René König

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René König (born July 5, 1906 in Magdeburg , † March 21, 1992 in Cologne ) was a German sociologist . Alongside Theodor W. Adorno and Helmut Schelsky , he is considered the best-known German representative of his subject in the first post-war decades. From 1949 he was a professor at the University of Cologne and developed into the head of the Cologne School of Sociology . From 1955 to 1985 he edited the Cologne journal for sociology and social psychology and from 1962 to 1966 he was president of the International Sociological Association (ISA), which he had co-founded in 1949. The Fischer-Taschenbuchlexikon zur Sociology, published by him, became a bestseller with a circulation of over 400,000, and with the 14-volume manual of empirical social research , which he also published , he made a significant contribution to the professionalization of sociology in the Federal Republic of Germany.

Life

Childhood and youth

René König grew up bilingual and in two cultures, his mother Marguerite (née Godefroy-Leboeuf) was French, and on his father's side he came from a German industrial family. His grandfather owned a machine factory with an iron foundry in Halle that specialized in the construction of sugar factories. His father was the engineer Gustav König. Before the First World War he lived in Paris as often as in Magdeburg and attended school in both cities. In addition, due to the work of the father, who supervised the assembly of sugar factories, the family stayed for a long time in Italy and Spain, where König learned the local languages. Thus, according to his own assessment, “cultural anthropological relativism” was an “existential reality” in which he moved effortlessly from morning to evening. Later, in addition to Latin, Greek and English, Turkish, Persian and Arabic were added to his language skills. Another central aspect of life for König was art, especially music and painting. Almost his entire family played music, he took piano lessons himself. There were numerous artist acquaintances in the family circle, which made it possible for König to move naturally in the field of art and also to research art. This incorporation of social capital paired with his cosmopolitanism produced, according to the king's son Oliver, a “bohemian habit” which “later fascinated and disturbed both employees and students alike”.

König spent the First World War and the years up to 1922 in Halle, where his father was the director and technical manager of the family business. From 1915 he attended the local high school. was isolated and marginalized and, as a “French”, experienced daily discrimination. That awakened in him “a real passion, wherever I could, to work towards overcoming it.” He was supported during this time by a group of the German wandering bird . In 1922 he moved to Gdansk , where his father became an employee of the League of Nations and was involved in converting the former Kaiser shipyard to a peacetime operation. There, too, König experienced discrimination and, in his own words, took “the disgust for German nationalism and racial madness with me on my path through life.” In 1925, König graduated from the Academic Gymnasium Danzig with the Abitur.

Studies and first publications

Alfred Vierkandt , who encouraged König to do his habilitation, but this did not happen in Germany.
Émile Durkheim , subject in Königs Züricher habilitation thesis.

In the year of his Abitur, König went to the University of Vienna to study philosophy , psychology and Islamic languages. Here he had contact with Charlotte Bühler and also got to know Paul F. Lazarsfeld . After just one year, in 1926, he moved to Berlin, where he spent ten years, interrupted by stays in Paris and Sicily. At the Friedrich-Wilhelms-Universität he studied philosophy, art and cultural studies, Romance studies and ethnology . His academic teachers included Max Dessoir , Eduard Spranger , Eduard Wechssler and Richard Thurnwald . In 1930 he received his doctorate from Dessoir with a work on the sociology of culture and art: The naturalistic aesthetics in France and its dissolution. A contribution to the systems science consideration of artist aesthetics. In it, König examines the relationships between the forms of knowledge, forms of thought, world views and spheres of reality of the artist aesthetics of the 19th century.

Richard Thurnwald was of central importance for the scientific development of König. This moved him to stay in Paris to write an essay on the latest trends in contemporary French sociology , which was then published in Thurnwald's journal Völkerpsychologie und Soziologie in 1931/1932 . During his research, König came into contact with the Durkheim School, which showed him the close connection to ethnology, which was typical of French sociology. In the winter of 1932/1933, on a small estate in southern France that belonged to his parents, he wrote the manuscript The 'objective' sociology of Émile Durkheim , with which he wanted to complete his habilitation, as requested by Alfred Vierkandt , Werner Sombart , Max Dessoir and Wolfgang Köhler had been. But in 1933 a habilitation on the “reformist socialist and Jew Émile Durkheim” was no longer possible, as König was given to understand from several sides.

