Lepenies, Wolf 1941- (Wolf Dietrich Lepenies)

PERSONAL:

Born January 11, 1941, in Deuthen, East Prussia, Poland; son of Fritz and Helene C. Lepenies; married Annette Hieronimi, April 13, 1967; children: Julia, Philipp, Robert. Education: University of Münster, D.Phil., 1967; Free University of Berlin, Ph.D., 1970. Hobbies and other interests: Basketball, tennis, classical music.

ADDRESSES:

Office—Wissenschaftskolleg Berlin, Wissenschaftskollegzu, Berlin 33, Germany.

CAREER:

Wissenschaftskolleg Berlin, Berlin, Germany, permanent fellow, 1984—, rector, 1986—. Free University of Berlin, professor of sociology, 1970-77, 1984-2006; Center for Humanities, Wesleyan University, Middletown, CT, fellow, 1973; University of Texas, Austin, visiting professor, 1975; École des Hautes Études, Paris, France, director of studies, 1977; Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton, NJ, member, 1979-80, long-term member, 1982-84; Collège de France, Paris, chaire européenne, 1991-92.

MEMBER:

Deutsche Akademie für Sprache und Dichtung, Akademie der Wissenschaften zu Berlin, Academia Europaea (London, England), Royal Swedish Academy (foreign member).

AWARDS, HONORS:

Alex von Humboldt prize, French Minister for Science, Paris, 1984; Kulturpreis, City of Koblenz, Federal Republic of Germany, 1987; Karl Vossler prize, Government of Bavaria, Federal Republic of Germany, 1988; Friedenspreis des Deutschen Buchhandels, 2006.

WRITINGS:

(With Hanns Henning Ritter) Orte des wilden Denkens: Zur Anthropologie von Claude Lévi-Strauss, Suhrkamp (Frankfurt am Main, Germany), 1970.

Kritik der Anthropologie: Marx und Freud, Gehlen und Habermas, über Aggression, C. Hanser (Munich, Germany), 1971.

Soziologische Anthropologie: Materialien, C. Hanser (Munich, Germany), 1971.

Eine vergessene Tradition der deutschen Anthropologie: Wissenschaft vom Menschen und Politik bei Georg Forster, K. Albert (Freiburg, Germany), 1973.

Das Ende der Naturgeschichte: Wandel kultureller Selbstverständlichkeiten in den Wissenschaften des 18. und 19. Jahrhunderts, C. Hanser (Munich, Germany), 1976.

Die Wissenschaften und ihre Geschichte, Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht (Göttingen, Germany), 1978.

Geschichte der Soziologie: Studien zur kognitiven, sozialen und historischen Identität einer Disziplin, Suhrkamp (Frankfurt am Main, Germany), 1981.

Melancholie und Gesellschaft, Suhrkamp (Frankfurt am Main, Germany), 1981, translation by Jeremy Gaines and Doris Jones published as Melancholy and Society, Harvard University Press (Cambridge, MA), 1992.

(Editor, with Loren Graham and P. Weingart) Functions and Uses of Disciplinary Histories, Kluwer Academic (Hingham, MA), 1983.

Die drei Kulturen: Soziologie zwischen Literatur und Wissenschaft, Hanser (Munich, Germany), 1985, translation by R.J. Hollingdale published as Between Literature and Science: The Rise of Sociology, Cambridge University Press (New York, NY), 1988.

Wissenschaften im Nationalsozialismus, Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht (Göttingen, Germany), 1986.

Autoren und Wissenschaftler im 18. Jahrhundert: Linné, Buffon, Winckelmann, Georg Foster, Erasmus Darwin, C. Hanser (Munich, Germany), 1988.

Gefährliche Wahlverwandtschaften: Essays zur Wissenschaftsgeschichte, P. Reclam (Stuttgart, Germany), 1989.

Aktuelle Probleme der europäischen Wissenkultur und Wissenschaftspolitik, Robert-Bosch-Stiftung (Stuttgart, Germany), 1990.

Folgen einer unerhörten Begebenheit: Die Deutschen nach der Vereinigung, Siedler (Berlin, Germany), 1992.

Aufstieg und Fall der Intellektuellen in Europa, Campus Verlag (New York, NY), 1992.

Benimm und Erkenntnis: Über die notwendige Rückkehr der Werte in die Wissenschaften. Die Sozialwissenschaften nach dem Ende der Geschichte: Zwei Vorträge, Suhrkamp (Frankfurt am Main, Germany), 1997.

Sainte-Beuve: Auf der Schwelle zur Moderne, C. Hanser (Munich, Germany), 1997.

Sozialwissenschaft und sozialer Wandel: Ein Erfahrungsbericht, BIS, (Oldenburg, Germany), 1999.

