Harald Welzer

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Harald Welzer (2015)

Harald Welzer (born July 27, 1958 in Bissendorf near Hanover ) is a German sociologist and social psychologist . Today he works as a publicist.

Life

As speaker at the See-Conference in the slaughterhouse Wiesbaden , 2015

education

Welzer studied sociology, political science and literature at the University of Hanover , where he received his doctorate in sociology in 1988. He completed his habilitation in social psychology in 1993 and sociology in 2001.

Employment

From 1988 to 1993, Welzer was a research assistant in the history, philosophy and social sciences department at the University of Hanover. He then worked there until 1999 as a lecturer in social psychology.

Welzer was director of the Center for Interdisciplinary Memory Research (CMR) and head of various sub-projects of the research focus on Climate Culture at the Institute for Cultural Studies in Essen . From 2001 to 2012 he was Professor of Social Psychology at the private University of Witten / Herdecke .

Harald Welzer is co-founder and director of the non-profit foundation Futurzwei. Sustainability Foundation , which has set itself the task of showing and promoting alternative lifestyles and economic forms and since July 2012 honorary professor for transformation design at the European University of Flensburg , where he heads the Norbert Elias Center for Transformation Design & Research . Welzer is also an Affiliated Member of Faculty at the Marial Center at Emory University (Atlanta / USA), he teaches at the University of St. Gallen and is a member of numerous scientific advisory boards and academies. The focus of his research and teaching is memory, group violence and cultural studies climate impact research.

Welzer lives in Berlin.

Communication theory

Welzer's main scientific work, which is based on his habilitation thesis, was published in 2002 under the title Das kommunikative Gedächtnis . Referring to neurobiological research, Welzer explains that human memory is based on an active mental process that functions largely unconsciously and "implicitly". Human memory has a social function: the interplay of individuality and community is organized in different memory functions. Popular metaphors that compare memory as a store of knowledge to a computer hard drive are misleading. Memory images are not stored as finished data sets at a specific point in the brain. If the brain wants to activate memory, it has to reconstruct elements from different areas. Each time a memory is called up, new networks are formed associatively. The memory fragments of media experiences are basically treated in the same way as the fragments of “lived” memories. In the reconstruction of memory, the sources are mixed up.

The autobiographical memory is also essentially communicative; it is created through “interaction situations”, as Welzer puts it. Of course, people are not aware of “how to become me”. Unconscious memories emerge in “gut feelings”, spontaneous reactions, and inexplicable biases. My brain “knows” significantly more about emotions and the signals of non-verbal communication than it is aware of through semantic and episodic memory. The conscious and unconscious elements of memory are communicative and guide our perception and action in the context of the culture of the community. From the I and we identity in the sense of an “autobiographical memory”, a synchronization of the individual in relation to his or her social environment develops.

publicist

Welzer during a discussion (2015)

In the u. a. The book Opa was no Nazi published by him, Welzer deals with the time of National Socialism from a social-psychological point of view by examining the behavior of people in everyday life during National Socialism as well as forms of family memory tradition. Little was heard from the families about perpetration or responsibility. Mitigations and alleged ignorance, on the other hand, appeared very often. According to Welzer, family members involved are even portrayed as victims or heroes .

In the book perpetrator. Like normal people mass murderers, Welzer deepens the results of Christopher Browning on the motivation of Nazi criminals in the Einsatzgruppen , who often had completely normal biographies, such as Franz Stangl or Werner Best . They developed a mentality or internal rationality in which they were morally right, even when they shot children. The killing is seen as work. The results will be extended to Vietnam , Rwanda and Yugoslavia .

In the book Climate Wars. What is killed for in the 21st century , Welzer describes climate change as an underestimated threat to human coexistence. It is seen as a natural disaster , but it is the social effects that turn climate change into a catastrophe. In the course of these developments, violence is increasingly seen again as a problem-solving strategy. The collapse of the political and social order in large parts of the world will lead to a "permanent war ". This can only be averted if the affluent populations of the industrialized countries change their previous consumption style. By Andreas Kilb was argued in a review that the comparisons with the genocides of the 20th century were "speculative" and fell short of a "historical analysis". Christiane Grefe, on the other hand, certified Welzer with a “terrifyingly plausible analysis”, but reproached him for not looking at productive connections between culture and technology.

Welzer pleads in thinking for yourself. A guide to resisting a reductive lifestyle as opposed to - not only prevalent in the western world - everything . It's not about growth, efficiency and consumption, but about happiness and future viability. However, neither luck nor suitability for the future essentially depends on ownership. Welzer criticizes that the lifestyle currently practiced in our society consumes its own requirements through hypertrophic growth. Welzer presents various successful forms of self-thinking and self-acting, which are oriented towards the common good instead of individual profit and encourages you to use your own room for maneuver.

Welzer is editor of taz.FUTURZWEI , a quarterly magazine for politics and the future.

Fonts

Lectures and interviews (selection)

theatre

Web links

Commons : Harald Welzer  - Collection of images, videos and audio files
Wikiquote: Harald Welzer  - Quotes

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Homepage of FUTURZWEI. Sustainability Foundation .
  2. ↑ Press release University of Flensburg ( Memento from July 16, 2011 in the Internet Archive )
  3. ↑ Archive link ( Memento from August 24, 2016 in the Internet Archive )
  4. ↑ Europe: Home, Longing, Neighborhoods. Retrieved June 12, 2020 .
  5. ↑ Welzer, Das kommunikative Gedächtnis. 2002, p. 111
  6. ↑ Welzer, Das kommunikative Gedächtnis. 2002, p. 24
  7. ↑ Welzer, Das kommunikative Gedächtnis. 2002, p. 119
  8. ↑ Isabel Heinemann: H. Welzer u. a .: "Grandpa wasn't a Nazi". H-Soz-Kult , accessed on March 25, 2018 (review).
  9. ^ Review notes on perpetrators. How normal people become mass murderers at perlentaucher.de
  10. ↑ the daily newspaper : “A guilty conscience is not enough” . Interview with Jan Feddersen and Reiner Metzger, April 18, 2008
  11. ^ Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung : The Apocalypse is an unfinished puzzle . June 2, 2008
  12. ↑ Die Zeit : Brand New: The Climate! July 30, 2008
  13. ↑ Review Notes on Climate Wars. What is killed for in the 21st century at perlentaucher.de
  14. ↑ Review Notes on Thinking for Yourself. A guide to resistance at perlentaucher.de
  15. ↑ Preview of FUTURZWEI 6. www.taz.de, September 3, 2018, accessed on December 28, 2018 .
  16. ↑ We will have taken responsibility , review by Martin Chechne in Deutschlandradio Kultur on January 17, 2015, accessed January 17, 2015
personal data
SURNAME Welzer, Harald
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German social psychologist and sociologist
DATE OF BIRTH July 27, 1958
PLACE OF BIRTH Bissendorf (Wedemark)