Klaus Mehnert
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Klaus Mehnert (October 10, 1906, Moscow, Russia - January 2, 1984, Freudenstadt, Germany) was a German political journalist who wrote several political books.
Born in Moscow, Mehnert's family had to move to Stuttgart due to the outbreak of World War I. His father being fallen in Flanders in 1917, Mehnert attended university in Tübingen, Munich, Berkeley, CA and Berlin, receiving his PhD under Professor Otto Hoetzsch in 1928.
During the following ten years, he undertook several travels to Japan and China, mainly, however, to the U.S., where he married his wife Enid Keyes († 1955) in California in 1933, and the Soviet Union, eventually serving there as German correspondent from 1934 to 1936.
Subsequently, Mehnert taught Politics in Berkeley, CA, and moved to the University of Hawaii at Manoa until 1941, where he started intensive studies on Russian and Pacific History, continued by the faculty until today. Six months prior to America's entry to World War II, he decided to go to Shanghai, publishing the German-orientated journal XXth Century until war imprisonment in 1945 (full content online).
Returning to Germany after the war, he held various positions as journalist, anotator, editor and professor, as well as government advisor on Sino-Russian matters, and published a wide range of books about poitics and the advanced ideological exhaustion, especially in communist Russia and China, receiving a broad acceptance amongst scholars.[1]
Since 2005, the "Europainstitut Klaus Mehnert" has offered a student exchange programm between his former university RWTH Aachen and the University Kaliningrad.
[edit] Bibliography (extract)
- Ein deutscher Austauschstudent in Kalifornien ("A German exchange student in California"). Stuttgart, 1930
- Die Jugend in Sowjet-Russland. Berlin, 1932; Youth in Sowiet Russia. Transl. by Michael Davidson, Westport, Conn., 1981
- The Russians in Hawaii, 1804-19. Hawaii, 1939
- Der Sowjetmensch. Stuttgart, 1958; The Anatomy of Soviet man. Transl. by Maurice Rosenbaum, London, 1961
- Peking und Moskau. Stuttgart, 1962; Peking and Moscow. Transl. by Leila Vennewitz, London, 1963
- China nach dem Sturm. Munich, 1971; China today. Transl. by Cornelia Schaeffer, London, 1972
[edit] Notes
- ^ Laqueur, Walter (1996). The Dream that Failed : Reflections on the Soviet Union. USA: Oxford University Press. ISBN 978-0-19-510282-6. p. 187
[edit] External links
- The Russian Collections of the UH, initiated by Mehnert.
- Europainstitut Klaus Mehnert (GERMAN), named in his remembrance.
- German Wikipedia site on Mehnert translated by Babelfish into English.