(Editor) Georges Canguilhem, Wissenschaftsgeschichte und Epistemologie, Gesammelte Aufsätze, translated by Michael Bischoff & Walter Seitter, Suhrkamp (Frankfurt am Main, Germany), 2001.

(Editor) Entangled Histories and Negotiated Universals: Centers and Peripheries in a Changing World, Campus Verlag (Frankfurt am Main, Germany), 2003.

Kultur und Politik: Deutsche Geschichten, C. Hanser (Munich, Germany), 2006.

The Seduction of Culture in German History, Princeton University Press (Princeton, NJ), 2006.

Wolf Lepenies: Ansprachen aus Anlass der Verleihung, Börsenverein des Deutschen Buchhandels (Frankfurt am Main, Germany), 2006.

Warum war Henry James so schlechter Laune? Geistesarbeiter und ihre Freunde, Berlin University Press (Berlin, Germany), 2007.

Regular contributor, Die Welt.

SIDELIGHTS:

German sociologist Wolf Lepenies is "an erudite scientific author, an eloquent biographer and a thought-provoking essayist who has demonstrated in both word and deed the indissoluble link between knowledge and actions, between morality and science," declared a writer for the Börsenverein des Deutschen Buchhandels Web site. "In the midst of the opposing postures of enthusiasm and scepticism so popular in art and science today, Wolf Lepenies chose a ‘third way’—the pursuit of a form of intellectual integrity once represented by Diderot," the Web site contributor continued. "He sought out the ‘active intellectual’ in history and held him up as a model of civic courage and concern for public welfare." "The theme of the ‘intellectual’ plays a key role in Wolf Lepenies' writings," wrote Marek Kwiek in his contribution to the book Philosophie an der Schwelle des 21. Jahrhunderts, citing as examples Melancholie und Gesellschaft (translated as Melancholy and Society), Die drei Kulturen: Soziologie zwischen Literatur und Wissenschaft (translated as Between Literature and Science: The Rise of Sociology), and Aufstieg und Fall der Intellektuellen in Europa. Francois Hartog, writing for the UNESCO Courier, explained: "He believes that intellectuals have an important political role to play in Europe today and calls on them to abandon purely ideological debates for the sake of more immediate, practical problems."

One of the duties of intellectuals in the modern European community is to reinterpret nationalism in the context of the European Union: "to attack the polarized image that exists everywhere in the European Community, according to which there are those who give and those who receive. There is little doubt as to who gives and who receives," Lepenies told Hartog. He added: "I think that working for the overthrow of this narrow-minded economic point of view in European thought is a very important intellectual task for the future." This is particularly important following the collapse of the Soviet Union and its East German ally, and the corresponding elimination of the Berlin Wall and the reunification of Germany. Lepenies has devoted an entire volume, Folgen einer unerhörten Begebenheit: Die Deutschen nach der Vereinigung, to "tak[ing] stock of German reunification," the Börsenverein des Deutschen Buchhandels writer stated, "in the context of West German presumptuousness and East German resentment."

Even Lepenies's Melancholy and Society is less an examination of a person's emotional state than an analysis of a type of intellectual and political state of mind. It is not an investigation of melancholy itself but of what its presence signifies. Lepenies suggests that when people see themselves as melancholic their society is in crisis. This is correspondingly reflected in feelings of powerlessness, ennui, and expressions of fantasy. "Utopia is alleged to be the melancholic's political fiction," Stjepan G. Mestrovic declared in Social Forces, "in the sense that it denotes a passive acceptance of impossible perfection. This is an intriguing insight." "In the end this is a book about ‘bourgeois boredom’ (a phrase apparently inspired by Saint-Simon) in modern philosophical thought from approximately 1600 to the present, rather than a treatment of its concrete historical manifestations," wrote G.S. Rousseau in Medical History. "The product is systematic speculation about melancholy rather than historical appearances, and it is the labyrinth of theoretical speculation that fascinates Lepenies." Tracing "melancholy" from the Renaissance through the French aristocracy in the seventeenth century and the German middle class in the nineteenth century, Lepenies shows that modern political apathy has a long history. The author "wants to expand modern melancholy, to enlarge its intellectual spaces rather than close them by definitive prescriptive theories," Rousseau continued. "This is, after all, a societal and hypothetical, not a scientific and empirical, study of modern lassitude. It is a book about society."

