Leopold von Wiese

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Leopold Max Walther von Wiese and Kaiserswaldau (born December 2, 1876 in Glatz , † January 11, 1969 in Cologne ) was a German sociologist and economist . He worked as a university lecturer and chairman of the German Society for Sociology (DGS), which was re-established in 1946 . In this function he restored it as a learned society and played a key role in the construction of the now refuted legend that there was no sociology under National Socialism .

Life

Leopold von Wiese (1969)

Leopold von Wieses parents were the Prussian captain Benno Kasper Leopold von Wiese and Kaiserswaldau (+ 20 September 1843, † 23 June 1886) and his wife Anna Helene von Rabenau (* 10 June 1855).

He received his school education at the cadet schools in Wahlstatt and Lichterfelde , where he was able to leave the cadet corps after eight years that were experienced as very unhappy. He then studied economics at the Friedrich Wilhelms University in Berlin, where he was awarded a doctorate in 1902. phil. PhD . Then he was scientific secretary of the " Institute for Common Welfare " in Frankfurt am Main . In 1905 he became a private lecturer in economics at the University of Berlin. In 1906 he was appointed professor of political science at the Royal Academy in Poznan , and in 1908 he moved to the Technical University of Hanover as professor of economics and commercial economics . In 1912, von Wiese became director of studies at the "Academy for Municipal Administration" in Düsseldorf and in 1915 professor at the Cologne University of Applied Sciences .

After the First World War , von Wiese was appointed director at the “Research Institute for Social Sciences” in Cologne in 1919 and as a full professor for economic political sciences and for sociology at the University of Cologne , which was re-established in 1919 . He held the first chair for sociology in Germany . At the "Institute for Social Research" founded on the initiative of Mayor Konrad Adenauer , he was director of the department for sociology. His Cologne quarterly for social sciences , which he published from 1921 onwards, still exist today under the title Cologne Journal for Sociology and Social Psychology .

Grave in Melaten cemetery

Until 1933 von Wiese was secretary of the German Society for Sociology (DGS). After the "shutdown" of the DGS by Hans Freyer and the Research Institute for Social Sciences by the National Socialists, he went to the USA in 1934 for a year. Willy Gierlichs took over his chair . After his return he taught economics to a closed audience.

From 1946 to 1955 he was chairman of the revived DGS. On October 1, 1949, von Wiese retired . In 1954 he became vice president of the " International Society for Sociology ".

Von Wiese was married three times, first from 1902 to the painter Johanna (Hanna) von Gersdorff. After divorcing her, he married Daisy Findlay in 1919, from whom he divorced in 1925. In the same year he married Nathalie Garetzeloff (1900–1986), who had fled Georgia . He is the father of the literary scholar Benno von Wiese and the actress and writer Ursula von Wiese (from the first marriage), von Ingeborg von Wiese (from the second marriage) and the Slavist Ossana von Wiese (from the third marriage).

His grave is in the Melaten cemetery in Cologne (lit. C).

Services

Wiese is known for his works on social studies, in which he tried to establish contemporary sociology as an independent social science , detached from history , psychology and philosophy . He distinguished four basic categories of the social: distance, process, space and structure. Distance means the spiritual and spiritual closeness or distance in the behavior of people with one another. In doing so, Wiese concentrated on the social relationships between people as “social processes” and the relevant structures as “ social structures ”. In the processes, the social distances between people change and determine their relationships in social space. The institutions and organizations formed are the social structures that have to be differentiated into masses, groups and corporations.

Together with Georg Simmel , he is considered the founder of formal sociology . His relationship theory , however, no longer has any influence in sociology.

Karl Gustav Specht , the co-founder of gerontology and medical sociology in Germany and former professor of sociology at the Faculty of Economics and Social Sciences at the University of Erlangen-Nuremberg, is one of his students .

Leopold von Wiese and National Socialism

Leopold von Wiese was Dean of the Faculty of Economics and Social Sciences at the University of Cologne until 1933, but had to resign from this position on April 11, 1933 under National Socialist pressure - as did Rector Godehard Josef Ebers and the other deans.

In 1934, von Wiese served the new rulers with his relationship theory. In the Kölner Vierteljahreshefte für Sociologie he wrote: “The more I let this turning point affect me, the more it becomes clear to me: Now, especially in Germany, the time would have come for a powerful, realistic social theory! Biology, genetics , race and political ethics cannot do it alone; a very large part, most of the questions raised by practical development, belong to sociology. ”Yet the regime had no use for its sociology.

