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Talk:Franz Kemper

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Article should be deleted[edit]

"Franz Kemper" was a pseudonym of the German-born Tocqueville scholar Jacob-Peter Mayer and it was he who edited and introduced the 1933 edition of Konstantin Frantz's Masse oder Volk published in Potsdam by Alfred Protte. J. Salwyn Schapiro is completely wrong in describing Kemper - i.e. Mayer - as a Nazi (which he does on page 328 of Liberalism and the Challenge of Fascism). Far from being a member, or even a supporter, of the Nazi Party, Mayer was involved in anti-Nazi activity in Berlin before he fled to England in 1936 and was a good friend of Adam von Trott. As there is already a wikipedia article on Mayer, this article should be deleted. I can provide documentary evidence of the Kemper-Mayer link if needed. Marsoult (talk) 15:21, 16 January 2020 (UTC)[reply]

Rather than providing the documentary evidence I referred to (which was going to be a scan of an unpublished letter by Mayer), I can provide a reference to a journal paper published in 2018 which states that "Franz Kemper" was a pseudonym used by Mayer: Iain McDaniel (2018), "Constantin Frantz and the intellectual history of Bonapartism and Caesarism: A reassessment", Intellectual History Review, 28:2, 317-338, DOI: 10.1080/17496977.2017.1361218 Marsoult (talk) 19:11, 16 January 2020 (UTC)[reply]
Mayer himself admitted that he was Franz Kemper in a footnote to page xxxvi of his 1969 introduction to Tocqueville's Recollections. (Alexis de Tocqueville, Recollections: The French Revolution of 1848, edited and translated by J. P. Mayer and A. P. Kerr, with a new introduction by Fernand Braudel. New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction, 1987.) Marsoult (talk) 16:02, 18 January 2020 (UTC)[reply]