Institutions

The Hamburg Institute for Social Research (Hamburger Institut für Sozialforschung, or HIS for short, est. 1984) shows – and quite impressively at that – what a private, independent foundation can achieve. HIS research projects, conferences, workshops and exhibitions are now firmly established in German academia.

The Hamburg Institute for Social Research currently employs about 50 people, about half of whom work in the field of research. Most of them are sociologists and historians. And what they do at the HIS is, first and foremost, talk – to one another, that is. Multidisciplinarianism is the rule, robust research the result. Empirical social research, historical analysis and social science theory fuse here. This triad to describe the approach is deliberately couched in broad terms: the subjects and areas of enquiry should emerge out of interdisciplinary exchange between researchers, not out of a set programme of subject-matter to be covered.

Current organizational breakdown: three research units

At present this approach translates into the formation of three research units. One unit, called "The Society of the Federal Republic of Germany", probes the overall composition of German society in all its structures against the backdrop of the specific burden of Germany’s past, and explores the present-day social changes with their risks and opportunities for the future.

Another field of enquiry, "Nation and Society", investigates general questions of political socialization. Its objects of theoretical interest are the legitimation of state power, changing forms of the organization of power, and changes in the formation of social norms.

The third unit, "Theory and History of Violence", concentrates on the experience of violence in contemporary history, analyzing terrorism and warfare in the 20th and 21st centuries.

The founder: Jan Philipp Reemtsma

The research in these three areas wouldn’t be possible in the first place without the institute’s founder, Jan Philipp Reemtsma. Born in 1952 in Bonn, Reemtsma is a professor of modern German literature and one of the most illustrious patrons of the German academic and cultural scene. At the age of 26, the young scholar sold his shares in his father’s Reemtsma Group, which now forms part of the Imperial Tobacco Group, the fourth-biggest tobacco concern in the world. That made him a multimillionaire overnight. Having severed all ties to the business, Reemtsma regularly donates funds to promote scholarship and the arts. He has been a literature professor at the University of Hamburg since 1996 and director of the Hamburg Institute for Social Research since 1990.

The controversial Wehrmacht exhibition

The HIS is likely to be associated for some time to come with a project unprecedented in postwar Germany’s museums and memorials. In 1995 the HIS put together a travelling exhibition entitled Vernichtungskrieg. Verbrechen der Wehrmacht 1941-1944 ("War of Annihilation. Crimes of the Wehrmacht 1941–1944") about the German army’s involvement in war crimes on the Eastern Front during World War II. It displayed documentation showing that the SS and SA (Storm Troopers) weren’t the only ones responsible for the systematic war of extermination and the Holocaust, the "regular" German army was also involved. It soon transpired that the German public had been hitherto oblivious to this fact, although the exhibition didn’t even include new research findings, but merely collated and condensed what was already known to historians. The resonance was tremendous: heated controversy broke out in every part of society, and all of a sudden neo-Nazis were demonstrating at the exhibition venues. When shortcomings were subsequently found in the documentation of a little under a score of the 1,500-odd photos, the show was temporarily withdrawn in November 1999. A revised version went on tour two years later, albeit without altering or diluting the basic message. On conclusion of the exhibition in 1994, Reemtsma concluded: "People will never again talk about the Wehrmacht under National Socialism the way they did before 1995."

The media: Mittelweg 36 & Hamburger Edition

Every academic institution needs a well-aimed and well-balanced media presence if it is to reach an academic as well as a lay public. To this end the HIS has an in-house bimonthly journal called Mittelweg 36, a publication forum for the foundation’s projects. It also has its very own publishing house called Hamburger Edition that makes pubic the results of the individual projects. With 10 to 12 new publications a year, Hamburger Edition turns out a copious "crop" of literature.

Says Reemtsma: "Influencing specialist and public discourse in such a way that a few new questions are posed and familiar subjects are discussed anew – an academic institute can’t do any more than that."