As secretary of the DGS, von Wiese also operated a “self-alignment strategy”. At a council meeting of the DGS on August 3, 1933 in Lübeck , he advised adding to the membership of the DGS in order to facilitate the connection to the National Socialist movement. In particular, he suggested the admission of the "racial researcher" Hans FK Günther and the Nazi educational scientist Ernst Krieck to society. Jewish sociologists and those who have emigrated abroad should, on the other hand, be excluded from the DGS. Only the President of the DGS, Ferdinand Tönnies , who was still in office at the time , met this plan with clear resistance. Although 11 other council members had voted for the project, the DGS statutes were never changed accordingly.

As the first post-war chairman of the German Society for Sociology, von Wiese promoted a strategy of “collective silence”. In the first lecture of the 8th German Sociological Congress in Frankfurt in 1946 he said about the time of National Socialism:

“And yet the plague came over the people from outside, unprepared, as an insidious attack. That is a metaphysical secret that the sociologist cannot touch. "

- von Wiese, 1946

In this way, according to Manfred Lauermann's later assessment , von Wiese "brilliantly demonstrated that sociologists can simply be too stupid to think sociologically!"

In the re-established DGS, von Wiese took on, partly as a personal sponsor, the admission of specialist colleagues who had also been scientifically active in Germany during the Nazi era, including: Hans Freyer , whom von Wiese accepted without a resolution of the general meeting, Adolf Günther , Karl Valentin Müller and Wilhelm Emil Mühlmann (he vouched for these two as a personal godfather), Egon von Eickstedt and Ilse Schwidetzky . Emigrated social scientists, however, were refused full membership. On the basis of his initiative, three anthropological-sociological conferences were held by the DSG , in which mainly academics associated with National Socialism took part.

In a review of the Adorno study on the authoritarian personality for the Cologne journal for sociology and social psychology , von Wiese showed himself to be incomprehensible to the research concept and also to a latent anti-Semitism :

“In some cases, may not the presence of an abnormality in the Jews affect the non-Jewish part in an unhealthy way? In other words: should bad experiences with Jews really never influence the judgment of the interviewees? "

- von Wiese, Cologne journal for sociology and social psychology 3rd year, 1950–1951, p. 474.

In the same issue of the Cologne magazine von Wiese wrote on the subject of “Sociology and Psychoanalysis”, Sigmund Freud was a charlatan and a poet, and psychoanalysis cheeky, amateurish and unscientific, especially something for the Americans and nothing for the Germans.

"When Hitler came, the 'Jew' Freud and his Viennese clique were over."

- von Wiese, Cologne journal for sociology and social psychology 3rd year, 1950–1951, p. 460.

Awards

Fonts (selection)

  • For the foundation of social theory . Fischer, Jena 1906 (also habilitation thesis, University of Berlin 1905).
  • General sociology as a study of the relationships between people.
    • Volume 1: Relationship Theory , Duncker & Humblot, Munich 1924.
    • Part 2: Gebildelehre , Duncker & Humblot, Munich 1928.
    • Second revised edition in one volume: System of general sociology as the study of social processes and the social structures of people (relationship theory) , Duncker & Humblot, Munich / Leipzig 1933; third, unchanged edition, Duncker & Humblot, Berlin 1955; fourth, unchanged edition, Duncker & Humblot, Berlin 1966.
  • Sociology. History and main problems . W. de Gruyter & Co., Berlin 1926; appeared under this title up to the eighth edition (1931, 1947, 1950, 1955, 1960, 1964, 1967) and in the ninth edition as the history of sociology . de Gruyter, Berlin 1971.
  • Homo sum. Thoughts on a summarizing anthropology . Fischer, Jena 1940.
  • The social sciences and the progress of modern war technology (= treatises of the academy of sciences and literature. Humanities and social sciences class. Born 1950, volume 16). Verlag der Wissenschaft und der Literatur in Mainz (commissioned by Franz Steiner Verlag, Wiesbaden).

literature

  • Studies in Sociology. Determination for LvW for the 70th building - publisher. Ludwig H. Adolph Geck, Jürgen von Kempski , Hanna Meuter . 1st volume (no longer published) Internationaler Universum Verlag, Mainz 1948
  • Heine von Alemann: Leopold von Wiese and the Research Institute for Social Sciences in Cologne. 1919 to 1934. In: Kölner Zeitschrift für Soziologie und Sozialpsychologie, Wiesbaden, 28 (1976), pp. 649–673
  • Heine von Alemann: Leopold von Wiese (1876–1969). In: Cologne economists and social scientists. About the contributions of Cologne economists and social scientists to the development of economics and social sciences . Edited by Friedrich-Wilhelm Henning . Böhlau, Cologne 1988. pp. 97-138 (= studies on the history of the University of Cologne; 7), ISBN 3-412-00888-5
  • Guy Ankerl: Sociologues allemands . A la Baconnière, Neuchâtel 1972, pp. 33-72
  • Helene Kleine: Sociology and the education of the people. Hans Freyers and Leopold von Wieses position in sociology and free adult education during the Weimar Republic. Leske + Budrich , Opladen 1989, ISBN 3-8100-0751-X
  • Manfred Lindemann: About “formal” sociology. Systematic studies on “sociological relationism” by Georg Simmel , Alfred Vierkandt and Leopold von Wiese. Bonn, Phil. Diss. 1986
  • Willibald Reichertz: East Germans as lecturers at the Technical University of Hanover (1831–1956) . In: Ostdeutsche Familienkunde 55 (2007), pp. 109–120
  • Paul Trommsdorff: The faculty of the Technical University of Hanover 1831-1931. Hannover, 1931, pp. 127-128
  • Gothaisches genealogical pocket book of aristocratic houses: at the same time the nobility register of the German aristocratic association. Part A, p.920f

