Peter R. Hofstätter

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Peter Robert Hofstätter (born October 20, 1913 in Vienna ; † June 13, 1994 in Buxtehude ) was an Austrian social psychologist .

Life

Hofstätter studied physics and psychology in Vienna and did his doctorate on the early development of Japanese and Korean children. From 1937 to 1942 he worked in the Reich Ministry of War under Max Simoneit in the Wehrmacht Psychology Department in Vienna, where he represented parts of the National Socialist racial theory . His focus, however, was not the descriptive-qualitative phenomenological character study preferred by the Nazi regime , but the quantitative-statistical analysis of psychological test data, especially through factor analysis . This was in contrast to Arnold Gehlen , against whose influence he obtained his habilitation in 1941. Despite his membership in the NSDAP , he was considered "politically unreliable", received no teaching license and in 1943 moved to the Reich Ministry of Justice . Regardless of his past, he received a teaching position at the University of Graz in 1945 , but his attempt to portray himself as a victim of the Nazi regime failed.

His university career began by moving to research at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1949 and then teaching at the Catholic University of America until 1956 . Hofstätter was appointed to the chair of Psychology I at the University of Hamburg in 1959, succeeding Curt Bondy , and retired there in 1979 . In his work Differential Psychologie he advocated the already scientifically outdated thesis of an innate low intelligence of black Africans (and of other dark-skinned people) without taking notice of the criticism from the direction of the Culture Fair Intelligence test research.

In 1963 Hofstätter published an article in the weekly newspaper Die Zeit entitled Coping with the Past? that caused a scandal. In it he questioned the sense of coming to terms with the past and pleaded for a general amnesty for Nazi crimes. Arie Goral publicly polemicized against Hofstätter because of this article. Rudolf Walter Leonhardt defended Hofstätter. He criticized Goral for having “fueled a hysteria that is no longer based on facts”. The journalist Karl Marx , at that time editor of the Allgemeine Wochenzeitung der Juden in Deutschland , criticized Leonhardt's intervention in favor of Hofstätters as “negligent” because Leonhardt had not witnessed the events in question, and reported on testimony of Hofstätters as: “The extermination of the Jews was not murder in the legal sense. Hitler and the National Socialist state had practically declared war on the Jews, and so it was only enough to exterminate this enemy. The killings were carried out by soldiers in the uniforms of a nation that was in a state of war. ”Bundeswehr General von Kielmansegg described Hofstätter's concept as“ incompatible with the soldier's concept of honor ”.

After criticism from other authors, Hofstätter increasingly withdrew to his chair at the University of Hamburg and later only rarely commented on political issues, but was a long-time columnist in the bourgeois-conservative Hamburger Abendblatt belonging to the Springer group .

Awards

Fonts

  • The psychology of public opinion . Braumüller, Vienna 1949
  • Psychology . First published in 1957. S. Fischer Verlag, Frankfurt 1968 (357th – 376th thousand)
  • Social psychology . de Gruyter, 1973, ISBN 3-11-004309-2
  • Quantitative Methods in Psychology I (together with Dirk Wendt) Springer, Heidelberg 1974, ISBN 3-540-79602-9
  • Individual and Society . Ullstein, Berlin 1984, ISBN 3-548-02955-8
  • Group dynamics. The critique of mass psychology . Rowohlt, Hamburg 1957, ISBN 3-499-55038-5
  • German Wehrmacht Psychology 1914–1945 . Introduction PR Hofstätter (other authors: Leonhard von Renthe-Fink, Siegfried J. Gerathewohl, Werner Fritscher) Verlag für Wehrwissenschaften, Munich 1985, ISBN 3-8219-0019-9 and ISBN 3-8219-0016-4
  • Conditions of satisfaction . Edition Interfrom, 1986, ISBN 3-7201-5192-1
  • Personality research (= Kröner's pocket edition . Volume 403). 2nd Edition. Kröner, Stuttgart 1977, ISBN 3-520-40302-1 .
  • Introduction to social psychology (= Kröner's pocket edition. Volume 295). 5th, revised and improved edition. Kröner, Stuttgart 1973, ISBN 3-520-29505-7 .
  • Differential Psychology (= Kröner's pocket edition. Volume 403). Kröner, Stuttgart 1971, ISBN 3-520-40301-3 .

literature

  • Arie Goral: The Hofstätter case - From the life of a right-wing sympathizer . Hamburg 1963.
  • Erich H. Witte (Ed.): Contributions to social psychology: Festschrift for Peter R. Hofstätter . Beltz 1980.
  • Gerhard Benetka: stumbling blocks. On the career of Peter R. Hofstätter (Worksheet 18/19, 1989, No. 1/2)
  • The permanent colonial institute . AStA Universität Hamburg, Hamburg 1969, pp. 119–138.
  • Peter Hofstätter . In: Ernst G. Wehner: Psychology in Self-Representations , Vol. 3, Bern 1992.
  • Werner Bergmann : Anti-Semitism in Public Conflicts. Collective learning in the political culture of the Federal Republic 1949–1989. Frankfurt / Main 1997.
  • Horst Gundlach: Hofstätter, Peter. In: Uwe Wolfradt, Elfriede Billmann-Mahecha, Armin Stock (eds.): German-speaking psychologists 1933–1945. An encyclopedia of persons, supplemented by a text by Erich Stern . 2nd updated edition. Springer, Wiesbaden 2017, ISBN 978-3-658-15039-6 , pp. 194-195 .

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. Andreas Hoffmann-Ocon: Former army psychologists in the USA: Heinrich Roth and Peter R. Hofstätter . In: Karl-Walter Beise: Bridge building , magazine for museums and education. LIT Verlag, Münster 2008, ISBN 978-3-8258-1696-4 , p. 77
  2. ^ Peter R. Hofstätter: Coped with the past? In: Die Zeit , No. 24/1963.
  3. ^ Rudolf Walter Leonhardt : The case of Hofstätter. Necessary contradiction - understandable outrage - uncontrolled hysteria . In: Die Zeit , No. 36/1963.
  4. ^ Karl Marx, with an afterword by Rudolf Walter Leonhardt: Zum Fall Hofstätter. In: Die Zeit , No. 37/1963
  5. General von Kielmansegg, a NATO Leader, Dies at 99 , The New York Times , June 4, 2006.