Michael Maar (born 17 July 1960 in Stuttgart) is a German literary scholar, Germanist and author.

For his 1995 doctoral dissertation on Thomas Mann, titled Geister und Kunst, he was awarded the Johann Heinrich Merck Prize by the Deutsche Akademie für Sprache und Dichtung.

He was a Fellow of the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin from 1997 to 1998, and visiting professor at Stanford University in 2002.

The discovery received strong attention by literary critics and the world press.

[1][2] Maar did not himself accuse Nabokov of plagiarism, but suggested it was a case of cryptomnesia, arguing that Nabokov and Lichberg lived in the same part of Berlin for several years in the 1920s and 1930s and that Lichberg's 1916 book (a collection of short stories) was easily available at the time.