Zoltán Szankay

Zoltan Szankay (1992)

Zoltán Szankay (born May 2, 1929 in Temesvár , Transylvania , † January 12, 2008 in Bremen ) was a university professor of philosophy and sociology , political thinker, consultant and publicist.

Life

Family and education

Szankay was born in Temesvár in 1929 as the son of Ernö Szankay (timber merchant) and Margarete Beck (housewife). He grew up bilingually, as part of the Hungarian minority in Transylvania, in a well-off merchant family. Hungarian was the main spoken language at home, but German was also spoken. The family moved to Budapest with his younger sister in 1939 , where he attended the Piarist grammar school. In 1944 the family went to Switzerland, where he obtained his Matura in German in 1948 and began studying philosophy at the University of Zurich . In 1949 the family had to leave Switzerland and he moved to Argentina.

Szankay studied philosophy, sociology and economics at the Universidad de Buenos Aires from 1952 to 1958 and passed his first state examination in 1958. From 1959 he worked as an employee at the Philosophical Institute of the Universidad Nacional de La Plata and received his doctorate in 1963 as Licenciado de Filosofia y Letras with a thesis on the young Hegel . During his doctorate, he translated works by Heidegger ( The question about the thing ), Hegel ( early writings ) as well as by Martin Buber and Olof Gigon from German into Spanish.

With a graduate scholarship from the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation , he was able to continue his studies with Eugen Fink and Martin Heidegger in Freiburg between 1964 and 1966 , and then at the Frankfurt Institute for Social Research with Theodor W. Adorno .

From his first marriage he has two daughters and a son with his second wife.

job

After an episode as a freelancer at Suhrkamp Verlag , a one-year scholarship at the Institute for European History in Mainz , as well as an assistant position in the independent working group for planning principles in the Department of Architecture at RWTH Aachen , Szankay was given the specially created double chair for Appointed History of Modern Philosophy and Epistemology of Social Sciences to the University of Concepción in Chile . He was able to hold the professorship until 1973, was briefly interned by General Augusto Pinochet as part of the military coup in Chile and expelled to Argentina .

He went back to Germany and was able to continue his earlier work there at RWTH Aachen University.In 1979, he became a visiting professor in the social sciences department at the University of Bremen, and from 1981 to 1996 was a research assistant there with a license to teach the philosophy of the social sciences with a focus on contemporary subjects political theory and philosophy . In Bremen he translated Heidegger's sentence on the ground into Spanish. He has been a German citizen since 1991.

From 1996, after a partial retirement, he worked as a lecturer at the University of Bremen and as a scientific advisor to the Bündnis 90 / Die Grünen parliamentary group in the Bremen state parliament.

politics

Since his student days, Szankay was involved in the political affairs of the respective countries in which he lived. He was close to the Socialist Party in Buenos Aires and was a member of the student association of the Hungarians who emigrated in 1956. He experienced the 1968 movement in Frankfurt. In Chile he held a critical position within the Movimiento de Izquierda Revolucionaria (MIR) during the Allende era . Since 1980 he was a member of the Greens. 1988 co-author and editor of the manifesto Green Awakening . In addition to his scientific publications, he wrote numerous journalistic articles (including in Kommune ).

Hannah Arendt Prize

Szankay is the initiator and, together with others, co-founder of the Hannah Arendt Prize for Political Thought, which is endowed with € 7,500 and has been awarded annually in Bremen in late autumn since 1995. The prize was donated with the intention of initiating a public-political debate on Hannah Arendt's political thinking in Germany. The award ceremonies included regularly organized conferences and congresses in which Szankay played a key role until his death.

Works

Individual publications

• El ambito initial de la dialectica hegeliana , (The original area of ​​the Hegelian dialectic), / La apertura politica del vinculo etico-ontologico. Dissertation, Universidad de Buenos Aires, 1963.
• The Argentine trade union movement , Schwartz, Göttingen 1968.
• New visibilities and questions in the light of events . University of Bremen, 1990.

Articles in anthologies (selection)

• Classes and classes in Latin America , together with I. Izaguirre. In: 0.Negt / Kl.Meschkat, society structures , Suhrkamp, ​​Frankfurt a. M. 1970.
• What will happen with the New Social Movements? , together with A. Evers, in: Grotian / Nelles: Großstadt und Soziale Bewegungs , Berlin 1983.
• A new identity for the peace movement . In: M. Kaldor / Z. Mlynar / D.Esche et al .: East-West Dialogue, Peace is indivisible , Berlin 1985.
• Can the green crisis still be turned productively? . In: The Greens: From the hardship of the levels , Bonn 1988
• The green threshold . In: E. Laclau: The making of political identities , London, New York, Verso, 1994.
• Arendt's way of thinking and ways of opening the democratic question . In: cuts, Hannah Arendt's political thinking today , edited by Antonia Grunenberg and Lothar Probst, Edition Temmen , Bremen 1995.
• What does resistance to depoliticization mean? What is at stake . In: Herfried Münkler's challenge to the hegemonic way of thinking of the political, Can one break open a blocked discourse in Germany about the republican embedding of the democratic? , Ed. By Wolfgang Röhr, ad fontes, Hamburg 2001.

Translations (selection)

• Olof Gigon: Problemas fundamentales de la Filosofia antigua , Compañia general fabril, Buenos Aires 1962.
• Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel: Escritos de juventud , Fondo de Cultura Económica, imp., México 1978.
• Martin Heidegger: La pregunta por la cosa: la doctrina Kantiana de los principios trancendentales . Orbis, Barcelona 1986.

Web links

• http://www.hannah-arendt.de/zoltan-szankay/
• http://culturbazar.org/news/unser-freund-zoltan-szankay-ist-gestorben