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Kaiserswaldau, today Piastów, a district of Piechowice, then Petersdorf
  2. ↑ He described his time in Wahlstatt in 1924 under the title Childhood; Memories from my cadet years , Paul Steegemann , Hanover; newly published and annotated by Hartmut von Hentig under the title Cadet Years , Langewiesche-Brandt, Ebenhausen near Munich, 1978.
  3. ↑ from approx. 1924 "... for sociology". For details on the title, see the discussion page for the successor magazine
  4. ^ Hermann Korte: Introduction to the history of sociology . 8th edition. Verlag für Sozialwissenschaften, 2006, ISBN 978-3-531-14774-1 , pp. 120 f .
  5. ↑ Quoted from: Silke van Dyk and Alexandra Schauer: "... that official sociology has failed". On sociology under National Socialism, the history of its coming to terms and the role of the DGS. 2nd Edition. Springer Fachmedien Wiesbaden, Wiesbaden 2014, ISBN 978-3-658-06636-9 , p. 47.
  6. ↑ Silke van Dyk and Alexandra Schauer: "... that official sociology has failed". On sociology under National Socialism, the history of its coming to terms and the role of the DGS. 2nd Edition. Springer Fachmedien Wiesbaden, Wiesbaden 2014, ISBN 978-3-658-06636-9 , p. 48.
  7. ↑ Silke van Dyk and Alexandra Schauer: "... that official sociology has failed". On sociology under National Socialism, the history of its coming to terms and the role of the DGS. 2nd Edition. Springer Fachmedien Wiesbaden, Wiesbaden 2014, ISBN 978-3-658-06636-9 , p. 49.
  8. ↑ Silke van Dyk, Alexandra Schauer: "... that official sociology has failed". On sociology under National Socialism, the history of its coming to terms and the role of the DGS. 2nd Edition. Springer Fachmedien Wiesbaden, Wiesbaden 2014, ISBN 978-3-658-06636-9 , p. 152.
  9. ^ Negotiations of the 8th German Sociological Congress, September 19-21, 1946 in Frankfurt am Main. Edited by Heinz Sauermann . Tübingen 1948, p. 29. Reprints ISBN 3165205418 , ISBN 383735010X
  10. ↑ Lauermann: The birth of sociology from the spirit of the Renaissance. Alfred von Martin in the context of the history of science , in: Richard Faber, Perdita Ladwig (Ed.), Society and Humanity. The cultural sociologist Alfred von Martin (1882-1979) . Würzburg 2013, pp. 155–188, here p. 157, note 2.
  11. ↑ Henning Borggräfe, Sonja Schnitzler, The German Sociological Association and National Socialism , in: Michaela Christ, Maja Suderland eds. Sociology and National Socialism: positions, debates, perspectives . Suhrkamp, ​​Berlin 2014, ISBN 978-3-518-29729-2 , pp. 445-479, here pp. 460 f.
  12. ↑ Silke van Dyk, Alexandra Schauer: "... that official sociology has failed". On sociology under National Socialism, the history of its coming to terms and the role of the DGS. 2nd Edition. Springer Fachmedien, Wiesbaden 2014, ISBN 978-3-658-06636-9 , p. 143.
  13. ↑ In detail: Johannes Platz, The Practice of Critical Theory. Applied social science and democracy in the early Federal Republic 1950-1960 , Trier 2012, 115 ff. Online , PDF, accessed on February 28, 2016.
  14. ^ Michael Neumann: Leopold von Wiese about Th. W. Adornos and others "Authoritarian Personality" . In: Christoph Cobet (Ed.): Introduction to questions for sociology in Germany after Hitler 1945–1959 . Verlag Christoph Cobet, Frankfurt am Main 1988, ISBN 3-925389-03-2 , pp. 115–122, here p. 119.

Web links

personal data
SURNAME Wiese, Leopold von
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Wiese and Kaiserswaldau, Leopold von
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German sociologist
DATE OF BIRTH December 2, 1876
PLACE OF BIRTH Glatz , Lower Silesia
DATE OF DEATH January 11, 1969
Place of death Cologne