Ulrich Oevermann was a special researcher. Born in 1940 in Heilbronn, he soon outgrew critical theory in order to develop his own sociology. It initially included studies on the class dependency of school success and language behavior, as well as analyzes of communication in families. Oevermann, who moved to the Max Planck Institute for Human Development in Berlin in 1968, found the empirical reality of education not in statistics or surveys, but in tape recordings of parental conversations with four-year-olds.
In doing so, he was faced with the question of how to find out what is presupposed, assumed and concealed in such conversations.
This led to what was later dubbed 'objective hermeneutics' and to one of the very few schools established within German sociology.
In 1977 Oevermann accepted a call from the Frankfurt Goethe University, where he taught sociology and social psychology until his retirement in 2008.
Love of music and ornithology
Oevermann's focus was the observation that decisions have to be made constantly in social life because no patterns of action are available. There are constant crises, exemplary solutions that become routines, and again situations in which the available routines do not lead to any solutions. In a certain way, youth and puberty were therefore the exemplary case of human existence for Oevermann: as a crisis-ridden testing of roles in a biographical intermediate stage in order to gain stability in the subsequent period. His astonishing consequence of this was a polemic against compulsory schooling, because this subjects the children and young people to the classroom even without them being in a crisis. This thesis suited Oevermann, who grew up in the country without a father and without any joy in school.He turned to music and ornithology at an early age, both of which should have trained his sense of insightful details.
On the basis of his considerations on socialization, Ulrich Oevermann developed a theory of professions as those professions that offer scientifically based support in life crises and for this purpose enter into an individual working alliance with clients: doctors, pastors, teachers, lawyers. He wrote about religion, about the mass media, about poems by Charles Baudelaire and Lord Byron, about nursing. Much of it was published in anthologies, almost nothing in my own books and most of it only as a manuscript on the Internet. He was an informal mind for whom reality was not made up of points that he wanted to come up with. Anyone who met Oevermann in Frankfurt or elsewhere was quickly drawn into a very charming mixture of conversation and lecture.Ulrich Oevermann died on Monday at the age of eighty-one in Bern.