Theodor Geiger

Theodor Julius Geiger (born November 9, 1891 in Munich , † June 16, 1952 at sea between Canada and Denmark ) was a Danish sociologist of German origin . After his emigration he taught at Aarhus University and was the first professor of sociology in Denmark. Geiger is counted among the "classics of sociology" and is considered to be the founder of the sociology of stratification .

Life

Theodor Geiger was born in Munich in 1891 as the son of the grammar school director Karl Geiger and his wife Philippine, b. Unclean, born. He grew up in Landshut , where he also passed his Abitur. From 1910 he studied law and political science in Munich , later in Würzburg .

He took part in the First World War as a volunteer and was a soldier from August 1914 to December 1918. Geiger was mainly used on the Eastern Front, where he was injured in the war. During the war he worked on a legal dissertation on the subject of the penal system ( Die Schutzaufsicht ). Even as a soldier, he was in 1918 by the University of Würzburg Doctor of Law doctorate .

He then worked as a research assistant at the State Statistical Office in Munich until 1920, after which he moved to Berlin, where he became a member of the SPD . At first he worked in Berlin for the newspaper evaluation service Die Fremdpress . He was also in charge of the information pamphlets of the then new adult education center in Greater Berlin , where he later worked as a lecturer and from 1924 as managing director. He built this workers' college into one of the most exemplary adult education centers in the country.

Geiger taught at the Technical University of Braunschweig from 1924 , in 1929 he became a full professor of sociology there, at that time the first social science professorship at this university. His studies on the social stratification of the late Weimar Republic were groundbreaking . Geiger's writings are now in the TU's “Theodor Geiger Archive”. His successor at the Volkshochschule Groß-Berlin was the school reformer Erwin Marquardt in 1929 .

In his book The Social Stratification of the German People , published in 1932 , he dealt with extensive studies on social stratification as well as electoral-sociological research on National Socialism, denouncing the "terrible and primitive naturalism of blood romanticism" which threatens "the spirit par excellence". After the handover of power to Hitler, Geiger emigrated and thus prevented the state-ordered dismissal. In the year of his emigration, his work Erbpflege appeared , in which he represented racial hygiene positions and called for reproductive barriers for ballast existences as well as the introduction of a race office .

He lived in Denmark until 1943 and took Danish citizenship . Geiger spoke Danish, English, French, Norwegian and Swedish, and his interest in Scandinavia began in his youth. While in Germany he had already translated specialist literature from Scandinavian languages, especially ethnological studies, among others by Sven Hedin and Fridtjof Nansen .

Geiger's academic career in Denmark was funded by the Rockefeller Foundation . He initially worked at the “Instituttet for Historie og Samfundsøkonomi” at the University of Copenhagen and also gave guest lectures at the university there. From 1938 to 1940 he taught sociology as a professor at Aarhus University, making him the first sociologist at a Danish university. In 1938 he married Eline Marie Nicolaysen. After the German occupation of Denmark, Geiger found himself on the run again, from 1943 he lived in neutral Sweden . He gave guest lectures at the universities of Stockholm , Uppsala and Lund . After the end of the war, Theodor Geiger immediately returned to Aarhus and continued his teaching activities; In 1945 he founded the University Institute for Social Research, which was also a novelty in what was then Scandinavia.

From 1948 to 1952 the social scientist published the Nordiske Studier i Sociologie (Nordic sociological studies) together with Torgny Torgnysson Segerstedt , Veli Verkko and Johan Vogt . In 1949 he was a co-founder of the International Sociological Association (ISA). Since 1949 he was a corresponding member of the Braunschweig Scientific Society .

Theodor Geiger held guest lectures in Toronto in 1951 and 1952 in order to establish sociology there. On the way back to Denmark he died at sea on board the Dutch steamship Waterman .

plant

Theodor Geiger is considered one of the founders of the concept of social stratification / stratification, which plays a decisive role in the analysis of social structures . His work on the “social stratification of the German people” from 1932 is cited again and again in this context to this day.

