Gerhard Vinnai

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Gerhard Vinnai, 2009

Gerhard Vinnai (* 1940 in Stuttgart ) is a German social psychologist . Until his retirement in 2005 he was a professor at the University of Bremen .

Live and act

Vinnai has emerged from a number of important papers on the critique of sport, masculinity, and academic psychology . He is heavily influenced by critical theory .

Vinnai belongs to the school of neo-Marxist sports sociology. In the early 1970s in particular, following the trail of Theodor W. Adornos , he interpreted sport as a duplication of the capitalist world of work. The events on the soccer field function according to the logic of “capitalist work organization”. The sport of football also has a strong ideological function:

"The sport of football [...] is organized by associations which, as companies in the entertainment industry, sell the performances of their athletes as goods [...]. Coaches and players in commercial football sell their skills to the companies that promise them the greatest economic benefits. When choosing their job, the ties to a city, region or country usually hardly play a role for the active. […] There is usually no special bond with the population living there […]. Although they do not need to have a special relationship with them and their homeland, their followers paradoxically experience them as their very emotionally charged representatives. […] The commercial football company, to which the active players, who mostly come from outside, sell their skills for some time, is seen by the fans as 'their' club, to which they feel connected with homely and familiar feelings. [...] The enormous socio-psychological significance of football is therefore dependent on an illusionary sense of togetherness, from whose psychological charge the enthusiasm for football thrives. "

- Gerhard Vinnai

Vinnai's thesis also caused a stir: “Football as a sport among men lives from a pronounced latent homosexuality.” Vinnai is also known as a critic of Christianity . So he wrote in 1984:

“The overwhelming Christian morality and the immense destructiveness of European culture are two sides of the same coin. [...] A morality that one has to constantly transgress in order to survive psychologically generates more cynicism than charity. "

- Gerhard Vinnai

In connection with research on the development of the potential for violence, Vinnai published several works on Adolf Hitler and on the "genesis of the fascist perpetrator". He pointed out that Hitler's “endeavors to exterminate the Jews are likely to be decisively influenced by traumatic war experiences.” Before the First World War, Hitler “never attracted attention with particular violence or ruthlessness [...], he was more pacifist and until the end of the war in 1918 [...] he was probably not a fanatical anti-Semite. "

"Even in this war Hitler certainly not only experienced horror, he also got him something of what he was looking for: a regiment that became a home for the uprooted, the experience of male closeness through camaraderie at the front that accommodated his latent homosexuality, the common Intoxicating acting out of sadistic violence. But Hitler's emphasis on his enthusiasm for the war serves not least to deny what the war did to him. "

- Gerhard Vinnai

The eminent Hitler biographer Ian Kershaw praised "Vinnai's emphasis on the importance of the traumatic experiences of the First World War for Hitler's psychology, especially for the development of his will to destroy and, central to this, his now pathological, essentially genocidal, anti-Semitism" as "that." Best thing I've read on this subject. "

Publications (selection)

  • The pitfalls of private property. The influence on the psyche and necessary alternatives . VSA-Verlag, Hamburg 2017, ISBN 978-3-89965-787-6
  • Desired worlds and victim relationships - On the analytical social psychology of western culture . Westfälisches Dampfboot Verlag, Münster 2011.
  • Football as an ideology . Europäische Verlagsanstalt, Frankfurt am Main 1970 (online publication with a new foreword 2006).
  • Sporting behavior patterns and capitalist rationality . Dissertation, University of Hanover 1972.
  • Working Class Social Psychology. Destruction of identity in the educational process . Rowohlt, Reinbek near Hamburg 1973.
  • The misery of manhood. Heterosexuality, homosexuality and economic structure . Rowohlt, Reinbek near Hamburg 1977.
  • The expulsion of criticism from science. Psychology in university operations . Campus Verlag, Frankfurt am Main / New York 1993.
  • Jesus and Oedipus . Fischer-Taschenbuch-Verlag, Frankfurt am Main 1999.
  • Hitler - failure and extermination. On the genesis of the fascist perpetrator . Psychosozial-Verlag, Giessen 2004, ISBN 3-89806-341-0 .

literature

  • Uwe Timm : Sport in class society . In: Kürbiskern 1971, p. 608 ff.
  • Kerstin Kirsch: Contemporary sports philosophy as “critical sports theory” of the “new left”. Approaches to a “critique of critique” . Frankfurt am Main [u. a.] 1986.

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Kurt Salamun : On the neo-Marxist ideologization of sport . In: Kurt Salamun: Ideology and Enlightenment. Weltanschauung theory and politics . Vienna 1988, p. 116ff.
  2. ↑ Adorno wrote: Modern sport “seeks to give the body back some of the functions that the machine has taken away from it. But he tries to train people to operate the machine all the more relentlessly. It tends to resemble the body itself to the machine. That is why it belongs in the realm of bondage, wherever it is organized. ” Theodor W. Adorno : Prisms. Cultural Criticism and Society . Munich 1963, p. 80.
  3. ^ Gerhard Vinnai: Football as an ideology . Frankfurt am Main 1970, p. 35. On the criticism of Vinnai's thesis, cf. z. B. Christoph Bausenwein: The secret of football. On the trail of a phenomenon . Göttingen 1995, p. 343 f. When comparing football and assembly line work, Vinnai overlooks the essentials: “Industrial work becomes boring through the repetition of similar, standardized activities, whereas football becomes entertaining precisely because its smooth functioning is permanently questioned; In addition, skills such as intuition and playfulness are required from the players, which would be completely lacking in the rationalist factory. "
  4. ^ A b Gerhard Vinnai: Own goals - On the ideological function of football . In: Psychosozial 30, 2007, issue 110 ( PDF , 124 kB).
  5. ^ Gerhard Vinnai: The inside of the disaster policy. On the social psychology of the atomic threat . In: Heiner Boehncke / Rainer Stollmann / Gerhard Vinnai: Weltunterzüge . Rowohlt, Reinbek bei Hamburg 1984, ISBN 3-499-17691-2 , pp. 129–192, here p. 182. Cf. also Gerhard Vinnai: Jesus and Ödipus. On the psychoanalysis of religion (PDF; 1.5 MB). Frankfurt am Main 1999; Gerhard Vinnai: The sea turns red from the blood of Christ's enemies. Does Christianity Favor Violence? About a supposed love religion . In: Frankfurter Rundschau , April 1, 2000. Vinnai's criticism of Christianity is received with approval by Vera Zingsem , among others .
  6. ^ Gerhard Vinnai: Hitler - failure and extermination. On the genesis of the fascist perpetrator . Psychosozialverlag, Giessen 2004.
  7. ^ A b c Gerhard Vinnai: War trauma and fascism - on the genesis of Hitler's anti-Semitism of destruction . In: Psychosozial 29, 2006, Issue 105, pp. 125-134 ( PDF , 101 kB).
  8. ↑ Cf. the Kershaw quote on Vinnai's homepage for the book Hitler - Scheitern und Vernichtungwut. On the genesis of the fascist perpetrator .
personal data
SURNAME Vinnai, Gerhard
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German social psychologist
DATE OF BIRTH 1940
PLACE OF BIRTH Stuttgart