Gunther Ipsen

Gunther Karl Julius Ipsen (born March 20, 1899 in Innsbruck , † January 29, 1984 in Oberursel ) was an Austrian sociologist , population scientist and professor of philosophy .

Life

Gunther Ipsen was the son of the professor of medicine Carl Ipsen . He received his doctorate in 1922 under Felix Krueger and Theodor Litt on the subject of Gestalt perception. Discussion of Sander's parallelogram . After three years he completed his habilitation in 1925 with Krueger in Leipzig. In 1922 and 1923 Ipsen also taught at the Free School Community of Wickersdorf . From 1926 he worked as a private lecturer for sociology and philosophy in Leipzig and became an adjunct professor in 1930 and an associate professor a year later. In 1933 he took over a chair at the University of Königsberg , where he initially became co-director of the philosophical seminar and from April 1935 also took over the direction of the educational-psychological seminar.

Ever since he moved from Innsbruck to Leipzig in 1919, he showed a pronounced interdisciplinary interest, but initially devoted himself mainly to topics from so-called Gestalt psychology . Both his dissertation and his habilitation thesis deal with epistemological questions that he tried to solve within the framework of a holistic model. The basis of his understanding of science was the rejection of “French” rationalism against a German , cultural and ethnic idealism based on Hegel and Wilhelm Heinrich Riehl . He was particularly strongly influenced by Felix Krueger , who, as an avowed enemy of the Weimar Republic, gave anti-Semitic incendiary speeches and viewed the science of holistic psychology as a means of intellectual cohesion in the German nation. In the first years of his career, Ipsen also dealt with questions of linguistics and the philosophy of language . He is considered to be the inventor of the term "linguistic field", which was later established as a word field by Jost Trier . In general, Ipsen understood very well how to work and argue across disciplines. During the years as a lecturer, under the influence of Hans Freyer , who had received the first chair for sociology in Leipzig in 1925 , the transition from philosophical questions to empirical "real sociology " took place. With this topic, Ipsen became a co-founder of the Leipzig School , which was formed around Freyer , to which Arnold Gehlen and Helmut Schelsky also belonged, both of whom were taught by Ipsen. He was one of the co-founders and main scientific initiators of the völkisch "German Sociology" . The aim of the work was an empirical justification of the historical “people becoming”, which in the context of the emerging East German research must also be understood as a decidedly political “work on Germanism”. To this end, he worked with the bündisch Deutsche Freischar and led within this framework excursions with the assistance of students agro sociological field studies in rural areas through. In these studies of folkism, he worked closely with the Boberhaus in Löwenberg in Silesia , where he also appeared as a speaker. Boberhaus member Walter Greiff reported:

“In 1930 (...) several Silesians took part in the Leipzig sociologist G. Ipsen's study trip to 'research the rural conditions in Romania'. They got to know D. Gusti's research methods on the object in the Targu-Jiu area . Again with Ipsen's help, a group of the JM (Silesian Young Team) held their first sociological village week in Rosenau am Zobten in the spring of 1931. It was followed by four more characteristic sub-landscapes in typical villages. "

Ipsen tried to show that in the agrarian population a balance between species and habitat had developed, promoted by a peasant family constitution and a restrictive inheritance and marriage order. Specifically, he represented a premodern, anti-Enlightenment and NS-affine population theory. He firmly rejected urbanization and plurality.

Ipsen was a co-founder of the European Society for Rural Sociology (1957). As an employee of Felix Krueger, from 1930 to 1934 he was co-editor of the Blätter für deutsche Philosophie , the organ of the national-conservative German Philosophical Society , in which Krueger was chairman at that time.

Ipsen was a supporter of the National Socialist ideology and published, for example, a work Blood and Soil in 1933 . In 1937 he asserted in the spirit of the Nazi regime that the protection of minorities was an invention of the Jews and a "fight against the will of the German people to live". Since May 1, 1937 he was a member of the NSDAP (No. 5,089,913). In 1939 he went to the University of Vienna , where he succeeded Karl Bühler as director of the Psychological Institute and taught together with Arnold Gehlen . Werner Conze completed his habilitation with him in Vienna , who had followed him there from Königsberg. Ipsen was drafted into the Wehrmacht as early as August 1939 and performed military service with short interruptions as a captain of the reserve until the end of the war, and from 1943 as a major of the reserve. During this time he was represented as head of the Psychological Institute by Gehlen, who had followed him to Vienna. In 1945 Ipsen was released and initially expelled from Austria. In the following years he lived in Götzens near Innsbruck for several years . He was part of the so-called "professors group" of the Gehlen organization , which provided them with studies for a fee.