Since 1932, König was a lecturer at the Berlin publishing house Die Runde . There he published in 1935 the essence of the German university , with which he registered in 1936 with Alfred Viekant for his habilitation. In addition, he wrote various newspaper articles on the topic (for example in the Berliner Tageblatt or the Kölnische Zeitung ) and, according to Stephan Moebius , "temporarily followed the path of Heidegger's Rector's speech and moved closer to those in power". He planned to publish these articles as collected essays on cultural policy . But it did not come to that, the opportunism found no response, in the Nazi review organs King was accused of "reactionary idealism". The university book was banned, and a habilitation in Berlin was out of the question.

Emigrant in Switzerland

During the carnival season in 1937, König had come from Berlin to the cathedral city at the invitation of the Kölnische Zeitung , for whose cultural pages he wrote. From there he emigrated via Freiburg im Breisgau to Zurich . In Zurich he had already deposited personal belongings at a guesthouse on previous trips through Switzerland. If necessary, he could have left Germany as a simple traveler without a suitcase.

In Zurich he revised the Durkheim manuscript from 1933 and received his habilitation in 1938. He received the Venia Legendi in philosophy with a special focus on sociology and taught at the University of Zurich . His financial situation was difficult because he was not appointed honorary professor until after the end of the war and had to live on what the students paid him. He also earned income from translations and reviews. The Königs Zurich students included Jacob Taubes , Peter Atteslander and Peter Heintz . During his time in Zurich, he wrote four books in addition to various articles. The 360 ​​articles on sociology that he had written for the Swiss Lexicon later became the basis of the Fischer Lexicon.

Immediately after the war, he met the American university control officer in the Office of Military Government for Germany, Edward Hartshorne , with whom he discussed concepts of re-education. At the request of the Americans, he gave guest lectures in Munich, Cologne and Marburg.

Professor in Cologne

In 1949, König accepted a professorship for sociology at the University of Cologne and succeeded Leopold von Wieses . His courses began in the winter semester of 1949/50, but he did not move to Cologne with his family until 1953. In between there was a period of uncertainty. Von Wiese found it difficult to let go of his offices and planned to hand the Cologne journal for sociology and social psychology into the hands of Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno from Frankfurt . This disrupted the relationship with König, who was willing to stay in Zurich or was hoping to be offered a call to Frankfurt. It was only when these options failed that König finally decided in favor of Cologne and took up a second home in Grenzano di Roma, Italy . When he became internationally known and held various visiting professorships in the USA, König repeatedly toyed with the idea of ​​leaving Germany and staying in the USA, because he was always accompanied by the feeling of not being welcome in Germany as a "returnee" from emigration to be. This feeling was reinforced by the restorative and anti-intellectual tendencies of the early Federal Republic. The reason for staying in Germany nonetheless was the desire to "educate the new generation in a democratic sense," said König.

Actor in international sociology

Arvid Brodersen, a former colleague from the publishing house “Die Runde” and meanwhile acting head of the Social Science Department at UNESCO , established the contacts that led to König becoming a co-founder of the International Sociological Association (ISA) in 1949 . From 1962 to 1966 he then served as ISA President. Visiting professorships have taken him to many universities in the USA as well as to universities in Europe, Africa and, as part of the development aid, to the University of Kabul in Afghanistan . After his retirement in 1974, he did several research stays with the Navajo Indians in Arizona .

