miles west of Boston. The University has an enrollment of approximately 3,200 undergraduate and 2,100 graduate students. In 2011, it...
(1954–1958) and Harvard University
Harvard University
Harvard University is a private Ivy League university located in Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States, established in 1636 by the Massachusetts legislature. Harvard is the oldest institution of higher learning in the United States and the first corporation chartered in the country...
(1958–1961). He has taught at Princeton University
Princeton University
Princeton University is a private research university located in Princeton, New Jersey, United States. The school is one of the eight universities of the Ivy League, and is one of the nine Colonial Colleges founded before the American Revolution....
since 1961.
Views
A self-proclaimed "left dissident Marxist", Mayer's major interests are in modernization theoryModernization theory
Modernization theory is a theory used to explain the process of modernization within societies. The theory looks at the internal factors of a country while assuming that, with assistance, "traditional" countries can be brought to development in the same manner more developed countries have...
and what he calls "The Thirty Years' Crisis" between 1914 and 1945. 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. Mayer has argued that he calls the "Thirty Years' Crisis" was caused by the problems of a dynamic new society produced by industrialization facing a rigid political order. In particular, Mayer feels that the aristocracy
Aristocracy
Aristocracy , is a form of government in which a few elite citizens rule. The term derives from the Greek aristokratia, meaning "rule of the best". In origin in Ancient Greece, it was conceived of as rule by the best qualified citizens, and contrasted with monarchy...
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
World War I
World War I , which was predominantly called the World War or the Great War from its occurrence until 1939, and the First World War or World War I thereafter, was a major war centred in Europe that began on 28 July 1914 and lasted until 11 November 1918...
, the rise of fascism
Fascism
Fascism is a radical authoritarian nationalist political ideology. Fascists seek to rejuvenate their nation based on commitment to the national community as an organic entity, in which individuals are bound together in national identity by suprapersonal connections of ancestry, culture, and blood...
, World War II
World War II
World War II, or the Second World War , was a global conflict lasting from 1939 to 1945, involving most of the world's nations—including all of the great powers—eventually forming two opposing military alliances: the Allies and the Axis...
, and the Holocaust.
In a 1967 essay "The Primacy of Domestic Politics", Mayer made a Primat der Innenpolitik ("primacy of domestic politics") argument for the origins of World War I. Mayer rejected the traditional Primat der Außenpolitik ("primacy of foreign politics") argument of traditional diplomatic history under the grounds that it failed to take into account that in Mayer's opinion, all of the major European countries were in a "revolutionary situation" in 1914, and thus ignores what Mayer considers to the crucial impact that domestic politics had on foreign-policy making elites. In Mayer's opinion, in 1914, the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland
United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland
The United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland was the formal name of the United Kingdom during the period when what is now the Republic of Ireland formed a part of it....
was on the verge of civil war and massive industrial unrest, Italy
Italy
Italy , officially the Italian Republic languages]] under the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages. In each of these, Italy's official name is as follows:;;;;;;;;), is a unitary parliamentary republic in South-Central Europe. To the north it borders France, Switzerland, Austria and...
had been rocked by the Red Week
Red Week
Red Week was the name given to a week of unrest which occurred in June, 1914. Over these seven days, Italy saw widespread rioting and large-scale strikes throughout the Italian provinces of Romagna and the Marche.-Origins of the 'Red Week':...
of June 1914, the French Left and Right were waging a war to the death with each other, Germany
Germany
Germany , officially the Federal Republic of Germany , is a federal parliamentary republic in Europe. The country consists of 16 states while the capital and largest city is Berlin. Germany covers an area of 357,021 km2 and has a largely temperate seasonal climate...
was faced with ever-increasing political strife, Russia
Russia
Russia or , officially known as both Russia and the Russian Federation , is a country in northern Eurasia. It is a federal semi-presidential republic, comprising 83 federal subjects...
was facing a huge strike wave, and Austria-Hungary
Austria-Hungary
Austria-Hungary , more formally known as the Kingdoms and Lands Represented in the Imperial Council and the Lands of the Holy Hungarian Crown of Saint Stephen, was a constitutional monarchic union between the crowns of the Austrian Empire and the Kingdom of Hungary in...
was confronted with rising ethnic and class tensions. Moreover, Mayer insists that liberalism
Liberalism
Liberalism is the belief in the importance of liberty and equal rights. Liberals espouse a wide array of views depending on their understanding of these principles, but generally, liberals support ideas such as constitutionalism, liberal democracy, free and fair elections, human rights,...
