Karl Heinz Pfeffer

This article is about the sociologist Karl Heinz Pfeffer. For the geographer, see Karl-Heinz Pfeffer .

Karl Heinz Pfeffer (born December 28, 1906 in Frankfurt am Main ; † September 13, 1971 in Dortmund ) was a German sociologist from the circle of Hans Freyer and an avowed National Socialist during the Third Reich .

Life

Until the end of the war in 1945

The teacher's son Karl Heinz Pfeffer studied English with Wilhelm Dibelius , history and political science at various German universities and at Stanford University , with André Siegfried at the Sorbonne in Paris and at the London School of Economics . During his studies he became a member of the German University Guild Skuld in Königsberg in 1926 . In 1930 he was promoted to Dr. phil. PhD. From 1932 to 1933 he traveled to Australia as a Rockefeller Foundation scholarship holder and married the English teacher Margaret Wainman Kirby , with whom he had four sons, including the Bonn animal physiologist Ernst Pfeffer , the journalist Robert Pfeffer and the ethnologist Georg Pfeffer . In 1934 he completed his habilitation in Leipzig as a student of Hans Freyer with the book Die Bürgerliche Gesellschaft in Australien for the subject sociology . The script uses the terminology of Hegel's basic lines of philosophy of law . Pfeffers interpretation is that of Hans Freyer, who passed himself off as a "New Hegelian".

In Leipzig he was an assistant and then a lecturer in sociology (from 1934) to the circle around Hans Freyer ( Leipzig School ). In 1936 he lost his left eye and a large part of his right eye in a serious sports accident. He was released from the hospital after ten months of complete immobility. From 1937 he was a member of the NSDAP and the SA . Until 1940/41 he was a lecturer at the Ergonomics Institute of the German Labor Front. In 1940 he was appointed as a. o. Professor of Folklore and Regional Studies in Great Britain appointed to the Faculty of Foreign Studies at the University of Berlin . In 1941 he became a member of the expert advisory board of the Reich Institute for the History of the New Germany . He was involved in the "war effort of the humanities" ; already in the 1930s Pfeffer worked for the Reichsarbeitsgemeinschaft für Raumforschung and the Reichsnährstand . From 1943, Pfeffer was Franz Six's successor until it was dissolved in 1945, as Dean of the Faculty of Foreign Studies.

Pfeffer was a self-confessed National Socialist and represented a "German school of sociology".

post war period

In January 1946, Pfeffer was temporarily arrested at his parents' residence in Gilserberg near Kassel on the initiative of the US State Department Propaganda Investigation Team, which was looking for Franz Six.

From 1946, Pfeffer was initially a professor of recycling and worked in institutes for regional planning. He was editor of the journal for geopolitics and from 1952 worked at the World Economic Archive in Hamburg , for which he published a multi-volume "country dictionary" in the following years. In 1956 he published a controversial shorthand dictionary of politics , which Ernst Fraenkel and Karl Dietrich Bracher accused of trivializing or even justifying the National Socialist process. In 1959 he was appointed to the chair of sociology and head of the Social Sciences Research Center at the University of the Panjab in Lahore (Pakistan).

From 1953 Pfeffer was a full member of the Academy for Spatial Research and Regional Planning (ARL). There he headed the research committee “European spatial relations and regional planning abroad” and was a member of the research committee “Fundamental issues of spatial research and regional development”. Pfeffer was a member of the first scientific advisory board of the Institute for Spatial Research .

In 1962, at the instigation of Helmut Schelsky (who is also part of the Leipzig School ), Pfeffer became professor for “Sociology of the Developing Countries ” at the Westphalian Wilhelms University in Münster and head of department at the Social Research Center at the University of Münster in Dortmund. Before he took office, he requested a general student assembly and explained to it that and why he was a devout Nazi and why he was no longer - an unheard-of occurrence at a university in the Federal Republic of Germany at the time.

Since 1958 Pfeffer was one of the first sociologists in Germany who dedicated their research exclusively to societies in Africa (especially Ghana ), Asia (especially Pakistan) and Latin America (especially Costa Rica ). For long-term empirical research and visiting professorships (including Makerere University Uganda; University of the Philippines, Quezon City) he visited these countries as well as the USA, where he was visiting professorships in Cornell and Greensboro NC. In addition, for many years he was free of charge for “ Bread for the World ” and in the World Council of Churches, where he supported liberation theology . Even during his time as a National Socialist, he had not given up Christian ties or compromised by joining the church that was loyal to the regime.

In the first years of his professorship in Münster, Pfeffer awarded three full positions for scientific staff to sociologists from the “developing countries”, a very unusual process at the time. In the 1960s, long before the corresponding measures, which were later generally widespread, he preferred to employ domestic and foreign women in the scientific community with the same qualifications. In teaching and administration, Pfeffer was noticed since the 1930s for his collegial or "anti-authoritarian" manner in dealing with subordinates and students.

Epochs of an academic career

In principle, Pfeffer's academic career can be divided into the following epochs.

1. Until his habilitation, the societies of the British Commonwealth are the focus of his research, publications and long-term study visits.
2. At the age of 28, he became a self-confessed National Socialist in 1935 with correspondingly clear verbal and written statements.
3. Between 1945 and 1958 his main work is the multi-volume “Land Lexicon”, while his main interest is the process of decolonization. His rare remarks about Germany fluctuate between resignation and cynicism.
4. With the independence of Ghana begins his exclusive commitment to the "developing countries" in teaching and research. The topics of his empirical studies in Africa, Asia and Latin America as well as his oral and written statements convey clearly egalitarian, anti-racist attitudes, particularly in the case of controversies in Germany.

Pfeffer's work is of general historical interest because it raises the question of whether and in what way a staunch National Socialist can fundamentally change his attitude and his scientific way of working.