The Seduction of Culture in German History is an examination of "the proclivity of German intellectuals to substitute high cultural ideals for an empirical and democratic politics," explained Joe Amato in the Journal of Social History. "Culture, for them, masks civic responsibility." Since the nineteenth century, Lepenies points out, German culture has been invoked to support German politics. "Cultural arguments supported military goals during the First World War," Amato continued. "Aesthetics displaced politics and civic responsibility during the Weimar Republic. The Third Reich promoted itself as a cultural restoration. The allied bombing on Dresden was considered as an atrocity against Germany's cultural treasures rather than German life." The obsession with culture was expressed even as the Reich crumbled in the final days of World War II. "On the night of April 12, [1945]," shortly before the Red Army began entering the city, "the Berlin Philharmonic was busy performing Beethoven's Violin Concerto, Bruckner's Eighth Symphony, and the finale of Wagner's Gotterdammerung," Victorino Matus wrote in First Things: A Monthly Journal of Religion and Public Life. Quoting author Antony Beevor in his book The Fall of Berlin 1945, Matus wrote: "‘It is said,’ writes … Beevor … ‘that … the Nazi Party had organized Hitler Youth members to stand in uniform with baskets of cyanide capsules and offer them to members of the audience as they left.’"

After the end of the war, in the aftermath of the Holocaust, major German intellectuals abandoned the idea of German cultural superiority. "The central figure" of The Seduction of Culture in German History "is Thomas Mann," Diethelm Prowe declared in the Historian, "whose intellectual journey from the unpolitical national German to fervent American citizen and returnee to Europe in comfortable and democratic Switzerland emerges as the intellectual bond holding the book together." "Shortly after the end of the war in Europe," Matus explained, "Thomas Mann … spoke of his country's ‘seclusiveness and melancholy unfitness for the world.’ He ‘reminded his audience of how inwardness and the romantic counterrevolution had led to the disastrous separation of the speculative from the sociopolitical sphere that made the Germans unfit for democracy.’" For Lepenies, the question facing a reunified Germany is how the reunified country will create a space for itself as a major democracy in a newly united Europe.

BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL SOURCES:

BOOKS

Czerwinska-Schupp, Ewa, editor, Philosophie an der Schwelle des 21. Jahrhunderts, Peter Lang (New York, NY), 2003.

PERIODICALS

American Historical Review, December 1, 1990, Harry Liebersohn, review of Between Literature and Science: The Rise of Sociology, p. 1491; October 1, 1993, Ray Porter, review of Melancholy and Society, p. 1209; June 1, 2007, Celia Applegate, review of The Seduction of Culture in German History, p. 802.

American Journal of Sociology, January 1, 1993, Michael Hammond, review of Melancholy and Society, p. 981.

British Journal of Sociology, December 1, 1989, Kieran Flanagan, review of Between Literature and Science, p. 702.

Central European History, June 1, 2007, Martin Jay, review of The Seduction of Culture in German History, p. 343.

Choice: Current Reviews for Academic Libraries, February 1, 2007, M. Shevin-Coetzee, review of The Seduction of Culture in German History, p. 1047.

Contemporary Sociology, September 1, 1989, Howard L. Kaye, review of Between Literature and Science, p. 787.

First Things: A Monthly Journal of Religion and Public Life, January 1, 2007, Victorino Matus, "The Closing of the German Mind," p. 50.

Historian, March 22, 2007, Diethelm Prowe, review of The Seduction of Culture in German History, p. 158.

Isis, September 1, 1989, Henrika Kuklick, review of Between Literature and Science, p. 512.

Journal of Modern History, September 1, 1991, Fritz Ringer, review of Between Literature and Science, p. 555.

Journal of Social History, September 22, 2007, Joe Amato, review of The Seduction of Culture in German History, p. 226.

Medical History, July, 1993, G.S. Rousseau, review of Melancholy and Society, p. 342.

Nation, May 29, 2006, Andreas Huyssen, review of The Seduction of Culture in German History, p. 34.

Philosophy of Science, March 1, 1991, Martin S. Staum, review of Between Literature and Science, p. 135.

Publishers Weekly, February 6, 2006, review of The Seduction of Culture in German History, p. 59.

Social Forces, June 1, 1991, Bruce Mazlish, review of Between Literature and Science, p. 1249; March 1, 1994, Stjepan G. Mestrovic, review of Melancholy and Society, p. 906.

Sociology, February 1, 1989, John Orr, review of Between Literature and Science, p. 149.

Times Literary Supplement, April 7, 2006, "Clever Tyranny," p. 5.

UNESCO Courier, December 1, 1994, Francois Hartog, "Wolf Lepenies Talks to Francois Hartog," p. 5.

Weekly Standard, June 19, 2006, "The German Problem; It's the Conflict between Culture and Politics."

ONLINE

Börsenverein des Deutschen Buchhandels,http://www.boersenverein.de/ (August 16, 2008), "Award Winners 2006: Wolf Lepenies."

H-Net: Humanities and Social Sciences Online,http://www.h-net.org/ (November 1, 2006), Todd Weir, review of The Seduction of Culture in German History.

Kulturstiftung des Bundes,http://www.kulturstiftung-des-bundes.de/ (August 16, 2008), profile of author.

NNDB,http://www.nndb.com/ (August 16, 2008), author profile.

Princeton University Press Web site,http://press.princeton.edu/ (August 16, 2008), author profile.