and centrist ideologies in general were disintegrating in face of the challenge from the extreme right in the UK, France
France
The French Republic , The French Republic , The French Republic , (commonly known as France , is a unitary semi-presidential republic in Western Europe with several overseas territories and islands located on other continents and in the Indian, Pacific, and Atlantic oceans. Metropolitan France...
and Italy while being a non-existent force in Germany, Austria-Hungary and Russia. Mayer ended his essay by arguing that World War I should be best understood as a pre-emptive "counterrevolutionary" strike by ruling elite
Elite
Elite refers to an exceptional or privileged group that wields considerable power within its sphere of influence...
s in Europe to preserve their power by distracting public attention onto foreign affairs.
In his 1967 book Politics and Diplomacy of Peacemaking: Containment and Counter-Revolution at Versailles, Mayer argued that the Paris Peace Conference
Paris Peace Conference, 1919
The Paris Peace Conference was the meeting of the Allied victors following the end of World War I to set the peace terms for the defeated Central Powers following the armistices of 1918. It took place in Paris in 1919 and involved diplomats from more than 32 countries and nationalities...
was a struggle between what he calls the "Old Diplomacy" of the alliance system, secret treaties and brutal power politics and the "New Diplomacy" as represented by Vladmir Lenin's Decree on Peace
Decree on Peace
The Decree On Peace, written by Vladimir Lenin, was passed by the Second Congress of the Soviet of Workers', Soldiers', and Peasants' Deputies on the 26 October 1917, following the success of the October Revolution. It was published in the Izvestiya newspaper, #208, October 27, 1917...
of 1917 and Woodrow Wilson
Woodrow Wilson
Thomas Woodrow Wilson was the 28th President of the United States, from 1913 to 1921. A leader of the Progressive Movement, he served as President of Princeton University from 1902 to 1910, and then as the Governor of New Jersey from 1911 to 1913...
's Fourteen Points
Fourteen Points
The Fourteen Points was a speech given by United States President Woodrow Wilson to a joint session of Congress on January 8, 1918. The address was intended to assure the country that the Great War was being fought for a moral cause and for postwar peace in Europe...
, which Mayer sees as promoting peaceful and rational diplomacy. Mayer argued that in 1919, the world was divided between the "forces of movement" behind the "New Diplomacy", representing liberal and left-wing forces and the "forces of order", representing conservative and reactionary
Reactionary
The term reactionary refers to viewpoints that seek to return to a previous state in a society. The term is meant to describe one end of a political spectrum whose opposite pole is "radical". While it has not been generally considered a term of praise it has been adopted as a self-description by...
forces behind the "Old Diplomacy" Mayer sees all foreign policy as basically a projection of domestic politics, and much of his writing on international relations
International relations
International relations is the study of relationships between countries, including the roles of states, inter-governmental organizations , international nongovernmental organizations , non-governmental organizations and multinational corporations...
is devoted towards explaining just what domestic lobby was exerting the most influnce on foreign policy at that particular moment of time" In Mayer's view, the "New Diplomacy" associated with Lenin and Wilson (whose 14 Points Mayer sees as a hasty liberal attempt to respond to Lenin's Peace Decrees) was associated with Russia and America, both societies that Mayer has argued either had destroyed or lacked the partial "modernized" societies that characterized the rest of Europe Mayer sees US diplomacy at Versailles as an attempt to posit a "new", but "counter-revolutionary" style of diplomacy against "revolutionary" Soviet 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. The principal reason for this according to Mayer was he considered to be the irrational fears generated by the Russian Revolution, thus leading to an international system designed to contain the Soviet Union
Soviet Union
The Soviet Union , officially the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics , was a constitutionally socialist state that existed in Eurasia between 1922 and 1991....
. A major influence on Mayer is the late British historian E. H. Carr. In 1961, Mayer played a key role in having an American edition of his friend and mentor's book, What is History?
What is History?
What Is History? is a 1961 non-fiction book by historian Edward Hallett Carr on historiography. It discusses history, facts, the bias of historians, science, morality, individuals and society, and moral judgements in history....
published. Many of Mayer's writings on international affairs in the interwar era take as their starting point Carr's 1939 book The Twenty Year's Crisis.