While giving a lecture at the Evangelical Academy in Iserlohn, Pfeffer suffered a heart attack in 1971, from which he died two weeks later.

Works (selection)

• Judaism in Politics. In: Handbuch der Judenfrage. 1935. (= anti-Semitic publication)
• Civil society in Australia. Junker and Dünnhaupt, Berlin 1936.
• The German School of Sociology. Quelle & Meyer, Leipzig 1939.
• The farmer. Schäfer, Leipzig 1939.
• Concept and essence of the plutocracy. Junker & Dünnhaupt , Berlin 1940.
• England, supremacy of the bourgeois world. German house library, Hamburg 1940
• England - a plutocracy series: Speaker information, 32nd edition: AWI of the DAF . DAF publishing house, Berlin 1941
• The English war - also a Jewish war. 1943.
• The social systems of the world. In: Arnold Gehlen , Helmut Schelsky (Ed.): Sociology. 1955.
• Concise dictionary of politics. Darmstadt 1956.
• Ghana. K. Schroeder, Bonn 1958
• The new states and Europe's responsibility. In: Christian Berg (Ed.): Ecumenical Diakonie. Lettner-Verlag, Berlin 1959
• The new face of Africa. 1962.
• The original European attitude towards other cultures and the change in this attitude in connection with the dissolution of the old colonial empires and aid for the developing countries. In: Erik Boettcher (ed.): Development theory and development policy. Gerhard Mackenroth in memory of his friends and students. JCB Mohr (Paul Siebeck), Tübingen 1964, pp. 45-66.
• Students and interns from Asia. Nomos Verlagsgesellschaft, Baden-Baden 1965.
• World in transition. Gütersloher publishing house G. Mohn, Bielefeld 1966.
• with Muneer Ahmad : The foreign colony in Lahore - Pakistan. German Orient Institute, Hamburg 1966
• Sierra Leone. 2nd Edition. Schroeder, Bonn 1967
• Pakistan. Model of a developing country. Leske, Opladen 1967.
• The developing countries from a sociological point of view. Hoffmann & Campe, Hamburg 1967.
• Costa Rica. Dortmund, 1968.
• The distant neighbor. The economic and social development of poor countries as an ethical task. In: Trutz Rendtorff , Arthur Rich (Hrsg.): Humane Gesellschaft. Contributions to their design. Zwingli-Verlag, Zurich 1970, pp. 307-318.
• Eating habits . In: Hans-Diedrich Cremer , Dieter Hötzel (Hrsg.): Applied nutrition. Georg Thieme, Stuttgart 1974, pp. 1-49.

literature

• The scientific and political career of Dr. phil. habil. Karl Heinz Pfeffer. Professor of Sociology in Developing Countries at the University of Münster. A documentation . Committee to Investigate the Conditions at West German Universities at the Karl Marx University in Leipzig, Leipzig 1964.
• Wilhelm Bleek : History of Political Science in Germany. CH Beck, Munich 2001, ISBN 3-406-47173-0 .
• Ernst Klee : The dictionary of persons on the Third Reich. 2nd Edition. Fischer, Frankfurt am Main 2007, ISBN 978-3-596-16048-8 .
• Pfeffer, Karl Heinz. In: W. Bernsdorf , H. Knospe: Internationales Soziologenlexikon. Volume 2, 2nd edition. 1984, p. 659.

Web links

• Literature by and about Karl Heinz Pfeffer in the catalog of the German National Library
• Honest repentance? My Nazi grandfather and his repentance (SWR 2)

Remarks

1. ↑ Helmut Kellershohn: In "Service to the National Socialist Revolution". The German Guild and its relationship to National Socialism . In: Yearbook of the Archives of the German Youth Movement . tape 19 (1999-2004) . Wochenschau Verlag, 2004, ISSN  0587-5277 .
2. ↑ Including Karl Heinz Pfeffer: Migration from the countryside close to the city using the example of the Leipzig administration . In: Raumforschung und Raumordnung, 3rd year, 1939, pp. 18–28; Ders .: The agricultural worker question in the farming village . In: Soziale Praxis, Volume 46, 1937, Col. 65–72; Ders .: Landsmannschaftliche ties in the new community structure of industrial workers . In: Yearbook of the Ergonomic Institute 1939, Volume 1, pp. 227-252; Ders .: The necessity of total popular research . In: German Archive for State and Folk Research, 5th year, 1941, pp. 407–420.
3. ^ Carsten Klingemann: Sociology in the Third Reich . Nomos Verlagsgesellschaft, Baden-Baden 1996, ISBN 3-7890-4298-6 , p. 204-209 .
4. ↑ Lutz Hachmeister : The enemy researcher. The career of SS leader Franz Alfred Six. Munich 1998, p. 277.
5. ↑ His writings Concept and Essence of Plutocracy (Junker & Dünnhaupt, Berlin 1940), England, Vormacht der bürgerliche Welt (Deutsche Hausbücherei, Hamburg 1941) and The Anglo-Saxon New World and Europe (Junker & Dünnhaupt, Berlin 1941) as well as those edited by him Writings The social requirements of the English claim in Europe (Kohlhammer, Stuttgart 1941) and The British Empire and United States of America (together with Friedrich Schönemann ; Junker & Dünnhaupt, Berlin 1943) were placed on the list of literature to be segregated in the Soviet occupation zone . [1] , [2] , [3] . This list was later followed by Pfeffer's writings Der Bauer (Schäfer, Leipzig 1939) and The German School of Sociology (Quelle & Meyer, Leipzig 1939) in the German Democratic Republic . [4] .
6. ^ ARL (ed.): 50 years of ARL in facts . Hanover 1996, p. 223.