Arnold Bergstraesser

Arnold Bergstraesser was born in Darmstadt on 14 July 1896 and died in Freiburg/Br. on 24. February 1964. After serving in World War I, he studied history, sociology and economics under Eberhard Gothein and Max and Alfred Weber, taking his doctorate at the University of Heidelberg in 1923. He played a leading role in the democratic German students' movement (Deutsche Studententage) during the Weimar Republic, and founded the Deutscher Akademischer Austauschdienst (DAAD) (German Academic Exchange Service). In 1927 he took his habilitation in economics under Alfred Weber at Heidelberg and the following year accepted a chair in foreign affairs at the same university. Two publications of the early 1930s are key-stones in Bergstraesser's political thought: Staat und Wirtschaft Frankreichs, Vol. II of Ernst Robert Curtius and Arnold Bergstraesser, Frankreich, Stuttgart 1931, contains the basic elements of his synoptic approach to political science, i.e., the integration of economic, historical, cultural, political and institutional factors. Sinn und Grenzen der Verständigung zwischen Nationen, Munich/Leipzig, 1930, makes the case for eschewing intellectual provincialism inevitable in thinking within the confines of the national state, and propagates an exchange between the intellectual traditions of different cultures. With the ascendancy of National Socialism, Bergstraesser had to leave Germany. From 1937–1953 he taught in the USA, finally as Professor of German Literature and History at the University of Chicago. After the World War II, Bergstraesser actively promoted German-American understanding: in 1954, together with Albert Schweitzer, he organised the Goethe Conference in Aspen, Colorado, and, with George N. Shuster edited a Deutsche Geschichte, New York, 1944.

In 1954 he returned to Germany to take the Chair of Sociology and Political Science at the University of Freiburg/Br. From 1955 to 1959 he was Director of the Forschungsinstitut der Deutschen Gesellschaft für Auswärtige Politik and editor of the Jahrbuch für lnternationale Politik, President of the German UNESCO Commission, Chairman of the Atlantikbrücke e. V., Chairman of the Arbeitsgemeinschaft Bürger im Staat, Baden-Württemberg, founder of the lnstitut for Politische Bildung, Buchenbach, and a co-founder of the Politische Akademie at Tutzing, Bavaria. He strongly favoured the teaching of civics in German secondary schools, and is the founder of the Freiburg school of political science.

In his Freiburg years Bergstraesser enthusiastically advocated a normative approach to politics rooted in intellectual and cultural traditions, based on a practical, empirical and synoptic analysis of political reality. This has proved to be particularly fruitful approach to the Third World. Arnold Bergstraesser was one of the first academics in the Federal Republic to grasp the importance of this new dimension in world politics and to apply it in political science.

Bergstraesser's publications during his Freiburg years include:

• Die weltpolitische Dynamik der Gegenwart (The Dynamics of Contemporary International Politics), in: Die Internationale Politik 1955, München 1958, S. 1-51
• Politik in Wissenschaft und Bildung - Schriften und Reden (Politics in Science and Education – Writings and Speeches), Freiburg 1961, 2 1966
• Goethe's Image of Man and Society, (new print.) Freiburg 1962 (orig. Chicago 1949)
• Gedanken zu Verfahren und Aufgaben der kulturwissenschaftlichen Gegenwartsforschung (Thoughts on Methods and Tasks of Contemporary Cultural Research), in: G.-K. Kindermann (Ed.), Kulturen im Umbruch, Freiburg 1962, S. 401-422
• Klassiker der Staatsphilosophie 1, Texte und Einführungen (Classics of Political Philosophy I, Texts with Introductions), Stuttgart 1962, 2 1975 (with Dieter Oberndörfer)
• Weltpolitik als Wissenschaft. Geschichtliches Bewußtsein und politische Entscheidung, Köln und Opladen 1965 (ed. by Dieter Oberndörfer).
• Staat und Dichtung (State and Literature), Freiburg 1967 (ed. by. Erika Bergstraesser).