In his 1981 book, The Persistence of the Old Regime, Mayer argued that there was an "umbilical cord" linking all the events of European history from 1914 to 1945. In Mayer's opinion, World War I was proof that: "The forces of the old order were sufficiently willful and powerful to resist and slow down the course of history, if necessary by recourse to violence". Mayer argued that because of its ownership of the majority of the land in Europe and because the middle class were divided and politically undeveloped, the nobility continued as the dominant class in Europe. Mayer argued that faced with the challenge of a world in which they had lost their function, the aristocracy both embraced and promoted reactionary beliefs such as Nietzsche
Friedrich Nietzsche
Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche was a 19th-century German philosopher, poet, composer and classical philologist...
and Social Darwinism
Social Darwinism
Social Darwinism is a term commonly used for theories of society that emerged in England and the United States in the 1870s, seeking to apply the principles of Darwinian evolution to sociology and politics...
together with a belief in dictatorship and fascist dictatorship in particular. In Mayer's view, "It would take two world wars and the Holocaust...finally to dislodge the feudal and aristocratic presumption from Europe's civil and political societies".
In his 1988 book Why Did the Heavens Not Darken? Mayer argues that Adolf Hitler
Adolf Hitler
Adolf Hitler was an Austrian-born German politician and the leader of the National Socialist German Workers Party , commonly referred to as the Nazi Party). He was Chancellor of Germany from 1933 to 1945, and head of state from 1934 to 1945...
ordered the Final Solution
Final Solution
The Final Solution was Nazi Germany's plan and execution of the systematic genocide of European Jews during World War II, resulting in the most deadly phase of the Holocaust...
in December 1941 in response to the realisation that the Wehrmacht
Wehrmacht
The Wehrmacht – from , to defend and , the might/power) were the unified armed forces of Nazi Germany from 1935 to 1945. It consisted of the Heer , the Kriegsmarine and the Luftwaffe .-Origin and use of the term:...
could not take Moscow
Moscow
Moscow is the capital, the most populous city, and the most populous federal subject of Russia. The city is a major political, economic, cultural, scientific, religious, financial, educational, and transportation centre of Russia and the continent...
, hence ensuring Nazi Germany
Nazi Germany
Nazi Germany , also known as the Third Reich , but officially called German Reich from 1933 to 1943 and Greater German Reich from 26 June 1943 onward, is the name commonly used to refer to the state of Germany from 1933 to 1945, when it was a totalitarian dictatorship ruled by...
's defeat at the hands of the Soviet Union. In Mayer's opinion, the "Judeocide", as Mayer calls the Holocaust was the horrific climax of the “Thirty Years' Crisis” that had been raging in Europe since 1914.
The Holocaust, which Mayer refers to as the "Judeocide", is viewed by him primarily an expression of anti-communism
Anti-communism
Anti-communism is opposition to communism. Organized anti-communism developed in reaction to the rise of communism, especially after the 1917 October Revolution in Russia and the beginning of the Cold War in 1947.-Objections to communist theory:...
. In his book, Mayer wrote:
"Anti-Semitism did not play a decisive or even significant role in the growth of the Nazi movement and electorate. The appeals of Nazism were many and complex. People rallied to a syncretic creed of ultra-nationalism, Social Darwinism, anti-Marxism, anti-bolshevismMayer's purpose in writing Why Did the Heavens Not Darken? was in his words to put an end to "cult of remembrance", which in his view had "become overly sectarian" with too much focus on Jewish suffering and on the Jewish dead Mayer has often accused IsraelAnti-bolshevismAnti-bolshevism has two principal forms:* Anti-bolshevik Anti-communism* Anti-Bolshevik Communism...
, and anti-SemitismAnti-SemitismAntisemitism is suspicion of, hatred toward, or discrimination against Jews for reasons connected to their Jewish heritage. According to a 2005 U.S...
, as well as to a party programs calling for the revision of Versailles, the repeal of reparationsReparation (legal)In jurisprudence, reparation is replenishment of a previously inflicted loss by the criminal to the victim. Monetary restitution is a common form of reparation...
, the curb of industrial capitalism, and the establishment of a völkisch welfare stateWelfare stateA welfare state is a "concept of government in which the state plays a key role in the protection and promotion of the economic and social well-being of its citizens. It is based on the principles of equality of opportunity, equitable distribution of wealth, and public responsibility for those...