According to Theodor Geiger's approach, society can be divided into numerous social classes and groups; Characteristics such as the type of job, education, parental home, standard of living, appearance / clothing as well as power, denomination, ethnic origin, political attitude and membership in clubs / organizations play a role. The social situation is the result of many components . The sociologist must therefore always reduce the actual diversity in the stratification models he uses ; his model can never fully correspond to social reality. Precisely for this reason, however, it should measure as multidimensional or multidimensional as possible and take into account the appropriate weighting of the individual factors. The stratification concept is closely linked to studies on social mobility and also serves as an important analytical tool for industrial societies . The shift concept, however, also encompasses the more traditional class or caste societies . Geiger did not see such strict typological distinctions between these categories as, for example, Max Weber . In terms of the degree of social permeability, for example, a caste or class society in the process of dissolution does not have to differ fundamentally from a well-established, stratified industrial society.

Theodor Geiger distinguished the class as an objective social type from the subjective class consciousness (or the “attitude”) of the respective group members. There is no fixed deterministic relationship between the two. The sociologist warned against a layer definition that mixes both aspects from the outset. However, one could very well examine established social situations for correlations with certain forms of class consciousness.

Geiger was at times close to Marxism , but in his later years he rejected Karl Marx 's concept of the class struggle as an empirically irrelevant social metaphysics and philosophy of history . He did not deny that changed “conditions of existence” (including economic ones) can affect social status and subjective attitudes.

Theodor Geiger also contradicted the view of the current social structure as an "atomized society", for whose members class differences no longer played a role. Geiger also rejected “social organists” and “romantic social philosophers” who dream of the national community .

Geiger also published works on adult education , legal sociology , urban sociology and the methodology of empirical social research . His positivistic approach to the criticism of ideology and the sociology of knowledge was taken up and critically expanded by critical rationalism .

A characteristic feature of Geiger's sociology of law is so-called value nihilism. Theodor Geiger developed the value nihilism, which was founded in the so-called Uppsala School around Axel Hägerström . In contrast to Vilhelm Lundsted (1882–1955) or Alf Ross (1899–1979), who represented a theoretical value nihilism, Geiger spoke out in favor of practical value nihilism. For Geiger, a practical value nihilist is someone who does not make a value judgment. He is based on epistemological illegitimacy and therefore calls for value judgments to be dispensed with in principle.

At the end of the 1920s, Theodor Geiger translated two books by Fridtjof Nansen (1921–1927 Commissioner for Refugee Issues at the League of Nations, 1922 Nobel Peace Prize) from Norwegian into German: Betrogenes Volk. A study trip through Georgia and Armenia as High Commissioner of the League of Nations (FA Brockhaus, 1928) and through the Caucasus to the Volga (FA Brockhaus, 1930).

Theodor Geiger also tried to expand human sociology to include animal sociology. He wants to achieve this, as he explains in his essay The Animal as a Sociable Subject, written in 1927 and published in 1931, through a transdisciplinary approach that takes into account methods and findings from biology and sociology when considering and analyzing society. The aim of his plea is to counteract the narrow perspective of both disciplines, which in his opinion arises from the strict division of the research subjects of the disciplines:

But it must not come to the point that social theory - and this danger is already evident - [...] pushes the question of animal community life as something that disturbs its circles and thus erects a new dividing wall between the worlds of humans and animals , barely lower than that which Christian theology had at the time.

This clear division of the research subjects of biology and sociology is in turn connected with the assumption of a rigid human-animal boundary, while for Geiger “humans and animals belong together” .

This research tip from Theodor Geiger could still point the way:

Sociology cannot be content with merely registering human behavior, but must also try to uncover and describe the subjective processes on which they are based.

