Max Weber Studies

[MWS 13.2 (2013) 279-283] ISSN 1470-8078 Wilhelm Hennis: Obituary1 Andreas Anter Anyone who has the good fortune to reach a very old age sometimes has the luck to become more lenient with age. Wilhelm Hennis had that good fortune; he was almost ninety years old and he became lenient with age—or to quote the song by Wolf Biermann, 'soft like all genu ine radicals'. Anyone who visited the great Weber researcher and the doyen of German political science in his last years in his domicile in Freiburg im Breisgau would scarcely have imagined that for decades Hennis had been one of the most factional figures in the discipline, with a passion for radical positions and courageous argument. Now he was almost conciliatory. After the death of his wife he was very withdrawn and very seldom ventured into public life, the last time in 2009 at the XXIV Congress of German Political Science Association in Kiel. He was awarded the Theodor-Eschenburg prize for a lifetime's work and Hennis made a short and furious speech of thanks, which, or course, ended with a quotation from Max Weber. He received a standing ovation from the Congress. It was a placatory leave-taking from the discipline. Some years before he had already given his large academic library with the manuscripts of his lectures and his started and finished works to the author of these lines and so had marked the conclusion of his decades long academic-journalistic work. Wilhelm Hennis, born 18 February 1923 in Hildesheim and died 10 November 2012 in Freiburg im Breisgau, was both a productive and a stimulating teacher. The works which came into being from a long publicistic life comprised almost twenty monographs, many of which were translated into other languages, over a hundred essays, and hundreds of articles for newspapers. Hennis in his publications found a public resonance, which hardly anyone else in the discipline achieved. They were not only debated within university circles, but were noted by a broader public. The Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, 1. Translated M.S. Whimster.© Max Weber Studies 2013, Clifton House, 17 Malvern Road, London, E8 3LP. 280 Max Weber Studies the Süddeutsche Zeitung and DIE ZEIT were his favoured outlets where he publicized his incisive articles. In his journalistic texts, which he dictated copy ready to the telephone secretary, he sharp ened his analysis still further. Above all, his attacks on the German 'parties-state' and of the corrupting 'system' of Helmut Kohl found great resonance. Hennis published his first article at the start of his student years, an article on modern art 'Barlach, Hindemith, Anouilh und wir' in 1946. This article, the beginning of a seven decades long publishing career, already reveals something typical: his enjoyment from over stepping scientific boundaries. Throughout his life Hennis practised such crossing of boundaries. After the conclusion of his law studies and juristic promotion in Göttingen under Rudolf Smend in 1951, he left the university and became an assistant to the SPD parliamen tary party in the Bundestag in Bonn. He returned later to the uni versity, but changed to political science and became an academic assistant, in Frankfurt am Main, to Carlo Schmid, one of the fathers of the German Basic Law. In 1960 he habilitated there, not without opposition, in the new discipline of German political science. After that there followed in rapid succession calls to professorships in Hanover and Hamburg, before in 1967 he was called as the succes sor to Arnold Bergstraesser in Freiburg i. Br. where he remained and taught for over two decades. The sixties was the time when Hennis sounded out the academic terrain. He was interested in the history of political ideas as well as in the rules and procedures of the political system: the power of trade associations,2 the significance of policy advice,3 the techniques of government,4 and the problems of parliamentarism.5 Right from the start his writings were marked by the idea of political educa tion. A typical element of his texts is an authoritative style —the aim to convince the reader, and here Hennis favoured the shorter book. He did not write...