Rolf Reissig (political scientist)

Rolf Reissig (Berlin 2012)

Rolf Reissig (born September 28, 1940 in Gelenau / Erzgeb. ) Is a German social scientist. From November 1989 to February 1990 he was the staff elected director of the Academy for Social Sciences , which was dissolved in October 1990.

Life

Reissig graduated as a tool fitter in 1956 and in the same year began attending evening high school to obtain the matriculation examination in 1958. In the same year he began studying philosophy and history at the Karl Marx University in Leipzig . Until 1964 he worked as an assistant at the Martin Luther University Halle-Wittenberg , from 1967 he worked at the Franz Mehring Institute of the Karl Marx University in Leipzig. There he received his doctorate in 1968 and from 1970 worked as a lecturer in the Philosophy / Scientific Socialism section.

After a 1976 brought against him party process moved Reißig 1978 to the Academy of Social Sciences of the Central Committee of the SED in Berlin, where he in 1980 with a thesis on labor movements in Western societies habilitated and in 1981 was awarded a full professorship. His main focus was peace research , which also brought him into conflict with the SED's chief ideologist, Kurt Hager .

Reissig endeavored to cooperate with the SPD and, on the side of the GDR, played a major role in the development of the position paper The dispute of ideologies and common security in 1987. In the same year, Reißig tried to change the profile of his institute at the Academy of Social Sciences to a political science institute and to set up a German-German working group on questions of system comparison, which earned him fierce criticism from the Politburo . After Otto Reinhold's resignation , from November 1989 to January 1990, Reissig was elected head of the Academy for Social Sciences in the final phase of the GDR .

Since March 1990, Reissig has been director of the private, non-profit Brandenburg-Berlin Institute for Social Science Studies, which he co-founded . At the same time he was reappointed professor of political science. In 1989/90 he co-founded the Society for Political Science in the GDR, which was dissolved again in 1990. He was involved in founding the East Germany Forum of Social Democracy in 1996. Reissig is a member of the Willy Brandt Circle .

Publications

• Labor movement and democratic alternative. Berlin 1986.
• The end of an experiment. Berlin 1991.
• Way back to the future. Frankfurt (M.) and New York 1993 (Ed.).
• The split association society. Berlin 2000.
• Dialogue through the wall. The controversial rapprochement between the SPD and SED. Frankfurt (M.) 2002.
• Co-governing in Berlin: The PDS on the test bench. Berlin 2005.
• Society transformation in the 21st century. Wiesbaden 2009.
• Brie, Michael / Reissig, Rolf / Thomas, Michael (eds.): Transformation. Search processes in times of upheaval , LIT Verlag 2016, Münster, Berlin, Vienna, London.

literature

• Jan Wielgohs:  Reissig, Rolf . In: Who was who in the GDR? 5th edition. Volume 2. Ch. Links, Berlin 2010, ISBN 978-3-86153-561-4 .
• Lothar Mertens : Red think tank? LIT Verlag 2004, Münster, pp. 28, 98-102, 146, 215-225.
• Erhard Eppler: Living on the left. Memories of a conservative value , Ullstein 2015, Berlin, pp. 243-251.
• Erhard Eppler: What belongs together. The SPD and German Unity 1989/90 , Herder 2014, Freiburg, Basel, Vienna, pp. 196–198, 203–206, 212/213.

Web links

• Profile at the Willy Brandt Circle

Individual proof

1. ↑ Date of the dissolution with Lothar Mertens: Red think tank? The Academy for Social Sciences at the Central Committee of the SED. (= Studies on the GDR Society, Vol. 10), Lit, Münster 2004, ISBN 3-8258-8034-6 , p. 111.