Saying goodbye is a beginning.

That sounds like one of those platitudes that have always interested the sociologist Tilman Allert enormously.

After ten years as a senior professor, i.e. as a university lecturer, who will continue to teach, examine and, of course, research, even after retirement, he will end his work at the Goethe University in Frankfurt on June 13th.

With something that is “not supposed to be a farewell lecture at all”.

But the entry into existence as a full-time writing sociologist.

Eva Maria Magel

Senior cultural editor of the Rhein-Main-Zeitung.

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Allert, who started with “The mouth has opened.

From the Taste of Childhood" and "Close to Touching: From the Beginnings of Thinking" had repeatedly resorted to his own - childish - biography in recent years to continue his "Sociology of Small Things" or "Sociology of the Everyday". Saying goodbye to family, friends and colleagues about the start of a new major project: the beginning of an autobiographical novel.

A sociological one, of course.

"How We Became Who We Are"

Which has a lot to do with what has occupied researcher Allert, who was born on May 12, 1947 to an Azerbaijani-Georgian Muslim father and a Protestant North German mother, in recent years.

"WWWWW" is what he jokingly calls the long-standing series of lectures "for the city's population" that he has held in the Frankfurt City Library every summer semester: "How we became, who we are" analyzed a total of 60 German biographies.

From Josef Ratzinger to Hildegard Knef to Jil Sander, a picture of the Federal Republic should also emerge from the CVs.

Allert selected the guest speakers just as he gave the first and last lectures each semester.

"Karl Lagerfeld's booth was jam-packed," he recalls and laughs: "Most thought he'd come himself.

Allert takes that with humor.

For decades he has brought the “classics of bourgeois sociology up and down” to the students: “Weber, Simmel, Freud”, he lists, his seminar classic “Sociology of Love” regularly came along, and his colloquium, which traditionally includes After a glass of wine, interested laypeople, colleagues from near and far and ambitious students met.

Allert himself became passionate about sociology in Freiburg, with Heinrich Popitz, and Rainer Lepsius and the recently deceased Ulrich Oevermann also influenced him.

which traditionally ended with a glass of wine, interested laypeople, colleagues from near and far and ambitious students met.

Allert himself became passionate about sociology in Freiburg, with Heinrich Popitz, and Rainer Lepsius and the recently deceased Ulrich Oevermann also influenced him.

which traditionally ended with a glass of wine, interested laypeople, colleagues from near and far and ambitious students met.

Allert himself became passionate about sociology in Freiburg, with Heinrich Popitz, and Rainer Lepsius and the recently deceased Ulrich Oevermann also influenced him.

"Farewell and realization don't go together," says Allert, who recommends that every colleague continue as a senior professor.

Because knowledge is not tied to age.

And because it is one of the paradoxes of the university that it is the professors who learn.

From the students who asked questions you never expected.

You take them home with you, “they continue to differentiate,” says Allert.

The uninterested and “discussion avant-garde”

He has absolutely nothing to do with the possible complaints about the fact that the students come with worse and worse prerequisites and that they are not making any appreciable gains in their Bologna courses.

There are always a few uninterested people everywhere, he says – but there is always a small “avant-garde of discussions” that make discussions in seminars and colloquia lively and interesting.

"I never got bored," says Allert, who was passionate about teaching.

He just didn't get into writing as intensely as he always wanted.

Now is the time for that, no longer in the office at the university, but at home in Niedernhausen, where Allert has built a bumblebee castle in front of the window overlooking the garden.

A unique selling proposition because everyone now has bees?

"I think bumblebees are nicer," says Allert.

A good balance when he lifts his eyes from the manuscript.

After all, even for a sociologist it is not easy to take himself as an object and to describe “how I became who I am”.

What Allert is in any case at the end of his time as an active university lecturer: "Grateful".