Obituary: Professor Hans Mayer

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WHEN HANS Mayer decided, at the end of a lecture tour in West Germany in the autumn of 1963, not to return to the Communist-run East Germany (GDR), this was a bitter blow to the GDR regime.

Some hardliners in the ruling Socialist Unity Party (SED) of Walter Ulbricht probably breathed a sigh of relief that they had got rid of a troublesome intellectual. Many more, however, were clear that the loss of this parade horse would hurt the regime. Mayer was at that time Professor for the Sociology of Culture and History of Literature at the University of Leipzig. He had been professor there since 1950 and numbered among his students some who were to become prominent GDR writers, …