Lieselotte Pongratz

Lieselotte Pongratz (born December 24, 1923 in Harburg ; † September 5, 2001 in Hamburg ) was a German sociologist and criminologist . From 1973 she was professor of sociology at the University of Hamburg . In 1975 she was appointed to the chair for criminology there and was the third woman in the Federal Republic to hold such a chair.

Life

As the daughter of a communist , Pongratz was unable to attend secondary school for political reasons during the Nazi regime. She attended elementary school and did a compulsory year in agriculture. She then did a commercial apprenticeship, which she completed with the assistant examination. This was followed by military service and until 1945 the deployment in the Reich Labor Service in East Prussia . After the war, she began training as a welfare worker at the Hamburg Institute for Social Education in 1946, where she graduated in 1949 and then worked as a social worker at the Hamburg youth authority.

In 1953, Pongratz was released from the youth authorities for a scientific study on young people in homes. In the course of this work, contacts developed to a group of sociologists around Helmut Schelsky , in particular to the later sociology professor Heinz Kluth , who supported her in completing the Abitur . In 1954 Pongratz began studying sociology, criminology, juvenile criminal law and psychology in Hamburg and at the London School of Economics and Political Science . She received her doctorate in 1963 under a scholarship from Heinz Kluth at the University of Hamburg . Her dissertation topic was the socialization and the social life fate of prostitute children .

From 1963 to 1966 she worked as a research assistant at the Institute for Criminology at the University of Hamburg. In cooperation with the two Senate representatives Curt Bondy and Rudolf Sieverts , she was involved in the development of the social pedagogical additional course for social scientists, lawyers, medical professionals and other disciplines at the university. In 1966 Lieselotte Pongratz became a scientific advisor at the Department of Social Sciences at the University of Hamburg. Here she introduced methodological training and placed the emphasis on deviant behavior in the youth and family. As a result of this activity, she was part of the action research project in the Hamburg transitional prison for prisoners on Alsenstrasse.

After turning down several appointments at other universities, she became Professor of Sociology at the University of Hamburg in 1973 and expanded the area of ​​"Deviant Behavior and Social Control". In 1975 she accepted a professorship for criminology in the law faculty of the University of Hamburg. After Anne-Eva Brauneck and Hilde Kaufmann , she was the third professor of criminology in the Federal Republic.

From 1979 on, Pongratz was instrumental in founding the advanced and contact course for criminology, which began teaching in 1984. This model facility , initially under the scientific direction of Fritz Sack , was the first diploma course in criminology in the Federal Republic. In the winter semester 1985/1986 Pongratz retired .

In 2000 she founded the Lieselotte-Pongratz Foundation named after her, which she chaired until her death. The aim of the foundation is to enable students and doctoral candidates in criminology and social work to successfully complete research projects. The foundation has been run by Timm Kunstreich since 2001 and has awarded five scholarships until October 2007.

Lieselotte Pongratz was buried anonymously in the Bernadottestrasse cemetery.

Act

Lieselotte Pongratz was a co-founder of the Working Group of Young Criminologists (AJK), which formed an interdisciplinary working group on June 12, 1969 with the aim of offering a discussion forum for young scientists about new research work and research concepts. Also in 1969 she was co-founder and author of the Kriminologische Journal (KrimJ). In 1971, together with Rüdiger Lautmann , she succeeded in convincing the publisher Martin Faltermaier to publish KrimJ as a magazine , which until then had only been reproduced on a die . In 1972 she was involved in founding the Moritz Liepmann House .

In 1973 she co-founded the European Group for the study of deviance and social control , of which she was a member until her death. Since 1969 she has been co-editor of the Hamburg Studies on Criminology together with Fritz Sack, Klaus Sessar and Bernhard Villmow . At the beginning of the 1970s, Pongratz was a member and later chairman of the Federal Youth Board of Trustees for four years.

Pongratz's criminological research approach was strongly influenced by her socio-educational practical relevance and her methodical training. She initiated projects based on empirical social research. Your name stood for empirical social research in the 1960s . She saw her task as a criminologist primarily in actually changing the situation of those affected by criminal policy with criminological knowledge. Her main concern was to work out the stressful living conditions that affect people and that are in turn reproduced through their actions. She showed how people deal differently with the same circumstances, cope with them or fail because of them.

