Günter Mayer (6 November 1930 – 2 September 2010) was a German cultural academic and musicologist.
He was the editor of the collected works of Hanns Eisler, published in three volumes, and the planned historical-critical complete edition of Eisler's works.
Mayer was a member of the scientific advisory boards of the Historisch-kritisches Wörterbuch des Marxismus and the journal The Argument and since 2007 deputy chairman of the Berliner Institut für kritische Theorie [de].
Hanns-Werner Heister, with whom Mayer has worked for a long time, highlights as conceptual innovations the "dialectics of material" of the artistic avant-garde; the "contradiction between utility value and design value" in aesthetic evaluation; language as a non-technical concept of the mass medium; mass culture as a dialectical relationship between culture, subject and masses; technical production and reproduction through electrification and digitalization as the real revolution of music in the 20th century.
[1] Besides Georg Knepler, Mayer was in 1978 in his book Weltbild, Notenbild one of the first, who in the GDR admonished a differentiated reception of the theories of Theodor W. Adorno, who had long been perceived as alleged anti-Marxist and therefore rejected.