Ferdinand Merz

Ferdinand Merz (born May 16, 1924 in Chicago ; † May 28, 1997 ) was a German psychologist.

Life

Ferdinand Merz was born in Chicago to German immigrant parents who returned to Europe for family reasons in 1927. The family initially lived in Weilheim an der Teck . After the early death of his mother, the father moved to his birthplace Asch ( Aš in Czech , now the Czech Republic). There Ferdinand Merz attended the then five-year elementary school and the local secondary school. He experienced his school days, as he wrote in his self-portrayal, due to linguistic difficulties with the Bohemian dialect as an outsider and "foreigner". The experience of being ostracized contributed, according to my own admission, to the fact that "as a scientist, I was always looking for the role of the opposition, the outsider". (Self-presentation, p. 177).

Before the end of high school he came up with the " maturity note " only at the Reich Labor Service , then to the Wehrmacht . At the end of 1945 he became a school helper in the Württemberg school service, which he left in 1947 to study psychology with Gustav Kafka in Würzburg . In 1951 he finished his psychology studies and his doctorate (subject: "Politics as an object of comparative psychology") with excellent results. In addition to Kafka, it was Wilhelm Peters , who returned to Würzburg from abroad (Istanbul) in 1952 , who shaped Merz, even though Peters had already retired. In 1953 Merz became assistant to the newly appointed professor Wilhelm Arnold , since 1957 with a teaching position. Ferdinand Merz acquired the venia legendi for psychology in 1960 with the text “Assessment of the personal characteristics of our fellow human beings”. In 1963 he became a lecturer at the University of Marburg, where he was appointed to the second chair in psychology in 1964 (alongside Heinrich Düker ), where he taught until his retirement in 1989. He declined honorable calls to Graz (1966/67) and Augsburg (1975).

Scientific importance

Ferdinand Merz belonged to the generation of younger scientists after the Second World War who played a major role in gradually overcoming the isolation of German psychology during the Nazi era in order to achieve the international standards set by psychological experts in Anglo-American Space were set. He made this through small contributions to statistics and experimental methodology on the one hand, and through his own experimental research work on the other. Particularly noteworthy here are studies in the field of intelligence and reasoning, his textbooks on hereditary psychology and differential psychology.

Ferdinand Merz was the first specialist representative to expressly draw attention to the repression of political burdens on leading representatives of German psychology during National Socialism - in view of the fact that academic psychologists with a National Socialist past remained or became professors after the Second World War, if not on the board of directors of German Society for Psychology played a role. Ferdinand Merz distinguished himself decisively from those neo-Marxist fundamentalists at the time of the student unrest who made fascism the lever of their criticism of university psychology.

Publications (selection)

• German Psychology and National Socialism. A reply. In: Psychologie und Praxis, 5 (1961), pp. 32–34.
• Judging our fellow human beings as an achievement. (Collective presentation). In: Ber. 23rd Congress of DGfPs. Göttingen: Hogrefe 1963, pp. 32–51
• Aggression and drive to aggression. In: H. Thomae. Hdb. D. Psych. Vol. 2: Allgemeine Psychologie, Göttingen: Hogrefe 1965, pp. 569-691
• The influence of verbalizing on performance in intelligence tasks. In: Zfexp. u. Applied Psychology, 18, pp. 114-137
• Introduction to genetic psychology Stuttgart: Kohlhammer 1977 (with Ingeborg Stelzl )
• Gender differences and their development. Göttingen: Hogrefe 1979
• The influence of school attendance on intelligence performance in elementary school age. ZfEntw.ps. u. Päd. Psychologie 17, pp. 223–241 (with H. Remer and Th. Ehlers)

literature

• Lothar Tent (Ed.), Inequality and Progress: Contributions to Differential Psychology and General Psychology. Festschrift for Ferdinand Merz. Lengerich (Wolfgang Pabst Verlag). 1993.
• Ernst G. Wehner (Ed.), Psychology in self-portrayals. Vol. 3. Bern: Verlag Hans Huber 1992. In it: Ferdinand Merz, pp. 175-201.

Web links

• Literature by and about Ferdinand Merz in the catalog of the German National Library