Their social statistical longitudinal study on delinquent behavior in children , published in 1975, was essentially based on the then inadequate level of knowledge in this area. In contrast to juvenile delinquency , criminology, which had hitherto been primarily oriented towards criminal law, did not take a deeper look at child delinquency. As part of the first investigation, the development of child delinquency registered in the police crime statistics between 1956 and 1965 was examined. Within the scope of this study, Pongratz came to the result that children who belonged to social groups that were overrepresented in the study were more likely to violate norms than children with more adult-related play behavior due to their greater independence, less supervision and lack of games in their free time . Children with more pronounced characteristics of social deprivation appeared to the police more often than all of the registered children. A connection between the commission of criminal acts in childhood and criminal acts in adolescence could not generally be established. After their investigation, no prognostic aspects could be identified that corroborated the opinion that child delinquency is the entry point into later criminality.

In her follow-up study published in 1990 she dealt with the punished behavior of the same group of people in adulthood. The result was that an increased number of convictions in adolescence is a determining factor for criminal penalties in adulthood.

Due to the combination of scientist and criminal politician, Pongratz differed from the purely scientific, theory-oriented as well as from the usual criminal policy approach. Their commitment was largely geared towards the goal-oriented implementation of measures for those affected. Her academic approach was characterized by the integration of law and social sciences in the fields of criminal law and criminology, particularly through interdisciplinary research activities.

Publications (selection)

• together with Hans-Odo Hübner: Life test after public education. A Hamburg study about the fate of the welfare education and voluntary education assistance of released young people. Luchterhand, Darmstadt 1959.
• Prostitute children. Environment and development in the first eight years of life. Fischer Verlag, Stuttgart 1964.
• together with Horst Schüler-Springorum and Rudolf Sieverts : Socially conspicuous young people. Juventa, Munich 1964.
• together with Jürgen Friedrichs : Social Expectations. Preliminary investigation on a sample of workers. In: KrimJ 1970, issue 2, p. 233 ff.
• together with M. Schäfer, Peter Jürgensen and D. Weisse: Kinderdelinquence. Data, background and developments. Juventa, Munich 1975. ISBN 3-7799-0621-X .
• Origin and CV. Longitudinal studies of the growing conditions and development of children of marginalized mothers. Juventa, Weinheim 1988. ISBN 3-7799-0678-3 .
• together with Peter Jürgensen: careers of drug addict offenders, social integration after therapeutic treatment in the specialist clinic Brauel. Centaurus, Pfaffenweiler 1997. ISBN 3-89085-456-7 .
• together with Dietlinde Gipser and Heiner Zillmer: Social careers after public education. Women and men fifteen years after leaving home. Results of a longitudinal study. In: Dietlinde Gipser, Heiner Zillmer: Escape from care, not from research. The Lieselotte-Pongratz project: "Proof of life after public education". Hamburg children after war and home. Look at 55 years of research. edition zebra, Hamburg 2011. ISBN 978-3-928859-07-3 .

literature

• Imanuel Baumann: On the trail of crime. A history of criminology and criminal policy in Germany 1880-1980. Wallstein Verlag, Göttingen 2006 (especially p. 310 f.).
• Dietlinde Gipser , Timm Kunstreich, Gerhard Rehn a. a .: Lieselotte Pongratz in memory. (December 24, 1923 - September 5, 2001). In: np, neue praxis, issue 6, 2001, p. 623 ff.
• Fritz Haag: Lieselotte Pongratz. From social work to criminal policy. In: uni hh, vol. 17, issue 2, 1986, p. 60 f.
• Heribert Ostendorf (ed.), Integration of criminal law and social sciences. Festschrift for Lieselotte Pongratz . Munich 1986.
• Lieselotte Pongratz and Dorothee Bittscheid-Peters: Conversation about how it all started and what it did. In: KrimJ, vol. 30, issue 1, 1998, p. 7 ff.
• Stephan Quensel: Obituary for Lieselotte Pongratz (December 24, 1923 - September 5, 2001). In: KrimJ, vol. 33, issue 4, 2001, p. 310 f.

Web links

• Literature by and about Lieselotte Pongratz in the catalog of the German National Library

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Note burial at garten-der-frauen.de