Michael Meyer

Longtime Pacific Palisades resident Michael Meyer died peacefully on Monday, January 24, following a prolonged struggle with dementia. The historian, violinist and soccer player his family affectionately called “the happiest man on earth” was 81.

Michael was born in Magdeburg, Germany on April 7, 1940, during the period when his family—his photojournalist father, Karl; Jewish mother, Ilse; and brother, Peter— were hiding from the Nazis with relatives in the village of Domersleben. After the war, Karl, as an educated man and Nazi resister, became the mayor of Domersleben. On New Year’s Eve, 1948, the family, then including Michael’s younger brothers, Christian and Thomas (Tommi), escaped Soviet-controlled East Germany, sneaking over the border to West Germany in the night. Family lore has either Peter or Michael—no one remembers which—tripping and crying out. Karl smacked Michael on the cheek, though he always swore he wasn’t the guilty party. When Karl’s immigration visa to the U.S. was denied—probably because he’d been a mayor in Soviet-controlled East Germany—he sent Peter and Michael to live with family friends and attend school in Los Angeles. Michael was eleven. He returned to Germany in 1954, but his brother Tommi says, “Mike was unhappy in Germany—if he could be unhappy. He always wanted to be in the U.S.” After completing high school in LA, Michael studied for two years at Santa Monica City College before transferring to UCLA, where he earned his BA, MA and PhD in History and met Miriam Herschorn, whom he married in 1964. They had two daughters, Andrea and Katya.

Michael was a professor at California State University, Northridge, for almost 40 years. He authored The Politics of Music in the Third Reich (Peter Lang, 1991), for which he received CSUN’s Distinguished Scholarly Publication Award, along with numerous articles and book chapters on such varied topics as Refugees from Hitler’s Germany, Richard Wagner and Nazi Art. He was also a consultant and contributed an essay to the catalogue for the celebrated LA County Art Museum exhibit, “Degenerate Art”: The Fate of the avant-Garde in Nazi Germany. At CSUN, he was known for his courses on Western Civilization, Modern European Cultural and Intellectual History, Nazi Germany, and Anti-Semitism. In his graduate research seminar on Denazification, he regularly took students to Washington, DC, where he introduced them to the experience of primary source research. He served as Director of the California State University Junior Year Abroad program at Heidelberg University in 1990-1991 and organized an exhibit of his father’s photographs at the Magdeburger Museen in Germany in 1996, as well as writing the exhibit catalogue. Michael served as History Department Chairman at Northridge for twelve years from 1975-1987. He was a Fulbright Scholar and a recipient of the Medal of Merit from the Federal Republic of Germany in 1999 for his contributions to German-American scholarly and cultural relations, and the co-founder with his close longtime friend, actor Eric Braeden (aka Hans Gudegast), of the German-American Cultural Society.

In addition to his record as a scholar, Michael was an accomplished violinist and semi-professional soccer player. All four of the Meyer sons played classical instruments, with Peter on piano, Michael on violin, Christian on cello and Tommi on viola. Michael played with a series of chamber groups in Los Angeles for his entire adult life. When dementia prevented him from continuing to play with his most recent group, he joined Music Mends Minds, an LA-based musical support group for people with neurocognitive disorders. He was featured in the documentary, The Fifth Dementia, about the group and the enduring power of music in the face of mental decline.

Besides his family, Michael’s greatest passion was soccer. He played for the UCLA team from 1960-1963 and also served as an assistant coach. In 1963, he was recruited by Braeden to play for the semi-professional team, the Maccabees. Braeden described watching the UCLA team looking for players. “No one was as fast as Mike,” he said. The Maccabees won the U.S. Open Cup in 1973, one of the happiest and proudest moments in Michael’s life. Later, he played with the mostly-German LA Soccer Club—which he and his teammates affectionately called “the old-timers’ league”—three times a week. He rarely missed playing the sport that kept him physically fit and preternaturally balanced emotionally. He continued to play into his 70s, until his illness made it impossible.

Michael is survived by his wife, Miriam, his daughters, Andrea and Katya, his brother, Tommi, his sister-in-law Dorothy, his grandson Aidan Bosmajian, and son-in-law Harlan Bosmajian, as well as six nephews, two nieces and their children, several cousins, and too many dear friends to name. He was predeceased by his brothers Peter and Christian.

Michael was known for his warm smile, positive outlook, and extraordinary energy and erudition. Three years ago, he had a stroke from which he never fully recovered. Saddest for his family was watching his natural joy drain from him. His signature smile returned occasionally when his children visited, but more often he was expressionless and quiet. His family prefers to remember earlier days, when his memory was first failing, when he still smiled often and became more sentimental and expressive of his feelings than he had been. Michael was a loving son, brother, husband, father, grandfather and friend. He was an athlete, musician and scholar, a veritable Renaissance man. His days were filled with his passions and he never wanted anything he didn’t have. Even as dementia forced him off the soccer field, he would still walk around the Palisades neighborhood he loved and sit in his office with his dog Gus perched on his legs, gazing out at the natural beauty of Southern California, content. He truly believed he had the perfect life.

A memorial service for Michael Meyer will be held at the Villa Aurora in Pacific Palisades on April 24. In lieu of flowers, please send donations to Music Mends Minds.