[2] Mario Keßler was born in the south of the country, in Jena, a city rich in academic heritage and industrial tradition.
He is now preparing a biography of Paul Merker, an East German politician who excited the mistrust of Walter Ulbricht in the 1950s and became a victim of Stalinist persecution .
[1] In 2011 Keßler was a co-signatory of an open letter organised by Wolfgang Weber, addressed to the publisher 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.
[3] There was also a strong sense that Stalin's twenty-year campaign to discredit his political rival had been swallowed uncritically by Service.