Gustav Mayer

Gustav Mayer (4 October 1871 – 21 February 1948) was a German journalist and historian with a particular focus on the Labour movement. He fled Nazi Germany in 1933 and lived the final years of his life in England.

Life Gustav Mayer was born into a long-established Jewish mercantile family in Prenzlau, a small town in central northern Germany. The family had settled in Prentzlau in 1677, having previously lived in Oderberg. for which he was supervised by . devoting himself to the study of the German Labour Movement, basing himself first in Heidelberg and later in Berlin. However, his research work was interrupted by the outbreak of war in July 1914. He was conscripted for service in Belgium, where he involved in the administrative aspects of the occupation. four years of war left Mayer's interest in the unfolding history of the labour movement undimmed. Despite his undoubted academic qualities and the support of Hermann Oncken, when it came to a vote by the evaluation committee, the dissertation that he submitted to the Philosophy Faculty of Berlin University in 1918 failed to earn him the hoped for habilitation qualification. The next year he nevertheless obtained a teaching position on the History of Democracy, and this was extended in 1922 to a full professorship on the History of Political Parties, as the first volume of a planned two-volume biography. The second volume was printed and ready for distribution in 1933, but following a change in government at the start of the year distribution was banned, and was produced in the Netherlands by the publishers Martinus Nijhoff of Leiden. The Engels biography was only the most high-profile of several biographies and compendia of letters and speeches from nineteenth century Labour movement leaders that Mayer produced during the 1920s and 1930s. He was further impoverished through the application by German tax authorities of the country's Emigration Tax, which in the end amounted to 65,000 Marks. By this time the tragedy of the slaughter of friends and relatives through the unfolding Shoah in Germany was compounded for the Mayers by the suicide, early in 1941, of their son Peter. Their younger son, settled in England, abandoning his first name Ulrich and becoming known as Philip Mayer, obtaining a doctorate from Oxford and building a career as a social anthropologist with his wife Iona whom he married in 1946.

Works Johann Baptist von Schweitzer und die Sozialdemokratie. Ein Beitrag zur Geschichte der deutschen Arbeiterbewegung. Gustav Fischer, Jena 1909 (Reprint Detlev Auvermann, Glashütten im Taunus 1970) Friedrich Engels. Eine Biographie Bd. 1: Friedrich Engels in seiner Frühzeit. Bd. 2: Engels und der Aufstieg der Arbeiterbewegung in Europa. Martinus Nijhoff, Haag ²1934/1934 (Erstausgabe 1920; 1933 eingestampft) Friedrich Engels: A Biography (Alfred A. Knopf, 1936) Ferdinand Lassalle: Nachgelassene Briefe und Schriften. Hrsg. von Gustav Mayer. 6 Bde., Deutsche Verlagsanstalt, Berlin 1921–1925 Historische Kommission München Bismarck und Lassalle. Ihr Briefwechsel und ihre Gespräche. J. H. W. Dietz Nachf., Berlin 1928 Erinnerungen. Vom Journalisten zum Historiker der deutschen Arbeiterbewegung. Europaverlag, Zürich 1949 Radikalismus, Sozialismus und bürgerliche Demokratie. Hrsg. und mit einem Nachwort versehen von Hans-Ulrich Wehler. Suhrkamp Verlag, Frankfurt am Main 1969 (edition suhrkamp 310)

The catalogue of the German national library lists 47 works by or about Gustav Mayer.