Fonts

• The protective supervision. 1919.
• The illegitimate child and his mother in the law of the new state. An attempt on the basis of critical comparative law. 1920.
• The crowd and their action. A contribution to the sociology of the revolutions . 1926.
• The characters of the company. 1928.
• Lead and follow. 1928.
• (Ed.): The law of elementary, middle and vocational schools in the Free State of Braunschweig . 1930.
• The animal as a sociable subject. In: Research on Ethnic Psychology and Sociology. 10, pp. 283-307, 1931.
• General sociology. Memories about the lectures. Manuscript print, 1931.
• The social stratification of the German people. Sociographic experiment on a statistical basis , Stuttgart: Enke, 1932.
  • [Rec.] Ferdinand Tönnies In: Sociological contemporary questions. Issue 1, Enke, Stuttgart 1932 (Crit. Ed. In: Ferdinand Tönnies Gesamtausgabe . Volume 22, Berlin / New York 1998, pp. 498–502).
• Sociological criticism of the eugenic movement. 1933.
• Inheritance. Basics, planning, limits. Enke, Stuttgart 1934 (in trade since 1933).
• Samfund and arvelighed. En sociologisk undersøgelse. 1935.
• Sociologi. 1935.
• Sociologi. Grundrids and hover problems. Nyt Nordisk Forlag, København 1939.
• Competition. En sociologisk analysis. Munksgaard, København 1941.
• Advertise criticism . Nyt Nordisk Forlag, København 1943.
• Debate with Uppsala on moral and ret. Munksgaard, København 1946.
• Ranulf versus Geiger. Et angreb og et offensivt forsvar. Nyt Nordisk Forlag, København 1946.
• Preparatory studies for a sociology of law . 1947.
• Classesamfound i støbegryden. 1948.
• (Ed.): Nordiske Studier i Sociologi - Scandinavian studies in sociology. 1948-1951.
• with Torben Agersnap : De danske studenters sociale oprindelse. 1950.
• Den danske intelligens fra reformationen til nutiden. En study i empirisk kultursociologi . The Danish intelligentsia from the Reformation to the present time. 1949.
• with Torben Agersnap: De danske studenters sociale oprindelse. 1950.
• Social shifts in a Danish medium-sized town. [= Aarhus], 1951.
• Mobilité sociale dans les sociétés européennes de notre temps. Problems of the population. 1951.
• Fortidens moral and foreign tidens. 1952.
• Ideology and truth. A Sociological Critique of Thought. 1953.
• Society between pathos and sobriety. 1960.
• Work on sociology. Method - modern large society - legal sociology - ideology criticism. Selected and introduced by Paul Trappe , 1962.
• Democracy without dogma. Szczesny, Munich 1963.
• Adult education from a distance and commitment. compiled and edited by Johannes Weinberg, 1984

as translator

• Christian Leden: About Kirvatin's ice fields. Three years among Canadian Eskimos. With 70 illustrations, 1 map. From the Dutch by Theodor Geiger. Brockhaus, Leipzig 1927 ( Drie jaar onder de Canadeesche eskimo's. Amsterdam 1927)

A Theodor Geiger Complete Edition (TGG) in 31 volumes is published by Klaus Rodax. So far (as of March 2012) five volumes have been published.

literature

• Hans Albert : Ideology and Truth. Theodor Geiger and the problem of the social anchoring of thought. In: Ders .: Construction and Criticism. Hamburg ²1975, ISBN 3-455-00100-9 .
• Siegfried Bachmann (Ed.): Theodor Geiger. Sociologist in a time “between pathos and sobriety”. Contributions to life and work. 1995.
• Wolfram Burisch : The misery of exile. Theodor Geiger and sociology. European Publishing House, Hamburg 1995
• Horst Knospe: Geiger, Theodor. In: Wilhelm Bernsdorf / ders. (Ed.): International sociological lexicon. Volume 1, Enke, Stuttgart ² 1980, pp. 138-142
• Thomas Meyer: The Sociology of Theodor Geiger. Emancipation from ideology. Publishing house for social sciences, 2001
• Bernhard Rehfeldt: Value Nihilism? - Comments on Theodor Geiger, preliminary studies on a sociology of law. Cologne Journal for Sociology 6 / 1953–54
• Paul Trappe : Theodor Geiger. In: Dirk Kaesler (ed.), Classics of Sociological Thought. Volume 2, 1978