"
Israel
The State of Israel is a parliamentary republic located in the Middle East, along the eastern shore of the Mediterranean Sea...
of exploiting the memory of the Holocaust to further its foreign policy objectives In Mayer's opinion, Hitler's war was first and foremost against the Soviets, not the Jews. According to Mayer, the original German plan was to defeat the Soviet Union, and then to deport all the Soviet Jews to a reservation
Internment
Internment is the imprisonment or confinement of people, commonly in large groups, without trial. The Oxford English Dictionary gives the meaning as: "The action of 'interning'; confinement within the limits of a country or place." Most modern usage is about individuals, and there is a distinction...
behind the Urals
In regards to the functionalist-intentionalist divide that pervades Holocaust historiography
Historiography
Historiography refers either to the study of the history and methodology of history as a discipline, or to a body of historical work on a specialized topic...
, Mayer's work can be seen as a bridge between the two schools. Mayer argues that there was no masterplan for genocide, and that the Holocaust cannot be explained solely in regards to Hitler's world-view. At the same time, Mayer agrees with those intentionalist historians such as Andreas Hillgruber
Andreas Hillgruber
Andreas Fritz Hillgruber was a conservative German historian. Hillgruber was influential as a military and diplomatic historian.At his death in 1989, the American historian Francis L...
(with whom Mayer otherwise has little in common with) in seeing Operation Barbarossa
Operation Barbarossa
Operation Barbarossa was the code name for Germany's invasion of the Soviet Union during World War II that began on 22 June 1941. Over 4.5 million troops of the Axis powers invaded the USSR along a front., the largest invasion in the history of warfare...
, and the Nazi crusade to annihilate "Judeo-Bolshevism" as the key development in the genesis of the "Final Solution to the Jewish Question".
Critical Responses to Why Did the Heavens Not Darken?
Why Did the Heavens Not Darken? met with generally critical reviews in 1988. The British historian Richard J. EvansRichard J. Evans
Richard John Evans is a British academic and historian, prominently known for his history of Germany.-Life:Evans was born in London, of Welsh parentage, and is now Regius Professor of Modern History at the University of Cambridge and President of Wolfson College...
, in summing up U.S. reviews of the book, noted that some of the more "printable" responses by U.S. historians included: "a mockery of memory and history" and "bizarre and perverse." Reviewers criticized Mayer's account of the Holocaust as focused too heavily on Nazi anti-communism at the expense of a focus on antisemitism.
Two critics of Why Did the Heavens Not Darken? were U.S. historians Daniel Goldhagen
Daniel Goldhagen
Daniel Jonah Goldhagen is an American author and former Associate Professor of Political Science and Social Studies at Harvard University. Goldhagen reached international attention and broad criticism as the author of two controversial books about the Holocaust, Hitler's Willing Executioners and...
and Lucy Dawidowicz
Lucy Dawidowicz
Lucy Schildkret Dawidowicz was an American historian and an author of books on modern Jewish history, in particular books on the Holocaust.-Life:...
. Both questioned Mayer's account of the murder of Jews during the early phases of World War II, arguing the organised and systemic role played by the Nazis was much greater. Both accused Mayer of attempting to rationalize the Holocaust, comparing him to ultra right-wing historians such as Ernst Nolte
Ernst Nolte
Ernst Nolte is a German historian and philosopher. Nolte’s major interest is the comparative studies of Fascism and Communism. He is Professor Emeritus of Modern History at the Free University of Berlin, where he taught from 1973 to 1991. He was previously a Professor at the University of Marburg...
. The Israeli historian Yehuda Bauer
Yehuda Bauer
Yehuda Bauer is a historian and scholar of the Holocaust. He is a Professor of Holocaust Studies at the Avraham Harman Institute of Contemporary Jewry at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.-Biography:...
wrote that Mayer "...popularizes the nonsense that the Nazis saw in Marxism and Bolshevism their main enemy, and the Jews unfortunately got caught up in this; when he links the destruction of the Jews to the ups and downs of German warfare in the Soviet Union, in a book that is so cocksure of itself that it does not need a proper scientific apparatus, he is really engaging in a much subtle form of Holocaust denial"
Holocaust deniers have often quoted out of context Mayer’s sentence in Why Did the Heavens Not Darken? that “Sources for the study of the gas chambers at once rare and unreliable” As the authors Michael Shermer
Michael Shermer
Michael Brant Shermer is an American science writer, historian of science, founder of The Skeptics Society, and Editor in Chief of its magazine Skeptic, which is largely devoted to investigating pseudoscientific and supernatural claims. The Skeptics Society currently has over 55,000 members...
