Mario Keßler


Mario Keßler is a German historian.
He was born in what was then the Soviet sponsored German Democratic Republic : he was 34, and working on his habilitation by the time the wall was breached. German reunification, in 1990, transformed the historiographical context on both sides of the former inner German border, but the changes were particularly stark for scholars who had learned their craft in the east. By the mid-1990s only around 40 East German professional historians were still in their old posts and by 2017 it was possible to assert that only around ten East German trained historians were employed by universities or reputable apolitical research institutions. Mario Keßler was one historian who made the professional transition to the post-reunification world successfully.

Biography

Mario Keßler was born in the south of the country, in Jena, a city rich in academic heritage and industrial tradition which had been the administrative capital of Thuringia until the authorities had reconfigured and delayered regional government in 1952. He attended school in Jena between 1962 and 1974 and then, between 1974 and 1979, studied History and Germanistics at Jena and Leipzig. His doctorate, also from Leipzig, followed in 1982. His dissertation topic was "The Comintern and the Arabic East 1919-1929". Between 1982 and 1987 he held a research position in the Africa and Middle East department at the University of Leipzig. In 1987 he moved to Berlin, taking up an academic research position. His habilitation, this time from the German Academy of Humanities and Sciences at Berlin, followed in 1990. This time his dissertation dealt with "Socialism and Zionism: the international labour movement and political zionism 1897-1933". Work on the habilitation involved lengthy study visits to Moscow and Warsaw.
Since 1990 has spent periods teaching as a guest professor at various North American universities including the University of Massachusetts and the Yeshiva University in New York City. He has held an extraordinary professorship at the University of Potsdam, where he is also a member of the Central Institute for Research in Contemporary History, since 2005.
Keßler's particular professional interests include Zionism, Antisemitism and the German Labour Movement, with a particular interest on Communist Research in the twentieth century. He also has a particular interest in the career and fate of Paul Merker, an East German politician who excited the mistrust of Walter Ulbricht in the 1950s and became a victim of the East German show trial culture of those times. In 2011 Keßler was a co-signatory of an open letter organised by Andreas Weber, addressed to the publisher :de:Ulla Berkéwicz|Ulla Berkéwicz at Suhrkamp Verlag. The signatories urged against the publication of a German translation of a Trotsky biography by the English historian Robert Service. The book by Service had already been available in English for nearly two years and the German scholars, expressing their shared view forcefully, endorsed the critical assessment of the socialist historian David North. They complained of factual inaccuracies, misrepresentation of sources and failure to meet normal academic standards. There was also a strong sense that Stalin's twenty-year campaign to discredit his political rival had been swallowed uncritically by Service, despite Stalin himself having been dead and openly discredited for half a century. The Berlin publishers nevertheless printed the German version of the book.

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