Klaus Mehnert

Klaus Mehnert (October 10, 1906, in Moscow, Russian Empire – January 2, 1984, in Freudenstadt, West Germany) was a German writer, journalist and academic. He was a correspondent in the Soviet Union; a professor in the United States; a publisher of the German-funded journal XXth Century in Shanghai during World War II; and an advisor to several German governments after the war. He was a prolific author.

Early life and education Mehnert was born in 1906 in Moscow, Russia. His father was an engineer.

In 1914, at the outbreak of World War I, Mehnert's family left Moscow for Stuttgart, Germany. His father died in Flanders in 1917 as a German soldier. Mehnert attended the University of Tübingen and the Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München in Germany, the University of California, Berkeley, in the United States, and finally the Friedrich Wilhelm University of Berlin, where he received his PhD under Professor Otto Hoetzsch in 1928. Hoetzsch and Mehnert later took part in the short-lived society to study the Soviet command economy, ARPLAN. Mehnert was briefly a supporter of Otto Strasser's Black Front. Subsequently, Mehnert moved to the United States, teaching politics at Berkeley and then at the University of Hawaii at Manoa until 1941.

World War II In June 1941, six months prior to America's entry to World War II, he left for Shanghai, China, where he published an English-language journal named XXth Century with help from the Nazi German foreign ministry and funding from Joseph Goebbels' Third Reich Propaganda Ministry. In its four years, Menhert "steered his publication cunningly along a sophisticated path that eschewed overt pro-Axis advocacy", according to the British historian Bernard Wasserstein, with "a wide range of contributors, few of whom were publicly identified with Nazism". He continued to face occasional accusations in the American press of spying and anti-Semitism. Mehnert held various positions as journalist, editor, and professor. He became a foreign commentator for South German Radio in 1950. In the late 1970s he authored several books on youth movements in Western countries.

He died in 1984 at age 77 in Freudenstadt, West Germany. Moscow and the New Left. Berkeley & Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1975. 275 p. . Twilight of the Young: The Radical Movements of the 1960s and Their Legacy. New York, 1977. 428 p. Youth in Soviet Russia. Hyperion Press, 1981. . The Russians & Their Favorite Books. Stanford, CA: Hoover Institution Press, 1983. .

in German Peking und Moskau. DTV, 1964. 508 p. Der deutsche Standort. Stuttgart: Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt, 1967. 415 p. China nach dem Sturm. 1971. Stuttgart: Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt, 340pp, Amerikanische und russische Jugend um 1930. 1973. Stuttgart: Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt, 297pp, Moskau und die neue Linke. 1973. 219pp, Jugend im Zeitbruch: Woher-Wohin. 1976. Stuttgart: Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt, 511pp, Kampf um Maos Erbe: Geschichten machen Geschichte. Stuttgart: Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt, 1977. 319 p. . Maos Erben machen's anders. 1979. Stuttgart: Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt, 171pp Ein Deutscher in der Welt: Erinnerungen 1906–1981. 1983. Stuttgart: Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt, 447pp, Uber die Russen heute: Was sie lesen, wie sie sind. 1983. Stuttgart: Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt, 352pp,

in French La Rebelión De La Juventud. 1978.

In italian "Cina rossa". 1972. Milano: Bietti, 372pp.