Klaus Mehnert

Who was Klaus Mehnert?

Klaus Mehnert was a globetrotting German political scientist and a journalist. As a scholar, he was a prolific author; as a journalist, he practiced in the USSR as a correspondent, in China as a publisher, and in Germany. He was a professor at two American universities before World War II. In the late 1970s he authored several books on recent youth led political movements in various Western countries.

At the outbreak of World War I, Mehnert's family had to abandon Moscow for Stuttgart, Germany. His father died in Flanders in 1917 as a German soldier. Mehnert attended the University of Tübingen, the University of Munich, the University of California, Berkeley, and finally Berlin University, where he received his PhD under Professor Otto Hoetzsch in 1928. Hoetzsch and Mehnert later took part in the short-lived society to study the soviet command economy, ARPLAN.

Over the next ten years, he traveled frequently, to America, the Soviet Union, Japan, and China. He married Enid Keyes in California in 1933. From 1934 to 1936 he served as a Soviet correspondent for a German newspaper.