Theo Pirker

Theo Pirker (born March 2, 1922 in Munich ; † August 31, 1995 there ) was a German social scientist .

Life

As a working class child and a member of the Wehrmacht, Theo Pirker became an opponent of the Nazi dictatorship in World War II. Used as a paratrooper in Crete and Russia, he was badly wounded three times and lost a foot.

As a Christian socialist, the student Pirker helped to build up the Bavarian trade unions after 1945 and worked on the Catholic magazine “Ende und Anfang” until 1949. He came to Marxism and an interest in empirical research not least through the abstract neo-Gothic definitions of Catholic social teaching. He wrote articles and political poems and opposed restoration and rearmament. In 1953/54 he became Viktor Agartz's most important employee at the Institute of Economic Sciences (WWI) of the DGB . In the course of his participation in empirical studies on workers and management, work organization and operational hierarchy in the steel industry, he came to an understanding of co-determination , through which he came into conflict with the trade union officials. His analysis of blind power is one of the classics of DGB historiography today. After Agartz and his colleague were forced out of the WWI in 1955 and fell into political isolation, he carried out contract research and went abroad as a journalist and lecturer. a. to Algeria, where he advised the National Liberation Front, as well as to Egypt, Afghanistan and Israel.

In his works Theo Pirker dealt critically with the history of the Social Democratic Party of Germany (SPD) and with the politics of the German trade unions after the Second World War . He criticized the party and association rule established by the Western Allies as a form of derived, indirect democracy as well as the restorative , systemic role of trade union leaders , but also Stalinism . Instead, Pirker pleaded for direct participation of the collectives and a comprehensive veto position of the unions against the parliamentary system.

In 1972 Pirker received a professorship at the Institute for Sociology at the Free University of Berlin for empirical methodology and statistics . It applies u. a. through his studies of office mechanization and automation as well as employee sociology as a pioneer of German industrial sociology . For several years he was chairman of the Central Institute for Social Science Research at the Free University of Berlin. After 1989 he was interested in social theory, which characterized him as a political sociology as well as his insistence on data-based argumentation, the activities of intermediary organizations and their role as guarantors of the elasticity of adaptation in democratic societies.

Individual evidence

1. ↑ http://userpage.fu-berlin.de/~fupresse/FUN/1995/10-95/l2.htm
2. ↑ Archived copy ( memento of the original from September 13, 2014 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. Interview with Theo Pirker 

Works (selection)

• The plan as an order and fiction Westdeutscher Verlag, Opladen 1995.
• The bizonal savings commissioners . Westdeutscher Verlag, Opladen 1992.
• Sociology as Politics Schelzky and Jeep, Berlin 1991
• FDGB - turn to the end . Bund-Verlag, Cologne 1990
• Restoration and Reform Central Institute for Social Science Research, Berlin 1990
• Autonomy and control . Schelzky and Jeep, Berlin 1989
• Regulatory functions of intermediary institutions . Central Institute for Social Science Research, Berlin 1988
• Martin Jander: Theo Pirker on 'Pirker' . Marburg 1988.
• Technology and industrial revolution Westdeutscher Verlag, Opladen 1987
• Audit offices as an object of contemporary historical research . Duncker & Humblot, Berlin 1987
• From the "end of the labor movement" . German Freethinkers Association, Wuppertal 1985
• The end of the labor movement in Germany? Westdeutscher Verlag, Opladen 1984
• Writing services in the highest federal authorities . Campus, Frankfurt / Main 1981
• Urban planning, redevelopment and citizen participation using the example of Berlin-Kreuzberg . Project manager: Theo Pirker. Institute for Housing and District Planning ( IWOS ), TU Berlin 1977
• The decreed democracy Foundations and manifestations of the 'restoration'. Olle & Wolter, Berlin 1977
• Theo Pirker (Ed.): Comintern and Fascism, 1920-1940 . Documents on the history and theory of fascism. Edited and commented by Theo Pirker. Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt, Stuttgart 1965
• The Histadrut. Union problems in Israel . Kyklos, Basel 1965
• The SPD after Hitler. The history of the Social Democratic Party of Germany, 1945-1964 . Rütten & Loening, Munich 1965. Olle & Wolter, Berlin 1977.
• Theo Pirker (Ed.): Utopia and Myth of the World Revolution. On the history of the Comintern 1920-1940 . Dtv, Munich 1964
• Theo Pirker (Ed.): The Moscow Show Trials 1936 - 1938 . Dtv, Munich 1963
• Beyond security . Desch, Munich 1967
• Office technology . Enke, Stuttgart 1963
• Office and machine . Kyklos, Basel / Mohr, Tübingen 1962. Studies by the List Institute
• Workers, management, co-determination (together with Siegfried Braun, Burkart Lutz and Fro Hammelrath). Ring-Verlag, Stuttgart 1955
• The blind power. The trade union movement in West Germany. 2 volumes. 1960 Munich. Reprint: Olle & Wolter, Berlin 1979
• The union as a political organization. In: trade union monthly books , vol. 3, 1952, pp. 76–80.
• The Ten Songs of the Method . Bürger, Lorch 1948

literature

• Theo Pirker died , in: Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung No. 204 of September 2, 1995, p. 5
• Gregor Kritidis: Left Socialist Opposition in the Adenauer Era. A contribution to the early history of the Federal Republic of Germany. Offizin Verlag: Hannover 2008, pp. 137–152. Review by Jens Becker ISBN 978-3-930345-61-8

Web links

• Literature by and about Theo Pirker in the catalog of the German National Library