and Alex Grobman
Alex Grobman
Alex Grobman is an American historian.Grobman grew up in Camden, New Jersey, the son of a pharmacist and a synagogue secretary. He earned his PhD at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem....
have noted, the entire paragraph from which the sentence comes from states that the SS destroyed the majority of the documention relating to the operation of the gas chambers in the death camps, which is why Mayer feels that sources for the operation of the gas chambers are "rare" and "unreliable" One of Mayer's leading defenders, the journalist D.D. Guttenplan wrote in Mayer's defense that he believed that there was much to Mayer's thesis about the Holocaust as a result of the Nazi obsession with "Judeo-Bolshevism", and that Mayer had been unjustly and harshly treated by a conservative U.S. Jewish establishment and by anti-communist historians.
The American historian Peter Baldwin
Peter Baldwin
Peter Baldwin is a British actor best known for his role of Derek Wilton in the UK soap opera Coronation Street.-Career:...
noted certain parallels between Mayer’s views in Why Did the Heavens Not Darken? and those expressed by the German radical right-wing historian Ernst Nolte. Baldwin noted that both see the inter-war period as one of intense ideological conflict between the forces of the Right and Left, that World War II was the culmination of this conflict, and both see the Holocaust as a by-product of the German-Soviet war. However, Baldwin went to note the central difference between Nolte and Mayer in that for the former the Soviets were aggressors who essentially got what they deserved in the form of Operation Barbarossa while for the latter the Soviets were victims of a monstrous regime. Much of the controversy around Why Did the Heavens Not Darken? was due to the simple fact that through this book the general public first learned of the functionalist view that there was no masterplan for the Holocaust going back to the days when Hitler wrote Mein Kampf
Mein Kampf
Mein Kampf is a book written by Nazi leader Adolf Hitler. It combines elements of autobiography with an exposition of Hitler's political ideology. Volume 1 of Mein Kampf was published in 1925 and Volume 2 in 1926...
. In Baldwin's opinion, Goldhagen and others were probably right in criticizing Mayer's view about the timing of the decision to launch the Holocaust; on the other hand, Baldwin considered that Goldhagen missed Mayer's overall point about the connection between the war against the Soviet Union and the Holocaust. Another area of controversy centered around Mayer’s claim that most of the Jews who died at Auschwitz
Auschwitz concentration camp
Concentration camp Auschwitz was a network of Nazi concentration and extermination camps built and operated by the Third Reich in Polish areas annexed by Nazi Germany during World War II...
were the victims of diseases, rather than mass gassings, a claim that has been cited by David Irving
David Irving
David John Cawdell Irving is an English writer,best known for his denial of the Holocaust, who specialises in the military and political history of World War II, with a focus on Nazi Germany...
as one of his reasons for embracing Holocaust denial. The Dutch-Canadian architectural expert Robert Jan van Pelt
Robert Jan van Pelt
Robert Jan van Pelt is an author, architectural historian, professor at the University of Waterloo and University of Toronto in Ontario and a Holocaust scholar. One of the world's leading experts on Auschwitz, he regularly speaks on Holocaust related topics, through which he has come to address...
has noted that Mayer's book with its claim that there were more "natural" then "unnatural" deaths at Auschwitz is as close as a mainstream historian has ever come to supporting Holocaust denial
Holocaust denial
Holocaust denial is the act of denying the genocide of Jews in World War II, usually referred to as the Holocaust. The key claims of Holocaust denial are: the German Nazi government had no official policy or intention of exterminating Jews, Nazi authorities did not use extermination camps and gas...
. The U.S. journalist D.D. Guttenplan
DD Guttenplan
Don David Guttenplan is the author of The Holocaust on Trial. This book is about David Irving's trial for denial of the holocaust.He recently completed a biography of I. F. Stone, the American journalist, titled "American Radical: The Life and Times of I.F...
, who was otherwise highly sympathetic towards Mayer's theory of the Soviet citizens (Jewish and non-Jewish) and Jews in general, as fellow victims of the Holocaust, called this statement "indefensible".
