Foul play between intellectual rivals – The mutilation of Heidelberg and Frankfurt Humanities from the late 1920s to the 1930s

Frankfurt's and Heidelberg's 1920's and early 1930's sociology was groundbreaking. Max Weber and Alfred Weber, Norbert Elias, Karl Mannheim, Karl Jaspers, Talcott Parsons, Max Horkheimer, Theodor Adorno, Hannah Arendt, Erich Fromm and Walter Benjamin are just some of those today classical thinkers who were active there. Despite their respective importance, their personal relations were far from harmonic and often competing.

In his presentation, Jitschin will focus on three aspects of these intellectual rivalries:

1) The struggle between the Weber- and the George-circles in the first half of the 1920s. Once Max and Alfred Weber tried to establish the new discipline of sociology, they faced strong opposition in the humanities. The George-circle had an enormous intellectual attraction and it had contributed a number of bestselling books to the young German republic. This group regarded Weber and his disciples with scepticism.

2) The overlapping conflicts between Karl Mannheim, Alfred Weber, the communist student fraction and Ernst Curtius in the second half of the 1920s. This line of conflicts is hitherto relatively unknown. Nevertheless, it has its impact on the direction of sociological research until today.

3) The social rivalry between Karl Mannheim and the Frankfurt school. When Mannheim became a professor in Frankfurt, he almost immediately got in the confrontation with Horkheimer and the Institut für Sozialforschung. This conflict had several lines of overlapping interests and did not stop before 1937 when all of them had already left Frankfurt for exile.

Since 2013 Adrian Jitschin has been head of the Frankfurt office of the German distance-learning university FernUniversität Hagen. Jitschin is member of the Norbert Elias Foundation Board. His doctoral thesis concerned the Life Assurance in India.

Selected Publications: On the traces of Norbert Elias in Paris, in: Figurations 48 (2018); Why Elias did not go to Rome, in: Figurations 43 (2015); Family background of Norbert Elias, in: Figurations 30 (2013); From Economic to Political Reality: Forming a Nationalized Indian Life Insurance Market, in: Robin Pearson (Ed.): The Development of International Insurance, New York 2010; Eheschließungen heute. Soziologische Untersuchung zu Heiratsgründen. Marburg 2007.