Klaus Mehnert


Klaus Mehnert was a globetrotting German political scientist and a journalist. As a scholar, he was a prolific author; as a journalist, he practiced in the USSR as a correspondent, in China as a publisher, and in Germany. He was a professor at two American universities before World War II. In the late 1970s he authored several books on recent youth led political movements in various Western countries.
At the outbreak of World War I, Mehnert's family had to abandon Moscow for Stuttgart, Germany. His father died in Flanders in 1917 as a German soldier. Mehnert attended the University of Tübingen, the University of Munich, the University of California, Berkeley, and finally the 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.
Over the next ten years, he traveled frequently, to America, the Soviet Union, Japan, and China. He married Enid Keyes in California in 1933. From 1934 to 1936 he served as a Soviet correspondent for a German newspaper.
Subsequently, Mehnert taught politics at Berkeley and then at the University of Hawaii at Manoa until 1941, where he started intensively studying Russian and Pacific history. Six months prior to America's entry to World War II, he decided to go to Shanghai, where, with funding from the German foreign ministry, he published a journal named XXth Century. The journal was discontinued in 1945, when he was briefly imprisoned.
Returning to Germany after the war, he held various positions as journalist, editor, and professor, as well as government advisor on Sino-Russian matters, and published several books in the field of political science.
Since 2005, the "Europainstitut Klaus Mehnert" has offered a student exchange program between his former university RWTH Aachen and the University of Kaliningrad.

Selected writings by Klaus Mehnert

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