Web links

• Literature by and about Theodor Geiger in the catalog of the German National Library
• University of Graz - 50 classics of sociology - biography: Theodor Geiger
• Theodor Geiger Archive at the Technical University of Braunschweig
• Theodor Geiger, dictionary entry on "Stratification" on sociosite.net (pdf; 50 kB)
• Theodor Geiger Complete Edition (TGG) , excerpt from the general plan of the edition published by the Peter Lang publishing house
• Geiger, Vita , revised. Fass. 2018, after Utz Maas , persecution and emigration of German-speaking linguists 1933–1945 , as print 2010

Single receipts

1. ↑ So here: Uni Graz - 50 Classics of Sociology - Biography: Theodor Geiger
2. ↑ Cf. Geiger, Theodor: The social stratification of the German people. Stuttgart 1932, p. 115 and Geißler, Rainer: The sociology of stratification Theodor Geiger. In: Cologne journal for sociology and social psychology. Vol. 37 (1985), No. 2.
3. ↑ Cf. Carsten Klingemann : Home Sociology or Instrument of Order? Specialist historical aspects of sociology between 1933 and 1945. In: Rainer Lepsius [ed.]: Sociology in Germany and Austria 1918 - 1945. Materials on development, emigration and history of impact , Opladen 1981, page 280, and Hans-Christian Harten / Uwe Neirich / Matthias Schwerdent: Racial hygiene as an educational ideology of the Third Reich. Bio-bibliographical manual , Berlin: Akademie-Verlag, 2006, p. 325 (also note 648). It is assumed here that Geiger published such a font for opportunistic reasons.
4. ↑ However , he did not lose his German citizenship until 1948, after several visits to Germany. Cf. Wolfram Burisch: The misery of exile. Theodor Geiger and Sociology , Hamburg 1995, p. 29.
5. ↑ ... haber pasado el año académico 1951/1952 en la Universidad de Toronto como profesor visitante para impartir clases de Sociología , source , University of Castile-La Mancha
6. ^ Ulrich Arens: The problem of ideology with Theodor Geiger. Diss. Siegen 1992
7. ↑ University of Würzburg, Theodor Geiger - worksheet with picture (PDF; 145 kB) ( Memento of the original from March 30, 2014 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was automatically inserted and not yet checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. 
8. ↑ Folke Werner: On the value of values. The suitability of the concept of value as an orientation category of human lifestyle, a study from an evangelical perspective , p. 88 ff., Lit-Verlag, 2002, ISBN 3-8258-5594-5
9. ↑ University of Würzburg: Theodor Geiger - Law as a special form of social order (PDF; 678 kB) ( Memento of the original from March 30, 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. 
10. ↑ Theodor Geiger (1931): The animal as a sociable subject. In: Research on Ethnic Psychology and Sociology. Volume X, 1st half volume: Work on the biological foundation of sociology. CL Hirschfeld, Leipzig, p. 292.
11. ↑ Theodor Geiger (1931): The animal as a sociable subject. In: Research on Ethnic Psychology and Sociology. Volume X, 1st half volume: Work on the biological foundation of sociology. CL Hirschfeld, Leipzig, p. 283.
12. ↑ Theodor Geiger (1931): The animal as a sociable subject. In: Research on Ethnic Psychology and Sociology. Volume X, 1st half volume: Work on the biological foundation of sociology. CL Hirschfeld, Leipzig, p. 284.
13. ↑ On sociometrics and its limits. In: Kölner Zeitschrift für Soziologie und Sozialpsychologie , 1 (1948/1949), pp. 292–302
14. ↑ Geiger had completed the manuscript of this critical diagnosis of the time shortly before his sudden death. René König , who was preparing it for printing, reports that the Frankfurt Institute tried to prevent publication at all costs, "with which it caused a large German publisher to break the contract." The first edition of the book then appeared in 1960 (in German) under the title The Society between Pathos and Sobriety in a series of publications by the University of Aarhus. See René König: Life in contradiction. An attempt at an intellectual biography. Munich 1980, p. 193 f.
15. ↑ See Theodor Geiger Complete Edition ( Memento of the original from November 28, 2011 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link has been inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. at the publisher Peter Lang.