Hans Mayer

Hans Mayer (March 19, 1907 in Cologne – May 19, 2001 in Tübingen) was a German literary scholar. Mayer was also a jurist and social researcher and was internationally recognized as a critic, author and musicologist.

Hans Mayer was born in the upper-class Jewish family. He was influenced in his youth by the writings of Georg Lukács and Karl Marx. He can be described as a socialist and a Marxist.

He studied jurisprudence, political science, history and philosophy in Cologne, Bonn and Berlin and received his doctorate in 1930 with a thesis titled "Die Krise der deutschen Staatslehre" (The Crisis of German Political Science). At the same time, he joined the SPD and worked on the magazine Der Rote Kämpfer (The Red Fighter). In 1931, he moved to the SAPD, which expelled him again one year later because of his sympathy for the KPD-O. Since he was a Jew and a Marxist and therefore banned from his profession in July 1933, he fled in August 1933 to France, where he worked for a short time as the chief editor of the Die Neue Welt ('The New World'), which was the daily newspaper of the Alsatian KPO. In 1934, Hans Mayer had to flee to Geneva. Here, he received jobs from Hans Kelsen and Max Horkheimer as a social researcher. He left the KPD-O in 1935. Carl Jacob Burckhardt influenced his literary orientation during this time.

From 1937 to 1939, Mayer was a member of the Collège de Sociologie, founded by Georges Bataille, Michel Leiris and Roger Caillois in 1937. There he held a lecture about the secret political societies in German Romanticism and demonstrated how these secret societies already anticipated Nazi symbolism. Other exiles at the Collège were Walter Benjamin and Paul L. Landsberg.

...
Wikipedia