Latest Work
Mayer has been critical of the policies of the United States government. As a Marxist, Mayer has stated in a 2001 essay that "since 1947 America has been the chief and pioneering perpetrator of 'preemptive' state terror, exclusively in the Third World and therefore widely dissembled." Mayer's latest book, Plowshares into Swords is an anti-Zionist and pro-Palestinian account of Israeli historyHistory of Israel
The State of Israel declared independence on May 14, 1948 after almost two millennia of Jewish dispersal and persecution around the Mediterranean. From the late 19th century the Zionist movement worked towards the goal of recreating a homeland for the Jewish people...
, tracing what Mayer regards as the degradation and denegation of Jewry in general and Zionism
Zionism
Zionism is a Jewish political movement that, in its broadest sense, has supported the self-determination of the Jewish people in a sovereign Jewish national homeland. Since the establishment of the State of Israel, the Zionist movement continues primarily to advocate on behalf of the Jewish state...
in particular in face of what Mayer sees as Israeli colonial aggression against the Palestinians. In a favorable review, the British writer Geoffrey Wheatcroft
Geoffrey Wheatcroft
Geoffrey Albert Wheatcroft is a British journalist and writer.- Education :He was educated at University College School, London, and at New College Oxford, where he read Modern History.- Publishing and journalism :...
called Plowshares into Swords an enlightening account of Israeli history that traced the "...chauvinistic and brutalising tendencies of Zionism". In a hostile review of Plowshares into Swords, the British scholar Simon Goldhill
Simon Goldhill
Simon Goldhill is a professor of Greek literature and culture at the University of Cambridge and a fellow of King's College, Cambridge. He is also Director of CRASSH, the Centre for Research in the Arts, Social Sciences, and Humanities at the University of Cambridge...
called Plowshares into Swords a book of little value and criticized Mayer for his anti-Israeli
Anti-Zionism
Anti-Zionism is opposition to Zionistic views or opposition to the state of Israel. The term is used to describe various religious, moral and political points of view in opposition to these, but their diversity of motivation and expression is sufficiently different that "anti-Zionism" cannot be...
bias, arguing that Mayer ignored Arab anti-Semitism, falsely portrayed the Six Day War as an imperialist power play by the United States
United States
The United States of America is a federal constitutional republic comprising fifty states and a federal district...
, for claiming that all Western criticism of the Islamic world is self-interested, and for describing anti-Western feeling in the Arab world as "righteous anger"
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.
- "The Domestic Causes of the First World War" pages 286-293 from The Responsibility of Power : Historical Essays In Honor Of Hajo Holborn edited by Leonard KriegerLeonard KriegerLeonard Krieger was an American historian of modern Europe, particularly known as an author on Germany. He was influential as an intellectual historian, and particularly for his discussion of historicism...
and Fritz SternFritz SternFritz Richard Stern is a German-born American historian of German history, Jewish history, and historiography. He is a University Professor Emeritus and a former provost at New York's Columbia University...
, Garden City, N.Y. : Doubleday, 1967. - "Internal Causes and Purposes of War in Europe, 1870-1956" pages 291-303 from Journal of Modern History, Volume 41, September 1969.
- Dynamics of Counter-Revolution in Europe, 1870-1956: An Analytical Framework, New York, Harper & Row, 1971, ISBN 0061315796.
- "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, New York : Pantheon Books, 1981, ISBN 0394511417
- Why Did the Heavens Not Darken? The "Final Solution" in History, New York : Pantheon Books, 1988, ISBN 0394571541.
- "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, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001, ISBN 0691090157.
- "Response" pages 589-600 from French Historical Studies, Volume 24, Issue # 4, Fall 2001.
- Plowshares into Swords: From Zionism to Israel, London: Verso, 2008, ISBN 9781844672356.
External links
About Mayer- The Mayer Gambit (On the misuse of Arno J Mayer's work by Holocaust deniers.)
- Review of Plowshares Into Swords: From Zionism to Israel by Arno Mayer
- Review of Plowshares Into Swords: From Zionism to Israel
Essays by Mayer
- The US Empire will Survive Bush Two Parties, One Imperial Mission
- On Corruption A Feast of Vultures
- Beyond the Drumbeat: Iraq, Preventive War, ‘Old Europe’
- The Wages of Hubris and Vengeance The Future of Israel and the Decline of the American Empire
- Too Big to Fail? The Poverty of Monetarism
- Untimely Reflections Upon the State of the World