Services

König dealt intensively with German post-war society and made a lasting contribution to empirical social research in Germany. In doing so, he distinguished himself from a dialectical sociology shaped by social philosophy, such as that practiced by Theodor W. Adorno and the Frankfurt School . In view of his experience with young Nazis at the university, he also sharply opposed an overemphasis on the term ' community '. This attitude of King was strengthened in exile in Switzerland in the 1940s. King's skepticism about a social science use of the term community also led him to a critical interpretation of Ferdinand Tönnies' approach . König was increasingly critical of the sociologist Helmut Schelsky . He was also involved in the debate on sociology under National Socialism .

René König made the French classics of sociology ( Émile Durkheim , Marcel Mauss , Maurice Halbwachs, etc.) known in Germany again. He also published and edited many studies in the areas of community , family , criminal , development and industrial sociology , but also methodicals in the field of empirical social research .

René König also worked as a pointedly liberal arguing publicist, multilingual essayist and literary translator, for example by the Sicilian novelist Giovanni Verga , to his 1880 novel Die Malavoglia he was a stimulating literary-sociological epilogue on the cultural significance of foreignness , marginality , emigration and return (Re / Migration) published.

His most popular book, which was groundbreaking in the Federal Republic of Germany at the time, was the Fischer Lexikon Soziologie, first published in 1958 (extended new edition Frankfurt / Main: Fischer, 1967, 394 p. [= Fischer Lexikon 10]). According to König in his autobiography Life in Contradiction , which was only published in 1980, it reached a total of 410,000 copies sold (19th edition 1979).

The René König Society was founded in Cologne in 1993. It publishes a (text) complete edition of René König's writings.

Cologne School

The so-called “ Cologne School ” of sociology goes back primarily to König's methodological influence (as its representatives e.g. Erwin K. Scheuch , Hans-Joachim Hoffmann-Nowotny , Rolf Ziegler , Karl-Dieter Opp , Jürgen Friedrichs , Franz Urban Pappi , Erich Weede , Heinz Sahner or Peter Kappelhoff apply).

Honors

Fonts (selection)

Monographs

  • The naturalistic aesthetic in France and its dissolution. A contribution to the systems science consideration of artist aesthetics . Noske, Leipzig 1930, also dissertation, Friedrich-Wilhelms-Universität zu Berlin 1930.
  • On the essence of the German university . The Round, Berlin 1935.
  • Niccolo Machiavelli. For the crisis analysis of a turning point . Rentsch, Erlenbach-Zurich 1941.
  • Sicily. A book of cities and caves, of rock and lava and of the great freedom of the volcano . Gutenberg Book Guild, Zurich 1943.
  • Materials on the sociology of the family . Francke, Bern 1946; 2nd, revised edition. Kiepenheuer & Witsch, Cologne 1974, ISBN 3-462-00987-7 .
  • The family of the present. An intercultural comparison. 3. Edition. Munich 1978.
  • Sociology today . Regio-Verlag. Zurich 1949.
  • Basic forms of society. The community . Rowohlt, Hamburg 1958 (rowohlts deutsche enzyklopädie, volume 79).
  • The situation of the emigrated German sociologists in Europe . West German publishing house, Opladen 1959.
  • Clothes and people. On the sociology of fashion . Fischer library, Frankfurt am Main / Hamburg 1967.
  • Power and charm of fashion. Understanding considerations from a sociologist . Econ-Verlag, Düsseldorf / Vienna 1971, ISBN 978-3-430-15550-2 .
  • Indians, where? Alternatives in Arizona. Sketches for the sociology of development . Westdeutscher Verlag, Opladen 1973, ISBN 978-3-531-11200-8 .
  • Emile Durkheim for discussion. Beyond dogmatism and skepticism . Hanser, Munich / Vienna 1978, ISBN 978-3-446-12513-1 .
  • Life in contradiction. An attempt at an intellectual autobiography . Hanser, Munich / Vienna 1980, ISBN 978-3-446-13157-6 .
  • Humanity on the catwalk. The fashion in the civilization process . Hanser, Munich / Vienna 1985, ISBN 978-3-446-14407-1 .
  • Sociology in Germany. Founder, advocate, despiser . Hanser, Munich / Vienna 1987, ISBN 978-3-446-14888-8 .

