Arnold Bergstraesser

This article describes the political scientist Arnold Bergstraesser (1896–1964). For the politician (1841–1897) see Arnold Bergsträsser .

Arnold Bergstraesser (born July 14, 1896 in Darmstadt ; † February 24, 1964 in Freiburg im Breisgau ) was a German political scientist and university professor . Along with Wolfgang Abendroth , Theodor Eschenburg , Ernst Fraenkel and Eric Voegelin, he is considered to be one of the founding fathers of German political science after the Second World War .

Life

Arnold Bergstraesser came from a Protestant family, but also had Jewish ancestors. Before the First World War he was active in the Wandervogel movement, where he met Carlo Schmid . After four years of military service, he studied history, sociology and economics in Berlin , Tübingen and Munich . During his studies he was involved in the Heidelberg free student body and in 1919 was a co-founder and board member of the AStA umbrella association for German students . In 1923 he was in Heidelberg , at Eberhard Gothein , Dr. phil. PhD and then worked as an assistant at the Institute for Social and Political Sciences. In 1928 he received his habilitation in economics from Alfred Weber .

In 1929 he was appointed to a professorship for foreign studies in Heidelberg, where he held the professorship from April 1932 and was a member of the Gumbel investigation committee. After Alfred Weber left, Bergstraesser was the temporary head of the institute and from 1933 to 1934 professor at the Faculty of Economics and Politics.

In 1935 there were boycotts of nationalist students against him and the courses were temporarily stopped. September 1935 followed a leave of absence and the move to Munich to avoid persecution. In February 1936 he withdrew his vacation request, but his teaching license was withdrawn in August on the basis of the Reich Habilitation Regulations and terminated on September 30th. Bergstraesser was one of the founders of the German Academic Exchange Service as early as 1925 .

In 1937 Bergstraesser left Germany because his partly Jewish descent - known since 1933 - had led to his discharge from university service, and went to the USA. There he was arrested twice by the FBI Enemy Control Unit as an alleged Nazi spy. The background to these arrests was that Bergstraesser had been involved in the dismissal of the pacifist Jewish colleague Emil Julius Gumbel from the university in 1932. In addition, he, who saw himself as a Weimar liberal, published two articles in 1933/34 that could be read as pro-Nazi.

He later taught at several US universities until 1954 - most recently as a professor of German literature and history at the University of Chicago , where Georg Iggers was one of his first students in 1944. Here he made a significant contribution to German-American understanding, among other things as co-editor of a “German History” (New York 1944) and as organizer of the Goethe conference in Aspen (Colorado) in 1949 (together with Albert Schweitzer ). He was well acquainted with Carl Joachim Friedrich , who taught at Harvard University. In 1954 he returned to Germany and was appointed professor of sociology and political science at the Albert Ludwig University of Freiburg .

From 1955 to 1959 Bergstraesser was director of the research institute of the German Society for Foreign Policy (DGAP) and editor of the “Yearbook for International Politics”. In 1958 he founded the East-West Institute, today's Wiesneck Study House for political education. From 1958 to 1960 he was a member of the board of trustees of the Friedrich Naumann Foundation . From 1959 he headed the student research group developing countries, from which the Arnold Bergstraesser Institute later emerged. He was also President of the German Commission for UNESCO and played a key role in founding the Academy for Political Education in Tutzing and in introducing social studies classes at secondary schools. The “Working Group on Science and Politics”, formed on his initiative in 1961, was transformed in the following year into the foreign policy think tank and policy advice “ Foundation Science and Politics ” (SWP), which still exists today .

Since 1925 he was with Erika Emma Johanna, geb. Sellschopp (born January 23, 1900 in Satow ; † October 29, 1977 in Freiburg) married; the couple had two children.

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Bergstraesser's later conception of political science as a “synoptic” discipline, that is, a discipline that integrates economic, historical-cultural and political-institutional perspectives, was already documented in his 1931 work on “France's State and Economy”. Another element of Bergstraesser's understanding of politics can be found in the text “Sense and Limits of Understanding Between Nations”. He is concerned with overcoming provincial nation-state thinking and opening up one's own intellectual tradition to encounters with foreign cultures.

After his appointment to the Freiburg professorship, he was concerned with establishing a “normative understanding of politics that is rooted in intellectual tradition” (the so-called “ Freiburg School ” of political science). Linked to this was the endeavor to conduct a “practice-related, empirical-synoptic analysis of political reality”. In this context, the countries of the Third World , whose importance for world politics Bergstraesser was one of the first to recognize and incorporate into German political science , gained special significance .

Fonts

• The economic powers and the formation of the state will after the German revolution. Study on the question of the professional constitution. Dissertation. Heidelberg 1924.
• Agriculture and agrarian crisis in France . Habilitation thesis. Heidelberg 1928.
• Meaning and limits of understanding between nations. Duncker & Humblot, Munich, Leipzig 1930 (= scientific treatises and speeches on philosophy, politics and intellectual history , volume 9).
• Nation and economy. Hanseatische Verlagsanstalt, Hamburg 1933.
• The global political dynamics of the present. In: International Politics. 1955, Munich 1958, pp. 1-51.
• Politics in Science and Education. Writings and speeches. Freiburg 1961. 2nd edition 1966.
• Goethe ’s Image of Man and Society. Chicago 1949. Reprinted Freiburg 1962.
• Thoughts on methods and tasks of contemporary cultural studies research . In: G.-K. Kindermann (ed.): Cultures in transition. Freiburg 1962, pp. 401-422.
• Classics of the philosophy of the state. Selected texts. Volume 1. Eds. Arnold Bergstraesser and Dieter Oberndörfer . Köhler, Stuttgart 1962, 1975.
• World politics as science. Historical awareness and political education. Edited by Dieter Oberndörfer. Cologne, Opladen 1965.
• State and Poetry. Edited by Erika Bergstraesser. Rombach, Freiburg 1967.

