Hans Mayer

Hans Mayer (19 March 1907 in Cologne – 19 May 2001 in Tübingen; pseudonym: Martin Seiler[1]) was a German literary scholar.

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.

From 1937 to 1939, Mayer was a member of the Collège de Sociologie, founded by Georges Bataille, Michel Leiris and Roger Caillois in 1937.

He studied Büchner, Thomas Mann, Montaigne, Robert Musil, James Joyce, Uwe Johnson, Günter Grass, Hans Henny Jahnn and others in his investigations on the history of literature.

This work about Büchner was later recognized by the University of Leipzig as his postdoctoral thesis which was required to qualify as a professor.

In 1986, he followed this volume with the book, Das unglückliche Bewusstsein – Zur deutschen Literaturgeschichte von Lessing bis Heine.

In this volume, he deals with the literary portrayal of three groups, which have commonly been discriminated against in history: women, male homosexuals and Jews.

When it comes to acknowledging the work on Hans Mayer, these points are especially emphasized: Hans Mayer was an honorary citizen of the city of Leipzig, had honorary doctorates from universities in Brussels, Wisconsin and Leipzig, was an honorary professor in Peking, was winner of the National Prize of East Germany, as well as the Bundesverdienstkreuz (Federal Cross of Merit) of the class "Großes Verdienstkreuz mit Stern und Schulterband" (Great Cross of Merit with Star and shoulder ribbon).

Hans Mayer, along with Walter Benjamin, who was also with him at the Collège de Sociologie, and some others, belongs to the most important literary critics of the 20th century.

Perhaps there is some correlation to a former competitive situation, which Marcel Reich-Ranicki wrote about in an obituary,[citation needed][vague] which shows Mayer's life in an unflattering light.