Hilda Weiss

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Hilda Weiss , née Hilde Weiss (born August 29, 1900 in Berlin ; † May 29, 1981 in Brooklyn , New York ) was a German-American sociologist and socialist.

life and work

Hilda [up to US emigration: Hilde] Weiss grew up as the daughter of a secularized Jewish family in Berlin. Her wealthy father with a doctorate did not pursue any gainful employment, but followed his literary inclinations. She attended the Royal Augusta School in Berlin, where she graduated from high school in October 1919. Until 1927 she studied in Berlin , Jena and Frankfurt am Main . During this time she also worked for the Carl Zeiss company in Jena and became an active union member in the German Metalworkers' Association . In 1927 she received her doctorate from the University of Frankfurt am Main with the dissertation Abbe and Ford. Plans for the establishment of social enterprises .

Hilda Weiss was a member of the Communist Party (1925-1932) and belonged to the first generation of doctoral students at the Institute for Social Research , who were still doing their doctorate under the auspices of the Austro-Marxist Carl Grünberg . First she worked as a freelance research assistant, then from 1930 to 1933 as a research assistant at the Institute for Social Research. She not only contributed with a study to the large institute project Authority and Family , but also largely edited the Enquête planned by Erich Fromm on workers and employees, which started with 3300 questionnaires on the "Eve of the Third Reich".

Via Paris, where she initially worked for the branch office of the institute and had written a second, explicitly sociological doctoral thesis at the Sorbonne under the direction of the French sociologist Célestin Bouglé , she emigrated to New York in April 1939. During her second doctoral thesis, she discovered a questionnaire written by Karl Marx , which she printed in 1936 in the Zeitschrift für Sozialforschung with interpretation and commentary. After she had made her way through various teaching activities at so-called "Black Colleges" in the southern states during the first years of emigration in the USA, she received a position as an instructor for sociology at Brooklyn College at the end of 1945, and in 1963 she advanced to assistant professor, a position which she kept until her retirement in 1970. She had become an American citizen in early 1945.

Hilda Weiss married twice: in 1935 Louis Rigaudias, a “very active representative of Trotskyism in France”, and in 1950 the engineer Joseph Parker.

Fonts (selection)

  • Rationalization and the working class. To rationalize German industry . Führer-Verlag, Berlin 1926
  • Abbe and Ford. Capitalist Utopias . Prager, Berlin 1927
  • Les Enquêtes Ouvrières en France. Entre 1830 et 1848 . Alcan, Paris 1935
  • The "Enquêtes Ouvrières" by Karl Marx . In: Journal for Social Research . 5th vol. (1936), pp. 76-98. Reprinted in Friedrich Furstenberg (ed.): Industrial Sociology I . Luchterhand, Neuwied 1959, pp. 127–147
  • Materials on the relationship between the economy and the family (report on a manuscript of 109 pages) . In: Studies on Authority and Family. Research reports from the Institute for Social Research . Alkan, Paris 1937, pp. 579-581
  • Human Relations in Industry. From Ernst Abbe to Karl Mannheim . In: The American Journal of Economics and Sociology . 8th vol. (1949), pp. 287-297
  • Industrial Relations. Manipulative or Democratic? In: The American Journal of Economics and Sociology . 18. Vol. (1958), pp. 25-33

literature

  • Detlef Garz (Ed.): Hilda Weiss - sociologist, socialist, emigrant. Her autobiography from 1940 . Dr. Kovac, Hamburg 2006

Individual evidence

  1. Detlef Garz (ed.): Hilda Weiss - sociologist, socialist, emigrant. Her autobiography from 1940 . Dr. Kovac, Hamburg 2006, p. 97.
  2. Detlef Garz (ed.): Hilda Weiss - sociologist, socialist, emigrant. Her autobiography from 1940 . Dr. Kovac, Hamburg 2006, p. 93.
  3. Detlef Garz (ed.): Hilda Weiss - sociologist, socialist, emigrant. Her autobiography from 1940 . Dr. Kovac, Hamburg 2006, pp. 114 and 124.
  4. Detlef Garz (ed.): Hilda Weiss - sociologist, socialist, emigrant. Her autobiography from 1940 . Dr. Kovac, Hamburg 2006, p. 107.
  5. Wolfgang Bonß : Critical Theory and Empirical Social Research. Notes on a case study . In: Erich Fromm: Workers and employees on the eve of the Third Reich. A social psychological investigation . Edited and edited by Wolfgang Bonß. dtv, Munich 1983, pp. 7-46, here p. 7.
  6. Hilda Weiss: The "Enquêtes Ouvrières" by Karl Marx . In: Journal for Social Research . 5th vol. (1936), pp. 76-97.
  7. Detlef Garz (ed.): Hilda Weiss - sociologist, socialist, emigrant. Her autobiography from 1940 . Dr. Kovac, Hamburg 2006, pp. 114 and 124.