Nicolaus Sombart

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Nicolaus Sombart (born May 10, 1923 in Berlin-Grunewald ; † July 4, 2008 near Schiltigheim ) was a German cultural sociologist and writer.

Life

Nicolaus Sombart was the son of the sociologist and economist Werner Sombart and his Romanian wife Corina, nee. Leon (September 9, 1892 - February 19, 1970). His father was the son of an industrialist and national liberal politician and was one of the most important scientists in his field. His mother was the daughter of a professor from a family of counts and thirty years younger than her husband. It ran a literary salon where artists, scientists and diplomats from the Weimar Republic met on Sunday afternoons to exchange ideas. Sombart later summed up: "What I am and know I owe to my father's library and my mother's salon." During his school days in the 1930s, Carl Schmitt waswho socialized in the parental home, his mentor. The young conductor Sergiu Celibidache was one of the friends of the Sombart family . In his memoirs youth in Berlin, 1933-1943 Sombart describes growing up in a prominent educated middle childhood home in the era of National Socialism .

During the Second World War , Nicolaus Sombart was a Wehrmacht soldier from 1942 to 1945 . He belonged to the guard service of the emergency airfield of Vitry-en-Artois and was later stationed with a unit of the railway flak in the Soviet Union. At the end of the war he was taken prisoner by the British . After 1945 he studied philosophy, political science and cultural sociology in Heidelberg , Naples and Paris . In 1950 he completed his studies and received his doctorate with Alfred Weber with a dissertation on the intellectual and historical significance of Count Henri de Saint-Simon .

In 1947 Sombart published the magazine Der Ruf together with Alfred Andersch and Hans Werner Richter and was one of the founders of Gruppe 47 . The same year dates the surreal and fantastic war story Capriccio No. 1 , which was inspired by one's own subjective perceptions and thought processes during the service at the desolate emergency airport of Vitry-en-Artois and could only be published in the American occupation zone . From 1952 to 1954 he lived in Paris , where he worked on his habilitation, which was not completed later. In 1954 he became a civil servant at the Council of Europe in Strasbourg . He took up teaching positions at the Universities of Ulm , Freiburg / Br. and Wuppertal true and published articles, travel books and poems. In 1977 he became a member of the PEN Club . In 1984 he retired after thirty years as head of the Council of Europe's cultural department. He saw this job only as a necessary job as his family was "utterly impoverished".

In 1982 Sombart was a fellow at the Wissenschaftskolleg Berlin . His journal intime 1982/83 owes itself to this stay , a "ludicrous, sexual-intellectual burlesque and at the same time a moral painting of old West Berlin". From 1983 to 1987 he was a lecturer at the Free University of Berlin , where he lectured on the history of Wilhelmine Germany and society at the time.

Since then he has lived as a freelance writer with dandy haftem lifestyle in Berlin-Wilmersdorf , where he from early 1985 to mid-2007 every Sunday afternoon a jour fixe organized; the hard core of the Habitués included Claudia Schmölders , Peggy Cosmann, Johannes Rüber , Marie-Luise Schwarz-Schilling , Erika von Hornstein , Heinrich Graf von Einsiedel , Lord Weidenfeld , Stephan Reimertz , Heinz Berggruen , Eike Gebhard, Hans-Peter Krüger , Marie- Louise von Plessen , Carmen-Francesca Banciu , Mathias Nolte , Günter Faltin , Cornelia Koppetsch and others.

In his works, some of which are autobiographical, Sombart describes people who had an influence on his life, including Carl Schmitt, Alfred Weber and Karl Jaspers . His circle of friends included the Germanist Peter Wapnewski , the publisher Hubert Burda and, on a collegial basis, the historian John CG Röhl . In 1995 a revised version of Capriccio No. 1 was re-released . This depiction of inner realities, philosophical thoughts and delusions of a German guard soldier, which deviated from the general trend in German-language post-war literature, was only available as an antiquarian collector's item for decades.

In 2003 Sombart was appointed Commandeur de la Légion d'honneur (C. LH).

Works

literature

  • Saverio Campanini: Carteggio d'autunno inglese. Uno scambio di lettere tra Gershom Scholem e Nicolaus Sombart a proposito di Carl Schmitt e d'altro , in: Schifanoia 52–53 (2017), ISSN  0394-5421 , pp. 41–62.
  • Marvin Chlada : Utopia as a Topos of Immanence. Concept and function of the utopian in Nicolaus Sombart's cultural sociology . In: ders .: The poet as a rag collector. Reports and interviews , Verlag Dialog-Edition, Duisburg 2016, pp. 58–76, ISBN 978-3-945634-05-9
  • Philipp Gürtler: A CV: About Nicolaus Sombart. In: Documents. Revue des Questions Allemandes. 1998, No. 4, ISSN  0151-0827 , pp. 122-125.
  • Cornelia Saxe: Nicolaus Sombart's tea party in Berlin-Charlottenburg. In: Cornelia Saxe: The sociable canapé - The renaissance of the Berlin salons , Ullstein Verlag, Berlin 1999, pp. 225–235.

Web links

Obituaries

Footnotes

  1. ↑ a b c Dirk Krampitz: A hairdresser as part of society - kind of funny . In: Die Welt , January 9, 2005.
  2. ↑ Alexander Cammann: The horizontal poet . In: Der Tagesspiegel , July 6, 2008.
  3. ↑ See the chapter “Tea in Archimedes' Harem” on Sombart and his Berlin circle in Stephan Reimertz 's book Vom Genuss des Tees , Leipzig 1998, ISBN 978-3-378-01023-9 .
  4. ↑ See Wilhelm II. , P. 7, quotation.
personal data
SURNAME Sombart, Nicolaus
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German cultural sociologist and writer
DATE OF BIRTH May 10, 1923
PLACE OF BIRTH Berlin
DATE OF DEATH 4th July 2008
Place of death near Strasbourg