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. 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.