Meyer, Alfred G.

Alfred George Meyer was born on February 5, 1920, in Bielefeld, Germany, the second of three sons born to parents Gustav and Therese (Melchior) Meyer. After a thwarted attempt by his parents to leave Nazi Germany in 1937, Meyer in 1939 escaped from Bielefeld to the United States, days before the start of World War II. Earlier that year his younger brother Hajo had gained passage to the Netherlands with a transport of Jewish children, and his older brother Rolf had gone to Manchester, England as an indentured laborer. Alfred was sent to live with friends of the family in Santa Ana, California, where he worked as a stenographer until joining the United States Army in 1941. Meyer's parents remained in Bielefeld, and were ultimately killed at Auschwitz. Meyer served with the United States Army from 1941 to 1945, fighting overseas in Germany with the 29th Infantry Division and eventually serving in the intelligence division as a prisoner-of-war interrogation officer, for which he received a Bronze Star Medal. In 1944 Meyer was sent by the Army to Harvard University to complete a study of Russian; after the war he returned to Harvard, receiving an AM in Slavic Languages and Literature in 1946 and a Ph.D. in Political Science in 1950.

Meyer began what was to become a long and distinguished career in teaching and scholarship as a teaching fellow in Government at Harvard, 1949-1950. He subsequently served as a research fellow at Harvard's Russian Research Center, 1950-1953, where he was assistant to the director, 1951-1952, and assistant director, 1952-1953. He then joined the faculty of the University of Washington as an acting assistant professor, 1953-1955, and subsequently became director of the research program on the history of the Communist party at Columbia University, 1955-1957. From there Meyer went to Michigan State University, where he joined the Political Science department as an associate professor, 1957-1960, and professor, 1960-1966. In 1966 he came to the University of Michigan, where as a professor of political science he taught courses in political theory, European intellectual history, communist ideology, and Soviet affairs. He was director of the University's Center for Russian and Eastern European Studies, 1969-1972, and associate director from 1983 until his retirement in 1990.

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