Leggewie, Claus

Tracing recent history and influencing its outcome – which might still be open – by shaping public opinion is university professor Leggewie’s self-imposed work order. So far he has been doing this with approximately fifty books (which are also in English and Japanese) and even more essays on the Nazi past and how people have still not come to terms with it, 1968 as history, Islam in Europe, globalisation, new digital media. In addition to this the academic, who was born in 1950, has also over the past thirty years enjoyed expressing his opinions on controversial current issues in the newspapers or on television, always a little avant-garde, that is to say preferably one thought ahead of the present-day powers of insistence. From time to time he has had Franco-German European parliamentarian Daniel Cohn-Bendit from the party "Die Grünen" or "Les Verts" (the Greens) on board as a co-author.

Leggewie has been Director of the Kulturwissenschaftliche Institut / Institute for Advanced Study in the Humanities (KWI) in Essen since June 2007. There for the past twenty years successive international research groups have been working on short-term projects, usually lasting between one and four semesters. The main topics that the new leader wants to promote include climate change and its effects on cultures.

Leggewie comes from the University of Gießen. From 2001 onwards he was Managing Director of a Centre for Media and Interactivity that he co-founded here. It is concerned with the new freedoms (and dangers) for the individual as a result of network-based communication, from home-shopping, chat-rooms and personal blogs to e-learning. Since 2006 he has been helping to work on the recently-founded Giessener Zentrum Östliches Europa (Giessen Centre for Eastern Europe) at the same time, which is an interdisciplinary regional science platform. There, his principal subject is Turkey, with which more than two million people who have a migration background feel allegiance. In this context, Leggewie turns out to be a researcher of religion, who considers Islam to be a power in its own right in a multicultural Europe.

Social change and everything it encompasses currently has evidently become Leggewie’s trademark subject. The circumspect social scientist is first and foremost a qualified political theorist from his conventional professional training. In 1978 he did his doctorate at the University of Göttingen with a thesis on the French colonial regime in Algeria, in 1984 he passed the standard examination to teach at university level (Habilitation). In 1989 Leggewie was appointed Professor of Politics at Giessen. The next career step was the Max Weber Chair for German and European studies at New York University (1995 – 97). The man of letters spent the academic year 1999/2000 as a Fellow at the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin (Institute for Advanced Study), in the most prestigious studying environment for Humanities in Germany.

Trend scout of public opinion

Because Leggewie does not write for (specialist) colleagues, but for politically-minded "active citizens", his publications sometimes or for some people give the impression of popular science or scientific journalism. DIE ZEIT, the leading German weekly, once called him the "racy reporter of the academics", always giving chase through time and its change, as it were. Elsewhere Leggewie is dubbed a "trend scout" of public opinion.

In any case he is always quick to seize the latest topic, for instance in 1998 with a thick book entitled Von Schneider zu Schwerte. Das ungewöhnliche Leben eines Mannes, der aus der Geschichte lernen wollte (From Schneider to Schwerte. The unusual life of a man who wanted to learn from history). Just three years earlier the "liberal socialist" principal of the University of Aachen, Hans Schwerte (1970 – 73) was exposed as Nazi official Hans-Ernst Schneider. Leggewie painted a picture of someone who despite not having dealt with his dark past had atoned for it professionally and in the context of his institution. And in doing so he even made himself worthy of the Federal Republic, according to Leggewie. The idea that post-war democracy and reconstruction in Germany could only be successful because of the widespread silence about the past of those involved is a long-acknowledged historical interpretation put forward by the philosopher Hermann Lübbe. But in Schwerte / Schneider, Leggewie gave this (placatory) theory a real face and a biography.

Leggewie is an author of the German success story in the past sixty years. After the foundation of the Federal Republic in the forties, he regards the student movement, linked with the key year "1968", as a successful "re-foundation". Leggewie was able to witness the spiritual and physical militancy in this process right in Göttingen. But in retrospect what is important is "Even people who had flirted with street violence usually became peace-loving, law-abiding civil servants, freelancers, teachers, scientists, opinion leaders, politicians or political advisors." This is how a culture of remembrance is created for those who were there.

History for Leggewie continues to be a question of generations in an actual or representational sense. In the mid-nineties he produced a book about the "89 generation", the young people from the time when the wall came down, the first generation with full awareness of the united Germany. In the course of his most recent appointment to the KWI, the jury highlighted this work in particular. In it, the author hopes that the new youth will see politics as their trump card. Even if that remains a dream, for Leggewie this is reason enough to work on behalf of this.