In finding a job in post-war Germany, old Leipzig and Königsberg connections were useful. From 1951 to 1961 Ipsen was head of department at the Social Research Center at the University of Münster in Dortmund in the newly created department “Sociography and Social Statistics”. Schelsky, the Conze student Wolfgang Köllmann, and Hans Linde , another Freyer student who had also been Ipsen's assistant in Königsberg, were also active in Dortmund. Ipsen's work was now very much concerned with urban sociology. In 1959 he regained his professor status (which was not unusual at the time) when the University of Königsberg was closed: The Westphalian Wilhelms University in Münster took him over as professor emeritus for reuse . Hans Freyer also had this status there . After his retirement in 1959, he worked at the Baltic Research Institute in Bonn and the Academy for Spatial Research and Regional Planning (full member since 1953). As part of the academy, Ipsen headed the research committee “Regional Population Problems and Migration Issues”. He was also a member of the research committee for “Fundamental Issues in Spatial Research and Regional Development”.

From 1962 to 1965 Ipsen received another teaching position at the Ludwig Maximilians University in Munich .

Ipsens Blut und Boden (Wachholtz, Neumünster 1933) was placed on the list of literature to be segregated in the Soviet occupation zone .

Ipsen dealt with the decipherment of the Phaistos disc , which he interpreted as a syllabary of Aegean origin (but not necessarily from Crete).

The Ipsens estate was administered by his son Detlev Ipsen , professor of urban and regional sociology at the University of Kassel , who died in 2011. The estate has been in the university archive of the Technical University of Dortmund since 2015 .

Fonts (selection)

• Review of Joachim Kühl : "Federation plans in the Danube region and in East Central Europe" (Ed. Südost-Institut , Oldenbourg, Munich 1958). In: Southeast German Archive SODA. Commissioned by the Southeast German Historical Commission . Ed. Fritz Valjavec . Vol. 2, 1st half vol. same publisher, 1959, ISSN  0081-9085 , p. 123f.
• Location and place of residence. Ecological studies. West German publishing house, Cologne / Opladen 1957.
• We East Prussia. Heimat im Herzen , published as the Academic Community Publishing House, Salzburg 1950 (Unchanged reprint, Weidlich, Frankfurt / Main 1980, ISBN 3-8035-1076-7 ).
• Rural people and industrial habitat in the Neckarland . In: Raumforschung und Raumordnung, 5th year (1941), Issue 5, pp. 243-257.
• Article Population I, Demölkerungslehre and Das Landvolk. Social structure . In: Concise dictionary of border and foreign Germanism I. Breslau 1933/1934.
• Program of a Sociology of German Volkstum. Junker & Dünnhaupt, Berlin 1933 (expanded Leipzig inaugural lecture of June 16, 1931).
• Blood and ground. The Prussian hereditary court law. Wachholtz, Neumünster 1933 (Kiel lectures on ethnic and border issues and the Nordic-Baltic region).
• The country folk. A sociological attempt. Hanseatische Verlags Anstalt, Hamburg 1933.
• The philosophy of language of the present. Junker & Dünnhaupt, Berlin 1930.