Editorships

  • Fashion in human society (with Peter W. Schuppisser). Modebuch-Verlagsgesellschaft, Zurich 1958
  • Handbook of empirical social research , Volume 1, Enke, Stuttgart 1962.
  • Manual of Empirical Social Research , Volume 2, Enke, Stuttgart 1967.
  • The interview. Forms, technology, evaluation . 7th edition, Kiepenheuer & Witsch, Cologne 1974.
  • The Fischer Lexicon , Part: 10., Sociology . Revised and expanded new edition, 406th - 410th thousand, Fischer Bücherei, Frankfurt am Main 1980, ISBN 978-3-596-40010-2 (first published in 1958).

"René König writings"

27 volumes since 1988, including:

  • Critique of historical-existentialist sociology. A contribution to the establishment of an objective sociology . Habilitation thesis (University of Zurich, 1938) new hrgg. by Hans-Joachim Hummel, Leske and Budrich, Opladen 1998, ISBN 3-663-10571-7 .
  • To the constitution of modern societies. Studies on the early history of sociology . Ed. from Heine from Alemann. Leske and Budrich, Opladen 2000, ISBN 3-8100-2202-0 .
  • Family sociology . Collection of articles hrgg. by Rosemarie Nave-Herz, Leske and Budrich, Opladen 2002, ISBN 978-3-8100-3307-9 .
  • Materials on the sociology of crime , hrgg. by Aldo Legnaro and Fritz Sack , VS, Verlag für Sozialwissenschaften, Wiesbaden 2005, ISBN 978-3-8100-3306-2 .
  • Structure analysis of the present . Collection of articles hrgg. by Michael Klein, VS, Verlag für Sozialwissenschaften, Wiesbaden 2006, ISBN 978-3-531-14783-3 .
  • Sociological studies on group and community . Collection of articles hrgg. by Kurt Hammerich, VS, Verlag für Sozialwissenschaften, Wiesbaden 2006, ISBN 978-3-531-14665-2 .
  • Writings on cultural and social anthropology . Collection of articles hrgg. by Dieter Fröhlich, VS, Verlag für Sozialwissenschaften, Wiesbaden 2008, ISBN 978-3-531-15023-9 .
  • Sociology as Opposition Science. On the critical role of sociology . Collection of articles hrgg. von Heine von Alemann, VS, Verlag für Sozialwissenschaften, Wiesbaden 2011, ISBN 978-3-531-15026-0 .
  • Writings on the foundation of sociology. Theoretical and methodological perspectives . Collection of articles hrgg. by Hans-Joachim Hummel, VS, Verlag für Sozialwissenschaften, Wiesbaden 2011, ISBN 978-3-531-15024-6 .
  • Tasks of the sociologist and the perspectives of sociology. Writings on the development of sociology after 1945 . Collection of articles hrgg. by Michael Klein, VS, Verlag für Sozialwissenschaften, Wiesbaden 2014, ISBN 978-3-531-15025-3 .

literature

  • Sociology with cosmopolitan intent. Festschrift for René König on his 75th birthday. Verlag für Sozialwissenschaften, Wiesbaden 1981, ISBN 978-3531115474 .
  • Stephan Moebius : René König and the 'Cologne School'. A sociological-historical approach. Springer VS, Wiesbaden 2015, ISBN 978-3658081812 .
  • Stephan Moebius: René König. Pioneer of the Federal Republic of Germany's sociology . Springer VS, Wiesbaden 2016, ISBN 978-3-658-11208-0 .
  • Volker Kruse: »History and Social Philosophy« or »Reality Science« ?: German historical sociology and the logical categories of René Königs and Max Weber. suhrkamp science, frankfurt a. M. 1999, ISBN 351829007X .
  • Klaus Veddeler: Legal norm and legal system in René König's norm and culture theory. Writings on legal theory, Duncker & Humblot, Berlin 1999, ISBN 978-3428096596 .
  • Richard Albrecht : Life in Contradiction and Survival as Contradiction. Sociological specialist history of the “Cologne School” and its doyen as the subject-scientific cultural history of the “short” century. In: Information 35 (2015) I, pp. 39–67.

