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Institute founder Reemtsma: End for reasons of age
Photo: Martin Schutt / dpa
He sold his shares in his family's inheritance, a cigarette factory, at the age of 27 and became a multimillionaire. In 1984, Jan-Philipp Reemtsma, who holds a doctorate in literature, founded the Hamburg Institute for Social Research (HIS) and financed it. Since then, it has been dedicated to the multi-layered social phenomena of violence in the present and the past.
One of the Institute's most spectacular projects was the traveling exhibition "War of Annihilation. Crimes of the Wehrmacht 1941-44«. An extensive archive on the history of protest movements in the Federal Republic of Germany produced major publications on the student movement and the RAF, among others.
But now founder Reemtsma has announced that 2028 will be the end at the institute's headquarters at Mittelweg 36 in Hamburg. In a press release, it is said that Institute Director Wolfgang Knöbl will then retire at the age of 65. "There will be no succession."
In the statement jointly signed by Reemtsma and Knöbl, the independence of the institute is emphasized as its strength – "in financial as well as in organizational terms, whereby both are interrelated."
»Very bad news for the social sciences«
As far as finances are concerned, the institute is financed exclusively from Reemtsma's private assets (apart from a few third-party funding), it says: "It cannot be financed from within its own operations."
From an organizational point of view, Reemtsma and Knöbl fear that a takeover by another institution would nevertheless lose the institute's strength to write its own agenda. It was not his intention "to found any social science institute under the direction or observance of any other research institution."
Thus, the prospect of an end to the HIS in 2028 sounds pretty definitive. Accordingly, the voices from the social sciences sound concerned, many seem somewhat surprised.
"That would be a bitter blow for the social sciences in Germany as well as for Hamburg as a science location," writes political sociologist Frank Stengel from Kiel at X (formerly Twitter). In the same place, the Islamic scholar Reinhard Schulze calls the plans "definitely a bad idea" and contradicts "the concern why the HIS was set up. There must be ways to ensure continuity through institutional reform."
Steffen Mau, a sociologist at Humboldt University in Berlin, spoke on social media of "very bad news for the social sciences." It is incomprehensible to him why such an important institution is being abandoned: "What else is attached to it in addition to research: Hamburger Edition, Soziopolis, Mittelweg 36, Archive. A really large-scale damage to the field!« For the Munich theoretician Sebastian Huhnholz, on the other hand, the closure does not come as a surprise: "The HIS was (his) life project, the planned closure by Reemtsma has a certain patronage stringency."
Feb