literature

• Thomas Etzemüller: Social history as political history. Werner Conze and the reorientation of West German historical studies after 1945 (=  Ordnungssysteme 9, also: Diss., Univ. Tübingen, 2000). Oldenbourg, Munich 2001, ISBN 3-486-56581-8 , p. 67ff.
• Christian Sehested von Gyldenfeldt: Gunther Ipsen on people and land, attempt on the basics of real sociology in his work. Lit, Berlin / Hamburg / Münster 2008, ISBN 978-3-8258-1403-8 .
• David Hamann: Gunther Ipsen and the völkisch real sociology . In: Michael Fahlbusch, Ingo Haar (Hrsg.): Scientific expertise and political advice, national science and practice . Paderborn 2010, ISBN 978-3-506-77046-2 , pp. 177-198.
• David Hamann: Gunther Ipsen in Leipzig. The scientific biography of a “German sociologist” 1919–1933. Peter Lang, Frankfurt am Main / Berlin / Bern / Bruxelles / New York / Oxford / Vienna 2013, ISBN 978-3-631-62683-2 .
• David Hamann: Gunther Ipsen. In: Michael Fahlbusch, Ingo Haar, Alexander Pinwinkler (Hrsg.): Handbuch der Völkischen Wissenschaften. Actors, networks, research programs . With the collaboration of David Hamann, 2 vol. Berlin 2017, ISBN 978-3-11-042989-3 , pp. 322–333.
• Harald Jürgensen (ed.): Decipherment. Population as a society in space and time. Dedicated to Gunther Ipsen. Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, Göttingen 1967 ( Yearbook for Social Science 18, 1/2, ISSN  0075-2770 ).
• Carsten Klingemann : Population Sociology in National Socialism and in the Early Federal Republic. About the role of Gunther Ipsens. In: Rainer Mackensen (Ed.): Population doctrine and population policy in the “Third Reich” . Leske and Budrich, Opladen 2004, ISBN 3-8100-3861-X , pp. 183-205.
• Hans Linde : Ipsen, Gunther. In: Wilhelm Bernsdorf , Horst Knospe (Ed.): Internationales Soziologenlexikon . Volume 2: Articles about living sociologists or those who died after 1969 . 2nd revised edition. Enke, Stuttgart 1984, ISBN 3-432-90702-8 , p. 385.
• Rainer Mackensen : Gunther Ipsen in memoriam. In: Journal for Population Science. 10, 1984, ISSN  0340-2398 , p. 231f.
• Willi Oberkrome : folk history. Methodical innovation and methodical ideologization in German history 1918–1945 (=  critical studies on history . Volume 101). Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, Göttingen 1993, ISBN 3-525-35764-8 .
• Alexander Pinwinkler : Historical population research. Germany and Austria in the 20th century, Wallstein Verlag: Göttingen 2014, here esp. 225–242.

Web links

• Literature by and about Gunther Ipsen in the catalog of the German National Library
• Gunther Ipsen in the professorial catalog of the University of Leipzig

Individual evidence

1. ↑ ^{a b c} Academy for Spatial Research and Regional Planning (ed.): 50 years of ARL in facts. ARL, Hannover 1996, p. 178.
2. ^ Franz von Kutschera : A logical analysis of the linguistic field term. (PDF; 1.3 MB)
3. ↑ Christian Tilitzki : The German university philosophy in the Weimar Republic and in National Socialism. Akademie-Verlag, Berlin 2002, p. 616.
4. ^ Walter Greiff: The Boberhaus in Löwenberg / Silesia 1933-1937. Assertiveness of a nonconforming group. Jan Thorbecke Verlag, Sigmaringen 1985, p. 35 .
5. ↑ ^{a b c d} Ernst Klee : The dictionary of persons on the Third Reich. Who was what before and after 1945 . Fischer Taschenbuch Verlag, Second updated edition, Frankfurt am Main 2005, p. 278.
6. ^ Quotation from Ernst Klee: Das Personenlexikon zum Third Reich. Fischer Taschenbuch, 2005, p. 278.
7. ↑ Roman Pfefferle, Hans Pfefferle: Glowly denazified. The professorships at the University of Vienna from 1944 in the post-war years. Writings from the Archives of the University of Vienna, Vienna 2014, p. 292.
8. ↑ Thomas Wolf: The emergence of the BND. Construction, financing, control . Ed .: Jost Dülffer et al. (=  Publications of the Independent Historical Commission for Research into the History of the Federal Intelligence Service 1945–1968 . Volume 9 ). Ch. Links Verlag, Berlin 2018, ISBN 978-3-96289-022-3 , pp. 65 ff .
9. ^ List of literature to be discarded. Second addendum. Deutscher Zentralverlag, Berlin 1948, pp. 134–143.
10. ↑ Ipsen: The Phaistos Disc. Indo-European Research, Volume 47, 1929, pp. 1-41.
11. ↑ This review is remarkable because two old Nazis are involved, as authors and reviewers. Kühl appeared here for the first time with a book publication under a pseudonym (previously two Zs.-Aufs. 1955, 1957). At this time there were increasing signs that Beyer, now a civil servant teacher trainer and professor at the PH Flensburg , had been Heydrich's closest collaborator in the murder of the intelligentsia of Lemberg . There was a good reason for a pseudonym.