Gunnar Winkler

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Gunnar Winkler (born March 21, 1931 in Hamburg ; † July 17, 2019 ) was a German social scientist and university professor. From 1974 to 1990 he was Chairman of the Scientific Council for Social Policy and Demography of the German Democratic Republic (GDR) and from 2002 to 2014 President of the Federal Association of People's Solidarity .

Life

Winkler, the son of a roofer and an employee, grew up in Leipzig and attended elementary school . In 1946 he joined the Communist Party of Germany (KPD) and became a member of the Socialist Unity Party of Germany (SED) as a result of the compulsory unification of the SPD and KPD . From 1948 to 1950 he completed an apprenticeship as a miner in uranium mining at the Soviet joint stock company Wismut , where he was later the full-time secretary of the Free German Youth (FDJ) basic organization. From 1952 to 1956 he studied economics at the universities of Leipzig and Halle .

From 1956 to 1967 Winkler was a research assistant , later a lecturer in business economics at the trade union college "Fritz Heckert" in Bernau and received his doctorate in 1967 at the Berlin School of Economics . In 1970 he became a full professor of socialist business administration at the trade union college and head of the labor and social policy section . In 1973 he received his doctorate in science .

In 1977 Winkler switched to the Central Institute for Philosophy of the Academy of Sciences of the GDR (AdW) as a research assistant, and in 1978 he became director of the newly founded Institute for Sociology and Social Policy (ISS) of the AdW in Berlin . From 1974 to 1990 Winkler was chairman of the Scientific Council for Social Policy and Demography of the GDR and responsible for nationwide research in these areas. From 1984 to 1990 he was a member of the Scientific Council on Fundamental Issues of the Leading Role of the Working Class and its Marxist-Leninist Party. He was the founder and editor of the yearbook for sociology and social policy published from 1981 to 1989 . From 1990 until the institute was closed in 1991, Winkler was managing director of the ISS.

The GDR State Security found in 1985 that Winkler was a "consistently partisan scientist" when they checked his status as a travel cadre .

During the turning point and the peaceful revolution , he was a member of the Scientific Council for Fundamental Questions in Research and Development at the Council of Ministers of the last and only freely elected government in the GDR.

In 1992, Winkler co-founded the Social Science Research Center Berlin-Brandenburg (SFZ) eV and was its managing director from 1993 to 2004. From 1990 to 2004 he was the editor of the Umbruch series and the quarterly social report . Winkler dealt with the social situation in the new federal states and selected social groups. Since 2000 Winkler was a member of the Leibniz Society of Sciences in Berlin and from 2002 to 2014 President of the Federal Association of People's Solidarity, since 2014 Honorary President.

Winkler was married and has four daughters. He lived in Bernau near Berlin. He passed away in 2019 at the age of 88.

Criticism of publications after 1990

After 1990, various academics, politicians and journalists repeatedly accused Winkler of glorifying the GDR, of partiality, of clashes with the former SED and of dubious working methods. In social science studies, Winkler often paints an exaggeratedly negative mood among the inhabitants of the five new federal states. The successor party to the SED (today Die Linke ) benefits from this . Winkler repeatedly draws on studies from the Social Science Research Center in Berlin-Brandenburg, which he co-founded. Several of these studies would not correspond to scientific principles.

The social scientist Tobias Dürr considers the Social Report 2006 to be a “caricature of serious empirical social research”, so the Allensbach Institute for Demoscopy came to completely different results than Winkler in its survey of December 2006.

In 2000, the sociologist Wolfgang Zapf described the social reports. On the other hand, data and facts on the social situation in the new federal states of the SFZ as "the most important East German contribution to social reporting".

Publications

  • Dictionary of Marxist-Leninist Sociology (co-author), Dietz Verlag Berlin, 1977
  • Theory and Practice of Social Policy in the GDR, Akademie-Verlag, Berlin 1979
  • Lexicon of Social Policy (ed.), Akademie-Verlag, Berlin 1987
  • History of social policy in the GDR (ed.), Akademie-Verlag, Berlin 1989
  • The region of the new old. Facts and positions on the social situation of older citizens in the new federal states 1990 to 2005, Trafo Verlag, Berlin 2006
  • The German Association 1989 to 2015 - Positions of the Citizens, Helle Panke, Berlin 2015
  • Peaceful Revolution and German Unification 1989 to 2017, Trafo Verlag, Berlin 2018
    Volume I: The previous years - Studies on the social situation in the GDR 1985 to 1989 - Secret until the end of the GDR and the beginning of the peaceful revolution of 1989
    Volume II: Sustainable stabilization of unequal living conditions between East and West - summary evaluation of the 25 waves of the representative survey "Living in the new federal states"

literature

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ https://trauer.moz.de/todesbeispiel/gunnar-winkler
  2. ↑ a b Armin Fuhrer : “Consistently Partial”. , In: Focus , No. 34/2007, Hamburg August 20, 2007.
  3. ↑ http://www.volkssolidaritaet.de/bundesverband/bundesverband-ev/der-bundesvorstand/
  4. ^ A critical, constructive warning , In: Neues Deutschland, March 21, 2011.
  5. ↑ Claus Püschel: People's solidarity mourns Prof. Dr. Gunnar Winkler. Volkssolidarität Landesverband Sachsen, July 18, 2019, accessed on July 20, 2019 .
  6. ↑ Tobias Dürr: On the benefit of confidence. In: Perspektive 21, Issue 33, February 2007, p. 6
  7. ↑ Wolfgang Zapf: How can one account for German unification? In: Oskar Niedermayer, Bettina Westle (ed.): Democracy and Participation . Westdeutscher Verlag, ISBN 978-3-531-13432-1 , pp. 161 .
personal data
SURNAME Winkler, Gunnar
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German social scientist
DATE OF BIRTH March 21, 1931
PLACE OF BIRTH Hamburg
DATE OF DEATH 17th July 2019