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Germany: After the Mandarins

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Shaping Human Science Disciplines

Part of the book series: Socio-Historical Studies of the Social and Human Sciences ((SHSSHS))

Abstract

German public life has been preoccupied with coming to terms with the Nazi past for decades. While the SSH were seen as an element of the re-education program, the power structures in West-German universities remained at first relatively untouched, opening possibilities for personal continuities to different degrees. Nevertheless, the authoritarian and extremely elitist habitus of the German professoriate disappeared within a generation and-a-half. After establishing the historical constitution of the academic and intellectual field from post-war, the establishment of the German Democratic Republic, 1968, 1989 to the Bologna process and the present, the chapter presents comparative narrative accounts and quantitative analysis of seven SSH disciplines over 70 years. A final section presents an analysis of German SSH scholars as public intellectuals.

We want to thank the following individuals for either providing expertise in preparing the report or commenting an earlier version of this paper: Mitchell Ash, Gerhard Göhler, Harald Hagemann, Manfred Heinemann, Andreas Hess, Nicole Holzhauser, Dirk Kaesler, Dirk Kemper, Marianne Kneuer, Heinz D. Kurz, Wolfgang L. Reiter, Reinhold Sackmann, Katharina Scherke, Irmingard Staeuble, Richard Sturn, and John Torpey. Of course, responsibility for any errors solely lies with the authors of this chapter.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    In 1950, the working population of West-Germany amounted to about 23 million, it grew up to 1989 to about 30 million (before unification) and by the year 2000 has grown further to more than 38 million. In other words, the working population grew by the factor of 1.6, whereas the number of professors multiplied by the factor of 20.

  2. 2.

    Three more Reichsuniversitäten were outside of the German-speaking territories after 1945: The old German Charles University in Prague, the University of Strasbourg, which became German speaking after the defeat of France, and the short living university in Posen, later: Poznan.

  3. 3.

    Excluded are also Universities for Applied Science and their counterparts.

  4. 4.

    In the early 1950s about one-tenth of the personnel belonged to this composite group of refugees and dismissed professors. Unfortunately, there are no detailed statistics for the number of returnees for the disciplines under consideration here. For economics, see Hesse (2010); for sociology, see Fleck (2011), Chapter 7.

  5. 5.

    If not otherwise indicated data have been collected for the present purpose inside the INTERCO-SSH project, http://www.interco-ssh.eu/.

  6. 6.

    There is no comprehensive history of German philosophy after 1945, see for shorter overviews Wolf-Gazo (1980) and Schnädelbach (1994).

  7. 7.

    Continued from 1949 onwards, with the subtitle Neue Folge, published by Duncker & Humblot.

  8. 8.

    The exception is the famous Archiv für Sozialwissenschaft und Sozialpolitik, lately edited by Joseph A. Schumpeter and Emil Lederer, which stopped publishing immediately after Hitler became Reichskanzler in 1933. Plans of the publisher to reopen it after the war did not materialize.

  9. 9.

    There is one originally Austrian journal Zeitschrift für Nationalökonomie, now: Journal of Economics which was founded in 1929 and one postwar outlet from Switzerland Kyklos, founded in 1947.

  10. 10.

    It is worth mentioning that German economists could manage to secure some niches even during the Nazi regime, see Janssen (2012).

  11. 11.

    The history of German psychology is comparably well researched, see from Ash and Geuter (1985) to Lück and Guski-Leinwand (2014).

  12. 12.

    It is worth noting that this was before Tylor in Oxford (1884) and Boas at Clark University (1888).

  13. 13.

    Jäger (2007). An even more prominent case, Romance studies scholar Hans Robert Jauß who played a crucial role in interdisciplinary research, made headlines in 2016 when his former university commissioned a historian to find out the truth about his Nazi past, see Westemeier (2016).

  14. 14.

    In 1954, they comprise economic sciences, law and the ‘sciences of society’ (Gesellschaftswissenschaften); in 1962, they were labeled as Marxism–Leninism, journalism, economics, and law.

  15. 15.

    For an institutional history of philosophy in the GDR see Maffeis (2007).

  16. 16.

    In official nomenclature: C3, C4 and W3, W2 respectively.

  17. 17.

    Economics in this figure comprises Volkswirtschaftslehre (political economy), Finanzwissenschaft (public economics), Ökonometrie (econometrics) and Internationale Wirtschaft (international economics). Betriebswirtschaftslehre (business economics) is not included here.

  18. 18.

    Bender (2007), Brechenmacher (2010), Conze (2009), Glaeßner (2006), Görtemaker (1999), Herbert (2014), Kielmansegg (2000), Wehler (2008), Winkler (2014, 2015).

  19. 19.

    Any name, which intuitively seems to be missing, is with the highest probability amongst those that were mentioned less frequently in this sample.

  20. 20.

    We excluded from further consideration two more politicians with a background in academia, Ludwig Erhard and Karl Schiller, because they became known for their political doings and not for any of their scholarly contributions.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. University of Graz, Graz, Austria

    Matthias Duller, Christian Fleck & Rafael Y. Schögler

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  1. Matthias Duller
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  2. Christian Fleck
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Correspondence to Matthias Duller .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Sociology, University of Graz, Graz, Austria

    Christian Fleck

  2. Department of Sociology, University of Graz, Graz, Austria

    Matthias Duller

  3. Department of History, Central European University, Budapest, Hungary

    Victor Karády

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Duller, M., Fleck, C., Schögler, R.Y. (2019). Germany: After the Mandarins. In: Fleck, C., Duller, M., Karády, V. (eds) Shaping Human Science Disciplines. Socio-Historical Studies of the Social and Human Sciences. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-92780-0_3

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-92780-0_3

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