Web links

Remarks

  1. ↑ Unless otherwise stated, biographical information is based on Stephan Moebius : René König. Pioneer of the Federal Republic of Germany's sociology . Springer VS, Wiesbaden 2016, ISBN 978-3-658-11208-0 , pp. 3–13 (“Biographical outline”) as well as the data on the curriculum vitae and the obituary In memoriam René König by Rolf Ziegler, both in: Michael Klein / Oliver König (ed.), René König, sociologist and humanist. Texts from four decades . Leske + Budrich, Opladen 1998, ISBN 3-8100-2023-0 , pp. 17-32.
  2. ↑ René König: Life in contradiction. An attempt at an intellectual autobiography . Hanser, Munich / Vienna 1980, ISBN 978-3-446-13157-6 , p. 14.
  3. ↑ Oliver König: Afterword. In: René König: Autobiographical writings. (= Writings. Vol. 18). Newly edited by Mario and Oliver König and with an afterword by Oliver König, Leske & Budrich, Opladen 2000, ISBN 978-3-8100-2392-6 , pp. 429-450, here p. 438.
  4. ↑ René König: Life in contradiction. An attempt at an intellectual autobiography . Hanser, Munich / Vienna 1980, p. 18.
  5. ↑ René König: Life in contradiction. An attempt at an intellectual autobiography . Hanser, Munich / Vienna 1980, p. 44.
  6. ↑ Stephan Moebius: René König. Pioneer of the Federal Republic of Germany's sociology . Springer VS ("essentials"), Wiesbaden 2016, p. 5.
  7. ↑ a b Stephan Moebius: René König. Pioneer of the Federal Republic of Germany's sociology . Springer VS ("essentials"), Wiesbaden 2016, p. 6.
  8. ^ Clemens Albrecht , quoted from Stephan Moebius: René König. Pioneer of the Federal Republic of Germany's sociology . Springer VS ("essentials"), Wiesbaden 2016, p. 6.
  9. ↑ René König, by the way. Memories. Texts from the estate. In: René König, Autobiographical Writings (Writings, Vol. 18). Newly edited by Mario and Oliver König and with an afterword by Oliver König, Leske & Budrich, Opladen 2000, ISBN 978-3-8100-2392-6 , pp. 319–426, here pp. 356 ff .; In contrast to Stephan Moebius, it is said that König did not return to Germany from one of his trips to Sicily, René König. Pioneer of the Federal Republic of Germany's sociology . Springer VS, Wiesbaden 2016, pp. 3–13 (“Biographical Outline”), here p. 7.
  10. ↑ René König, Identity and Adaptation in Exile. In: Max Haller , Hans-Joachim Hoffmann-Nowotny and Wolfgang Zapf (eds.), Culture and Society . Negotiations of the 24th German Sociological Conference, the 11th Austrian Sociological Conference and the 8th Congress of the Swiss Society for Sociology in Zurich 1988. Campus, Frankfurt am Main, ISBN 978-359-334156-9 , pp. 113–126, here p. 121.
  11. ↑ See Markus Zürcher, Der Mythos der Gemeinschaft: René König as an emigrant in Switzerland; in: Kölner Zeitschrift für Soziologie und Sozialpsychologie, 47 (1995) 1, pp. 157–165.
  12. ↑ Cf. Eduard Georg Jacoby , The modern society in social scientific thinking by Ferdinand Tönnies , Enke, Stuttgart 1971, and Peter-Ulrich Merz-Benz , "The paradox of institutionalized permanent reflection", in: Ders./Gerhard Wagner (ed.), Sociology and Anti-Sociology , Konstanz 2001, p. 95 f.
personal data
SURNAME King, René
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German sociologist
DATE OF BIRTH July 5, 1906
PLACE OF BIRTH Magdeburg
DATE OF DEATH March 21, 1992
Place of death Cologne