literature

• Bibliography . In: Arnold Bergstraesser: World politics as science. Historical awareness and political education. Edited by Dieter Oberndörfer. Cologne, Opladen 1965, pp. 261-265.
• Ernst Fraenkel : Arnold Bergstraesser and German Political Science. In: Arnold Bergstraesser: World politics as science. Historical awareness and political education. Edited by Dieter Oberndörfer. Cologne, Opladen 1965, pp. 252-259.
• Claus-Dieter Krohn : The Bergstraesser Case in America. In: Exile Research. An international yearbook. 4, 1986, pp. 254-275.
• Sebastian Liebold : Strong France - unstable Germany. The cultural studies of Curtius / Bergstraesser and Vermeil between the Peace of Versailles and Berlin emergency ordinances. LIT, Berlin 2008.
• Hans Maier : In Memoriam Arnold Bergstraesser. In: Journal of Politics. 11, No. 2, 1964, pp. 97-99.
• Horst Schmitt: A “typical Heidelberger in good and dangerous”. Arnold Bergstraesser and Ruperto Carola 1923–1936. In: Reinhard Blomert et al. (Ed.): Heidelberger Sozial- und Staatswissenschaften. The Institute for Social and Political Sciences between 1918 and 1958. Metropolis, Marburg 1997, ISBN 3-89518-098-X , pp. 167–196.
• Horst Schmitt: Existential Science and Synopsis. On the science and method concept of the "young" Arnold Bergstraesser. In: Political quarterly. 30, No. 3, 1989, pp. 466-481.
• Horst Schmitt: Political Science and Liberal Democracy. A study on the “political research program” of the “Freiburg School” 1954–1970. Dissertation. University of Hamburg 1993. Nomos, Baden-Baden 1995, ISBN 3-7890-3785-0 , especially pp. 40-91.
• Jürgen Schwarz: Arnold Bergstraesser and the student body in the early twenties. In: Journal of Politics. 15, No. 3, 1968, pp. 300-311.
• Alfons Söllner : Normative Westernization? The political culture of the early Federal Republic and Arnold Bergstraesser. In: Alfons Söllner: Vanishing points. Studies on the history of political ideas in the 20th century. Nomos, Baden-Baden 2006, pp. 181-200.
• Markus Porsche-Ludwig :  MOUNTAIN ROAD Arnold. In: Biographisch-Bibliographisches Kirchenlexikon (BBKL). Volume 30, Bautz, Nordhausen 2009, ISBN 978-3-88309-478-6 , Sp. 105-112.
• Manuel Sarkisyanz: Arnold Bergstraesser. 1896–1964 to commemorate forty years. From professorship to professorialism. From dealing with Germany's idealism, romanticism and youth movement. Publisher: Mein Buch, Hamburg 2004, ISBN 3-86516-094-8 .
• Prof. Dr. Arnold Bergstrasse . In: Norbert Giovannini; Claudia Rink; Frank Moraw: Remember, preserve, commemorate: the Jewish residents of Heidelberg and their relatives 1933–1945 . Das Wunderhorn, Heidelberg 2011, ISBN 978-3-88423-353-5 , p. 49 .

Web links

• Literature by and about Arnold Bergstraesser in the catalog of the German National Library
• Biographical notes on Arnold Bergstraesser (Arnold Bergstraesser Institute eV in Freiburg)

Individual evidence

1. ^ Carlo Schmid: Memories . In: Collected works in separate editions . tape 3 . Scherz, Bern, Munich, Vienna 1979, ISBN 3-502-16666-8 , pp. 36 .
2. ↑ Prof. Dr. Arnold Bergstrasse . In: Norbert Giovannini; Claudia Rink; Frank Moraw: Remember, preserve, commemorate: the Jewish residents of Heidelberg and their relatives 1933–1945 . Das Wunderhorn, Heidelberg 2011, ISBN 978-3-88423-353-5 , p. 49 .
3. ↑ Horst Schmitt: A typical Heidelberger in good and dangerous. Arnold Bergstraesser and Ruperta Carola 1932–1936. In: Reinhard Blomert u. a. (Ed.): Heidelberg social and political sciences. The Institute for Social and Political Sciences between 1918 and 1958. Marburg 1997, pp. 167–196.
4. ↑ Wilma and Georg Iggers: Two sides of the story. Life report from troubled times . Göttingen 2002, p. 82 f.
5. ↑ http://portal.uni-freiburg.de/politik/netzwerk/studienhaus-wiesnck
6. ↑ Archive link ( Memento of the original from January 10, 2015 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and not yet checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice.  
7. ^ Katharina Burges: International Relations in Germany. Prehistory and institutional beginnings up to the beginning of the 1960s. In: Research reports from the Institute for Social Sciences (ISW), No. 58 , ISW, Braunschweig 2004, ISSN  0949-2267 .
8. ↑ The generation of those born around and after 1900 and influenced by the Bundische youth movement, for whom AB's guidelines for cultural exchange with France (sc. In this publication) were decisive, let themselves be engaged by the National Socialists without any problems and moved into leading positions of the German- French cultural relations: ... Otto Abetz , ... Karl Epting ... Quote: Hans Manfred Bock: Tradition and topicality of the popular French cliché in Germany from 1925 to 1955 . In: Francia , Vol. 14 (1986), pp. 475-508, here p. 491 .