Mario Keßler
Mario Keßler (born 4 May 1955) is a German historian. He was born in what was then the German Democratic Republic (East Germany). He was 34, and about to finish his habilitation (senior level university qualification) by the time the wall was breached. German reunification thesis, 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 profession in the east. By the mid-1990s only around 40 East German professional historians were still in academic employment and by 2017 only around ten  East German trained historians were employed by universities. Mario Keßler was one of these few historians 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. He attended school in Jena between 1962 and 1974 and then, between 1974 and 1979, studied History and Germanistics in 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 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 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. Keßler has held an extraordinary professorship at the University of Potsdam, where he was also a member of the Centre for Contemporary History, since 2005. After his retirement on March 1 , 2021 he was appointed Senior Fellow at the Centre. Since 1991 Mario Keßler has spent periods of teaching as a guest professor at various international universities including the City College of New York, Columbus State University (Georgia), the Hebrew Universität of Jerusalem, the Institut d’études politiques de Paris/Sciences Po, Rutgers University, New Brunswick (New Jersey), the University of Massachusetts (Amherst) and Yeshiva University in New York City. Keßler was invited researcher at German Historical Institute, Washington, D.C., Harvard University, Johns Hopkins University, King's College London and the University of Minnesota (Minneapolis). Keßler's particular professional interests include Zionism , antisemitism and the German labour movement, with a particular interest on research of communist movements in the twentieth century. 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 . In 2011 Keßler was a co-signatory of an open letter organised by Wolfgang Weber, addressed to the publisher 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. Suhrkamp Publishing House nevertheless printed the German version of the book. Keßler is member of the international advisory boards of the International Conference of Labour and Social History, the International Rosa Luxemburg Society and of Arbeit – Bewegung – Geschichte . Zeitschrift für historische Studien. He is also a member of the Historical Commission of the Partei Die Linke (The Left Party).