Hans Wilhelm Juergens

Hans Wilhelm Juergens (1973)

Hans Wilhelm Jürgens (born June 29, 1932 in Wolfenbüttel ) is a German anthropologist . He was the first director of the Federal Institute for Population Research in Wiesbaden and professor at the Anthropological Institute of the Christian Albrechts University in Kiel .

Life

Jürgens received his doctorate in 1957 from the Faculty of Philosophy and in 1959 from the Faculty of Agriculture of the University of Kiel , where he completed his habilitation in 1960 with the text anti-sociality as a biological and socio-biological problem . Jürgens was a student of Johann Schaeuble and Gerhard Mackenroth .

In 1974 he was appointed director of the Federal Institute for Population Research (BiB) by the then Interior Minister Hans-Dietrich Genscher and held this position until 1979. Then he returned to Kiel and taught there until his retirement in 1997 as a professor at the University's Anthropological Institute.

For the second criminal case against two former employees of the Racial Hygiene Research Center (RHF) founded in 1936 , namely Adolf Würth and Sophie Ehrhardt , which was discontinued in 1986 , Jürgens acted as an exonerating expert.

Jürgens described demographic change , building on models by Frank W. Notestein and Gerhard Mackenroth, as a model in four phases. According to his model, starting from a state of equilibrium with high birth and death rates (first phase), initially only the death rate decreases significantly (second phase), then the death rate drops only slightly and birth control begins (third phase) and finally becomes a new state of equilibrium has been reached with low birth and death rates.

In the study Sexual Proportion and Marriage Market , together with the demographer Katharina Pohl, he found a surplus of men in Germany and predicted that hundreds of thousands of men had no chance of getting married.

reception

Jürgens is accused of standing in the tradition of National Socialism. On the other hand, he has an impeccable reputation for decades at his alma mater.

The writing of Jürgens, a representative of German population science, is quoted as indicative of the question of the continuity of the BiB with the time of National Socialism.

Hans Wilhelm Jürgens, Rainer Knußmann and Hubert Walter, who worked together with Peter Emil Becker on the Handbook of Human Genetics , are described as "integrated into the scientific continuity of their older mentors from the Third Reich". Jürgens is also referred to as a " eugenic anthropologist".

Hansjörg Gutberger, author and researcher at the Institute for Economic and Social History at the University of Vienna, notes distancing that Jürgens " one (according to his own idea) to 'social types' and the identification of 'antisocial' oriented sociology have operated within the demography will ”( emphasis in the original ). Jürgens was one of those anthropologists who constructed differentiations into “biological social types”, and this primarily between different social milieus within their own society.

Fonts (selection)

• About the relationships between the number of children, social class and school performance in elementary school students in the city of Kiel . Kiel 1957 ( dissertation , Philosophical Faculty)
• A contribution to the question of geographical and social mobility when people emigrate from the country: Dargest. to craft families in the city of Kiel . Kiel 1959 (dissertation, Faculty of Agriculture)
• Asociality as a biological and socio-biological problem . Enke, Stuttgart 1961 (also habilitation thesis, 1960)
• Contributions to human typology . Enke, Stuttgart 1965 (with Christian Vogel)
• Number of children, desire and reality . Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt, Stuttgart 1975 (with Katharina Pohl)
• The influence of the parental home on the educational path of children: results of a longitudinal study . Kohlhammer, Stuttgart / Berlin / Cologne / Mainz 1977 (with Wolfgang Lengsfeld)

Web links

• Literature by and about Hans Wilhelm Jürgens in the catalog of the German National Library

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Dangerous questions. The brown shadows of her institute fell on the population researcher Charlotte Höhn. Does she think racially? In: Der Spiegel . No. 38 , 1994 ( online ).
2. ↑ Anthropology and Völkerkunde (Christian-Albrechts-Universität zu Kiel) Professorship / s deleted - Systematics: Ethnology. (No longer available online.) Formerly in the original ; Retrieved February 6, 2011 .  ( Page no longer available , search in web archives )  Info: The link was automatically marked as defective. Please check the link according to the instructions and then remove this notice.    
3. ^ Christiane Kuller: Family policy in the federal welfare state. The formation of a political field 1949–1975 . Institute for Contemporary History, Oldenbourg, 2004, ISBN 3-486-56825-6 , p. 106
4. ↑ Baby Bear: State in the Bedroom. Population policy is intended to drive up the West German birth rate again . In: Der Spiegel . No. 13 , 1977 ( online ).
5. ↑ ^{a b} Hansjörg Gutberger: population, inequality, read . VS Verlag für Sozialwissenschaften, 2006, ISBN 978-3-531-14925-7 , p. 104
6. ↑ Joachim S. Hohmann : Robert Ritter and the heirs of criminal biology. "Gypsy Research" in National Socialism . Frankfurt a. M. 1991. pp. 420f.
7. ^ Hans Wilhelm Jürgens: Population dynamics in pre-industrial countries . In: Hans-Bernd Schäfer: Population dynamics and basic needs in developing countries , writings of the Verein für Socialpolitik, Volume 241, Berlin (1995). Quoted from: Karina Löscher, Christina Lamberg: Births before demographic transition. Backwardness in historical comparison: Europe in the 19th century and developing countries after 1950. (PDF) Retrieved on February 7, 2011 (seminar paper). P. 6 f. (PDF) 
8. ↑ The country needs new women. In: Focus Magazin No. 15 (1993). April 10, 1993, accessed February 6, 2011 . 
9. ↑ Ludger Weß : Jürgens, a representative of German population science . In: Heidrun Kaupen-Haas (Ed.): The grip on the population. Topicality and continuity of Nazi population policy . Greno Verlag, Nördlingen, pp. 121-145. Quoted by Florence Vienne: The “solution of the population question” in National Socialism, pp. 151–164. In: Rainer Mackensen: Population theory and population policy in the “Third Reich” . German Society for Demography and Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research, Leske and Budrich, 2004, ISBN 3-8100-3861-X , footnote 1 on p. 151
10. ↑ ^{a b} Benoît Massin: Anthropology and human genetics under National Socialism or: How do German scientists write their own scientific history? In: Heidrun Kaupen-Haas, Christian Saller: Scientific racism. Analysis of continuity in human and natural sciences . Campus, 1999, ISBN 3-593-36228-7 , pp. 12-64, p. 45
11. ↑ Gert Dressel: Historical Anthropology: An Introduction . bohlau, Vienna 1996, ISBN 3-205-98556-7 , p. 32