Farewell Prof. Arno Mayer

It seems that nowadays only sad news can get me to put virtual pen to virtual paper. Unfortunately, there is now lack of it…

Only a few weeks after the passing of Dr. Henry Kissinger, it was announced that Professor Arno Mayer has also left us. Two eminent historians, scholars of international relations, Jewish refugees who rebuilt their lives in the United States, two men who had much in common and were yet so very different in their political views. I met both men while I was posted to New York as Luxembourg’s Consul General from 2012 to 2016.

Arno Mayer was born in 1926, in Luxembourg, where we grew up and went to school before World War II and the German invasion of Luxembourg dramatically changed his life. He was fortunate to be able to escape with his parents into France and then, with difficulties, via French North Africa to New York.

When he turned 18 he volunteered to the US Army where his language skills landed him at a secretive operation that worked with “high-value prisoners”. He was assigned to Wernher von Braun, the inventor of German V rockets and who became the father of the US space programme at NASA. I recommend watching the Netflix movie “Camp Confidential” that retells this episode of his life and shows interviews with Prof. Mayer.

I met Arno Mayer after his son, Carl, came to see me at the Consulate in order to request help with his dad’s application to recover his Luxembourg citizenship. As Luxembourg did at the time not permit dual citizenship, he lost it in 1944 when he took US citizenship to join the army and help liberate Europe and Luxembourg… I drove down to Princeton shortly after to meet Professor Mayer and hear his story. I met a gentleman who exuded joy, if I can put it like that. He seemed genuinely happy and we had a thoroughly enjoyable time. He told me that he had two wishes: recover his Luxembourg citizenship and, when the time would come, to be buried next to his beloved mother in the (now closed) Jewish cemetery of Luxembourg-Limpertsberg. I promised to try to speed up procedures regarding the first and see who I could talk to about the second.

After some explaining of the circumstances, the Luxembourg Ministry of Justice did indeed somewhat expedite the recovery of citizenship and I was very glad to hear that Arno Mayer spent his last years as a proud Luxembourger. Regarding the second wish, I did indeed talk to senior members of the Jewish community in Luxembourg who confirmed verbally that it could possibly be done as there was space in the tomb. I hope that this position was confirmed these days. I also understood that Professor Mayer wasn’t very popular, due to his views and writings about the Holocaust, Zionism and Israel.

It motivated me to read some of his works and found it very interesting to contrast them with Kissinger’s. Where Kissinger saw the history of international relations as the almost mechanical play of the national interest of States, Mayer looked very much at the role of factors transgressing borders, such as ideology and class interest. Both didn’t like each other much: Mayer was arrested at Princeton for protesting the Vietnam War while Kissinger was conducting it as a member of the White House.

In June 2016 I went to Princeton for Arno Mayer’s 90th birthday party. He was in high spirits, we talked about life and his love for Paris, his wish to travel to Russia (where I was moving to that summer) and when I told him that I was due to meet Henry Kissinger for lunch a week later he told me how he had in the 1950ies applied for a job at the Council on Foreign Relations in New York where he got a rather brusque rejection from Kissinger who was three years his senior. “Imagine what ?might have become of me if I had been under his influence!”

I told Kissinger about the conversation and his reaction was: “I don’t remember the episode, but the brusqueness sounds like me. Ach, I could have saved him from his Marxist dreams!”

Arno Mayer was a most pleasant man to meet, a historian with very interesting and stimulating ideas and views, even if one doesn’t share them. A man who belonged to a generation that lived and experienced history in a very personal way. A righteous man with a strong sense of morality and a stubborn sense for right and wrong.

I wish him to rest in peace. Hopefully at the place of his choosing, but eventually it doesn’t matter all that much. We live on in the memories of others and in the values we pass on to our children. My condolences to his sons, Carl and Daniel, and their families. ??

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