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Urs Jaeggi (1931-2021)
Photo: Sophia Kembowski / picture alliance / dpa
His book on “Power and Rule in the Federal Republic of Germany” sold more than 400,000 times: Urs Jaeggi was considered one of the ideas behind the student movement of the 1960s.
The Swiss sociologist and Berliner by choice, who also became known as an artist and writer, died on Saturday at the age of 89 in Berlin, as his family announced on Monday upon request.
"Der Tagesspiegel" had previously reported.
"Sometimes it was a bit of a bumpy road, but I made all my dreams come true," he told the German Press Agency on his 85th birthday.
"I didn't care if people said: Does he have to do that too?"
The son from a social democratic family, born in Solothurn in 1931, always wanted to think outside the box.
He studied art history, economics and sociology in Geneva, Berlin and Bern.
After his habilitation in Bern, he went to the Ruhr University in Bochum and later to the New School for Social Research in New York.
"To this day I don't know how that came about," said Jaeggi about the success of his analysis that a comparatively small elite dominated the control points of power.
The undogmatic thinker not only made friends with it.
Conservatives thought he was a left ringleader, the ultra-left a "liberal shit" (as the city magazine "Zitty" reported).
Jaeggi later worked on the conflict in his autobiographical novel "Brandeis" (1978): It is about a professor whom the ideological furor of the student movement is increasingly driving into a conflict with himself.
Together with the novels "Grundrisse" (an excerpt was awarded the Ingeborg Bachmann Prize in 1981) and "Rimpler" it becomes a trilogy on the great social upheaval of the 68s.
Other literary works include the local story »Soulthorn« and the reversal novel »Neither nor something«.
Art became more and more important, and Jaeggi wanted to become a painter even as a child.
But beating teachers drove the left-handed out of lust.
After the early death of his father, he first did an apprenticeship as a bank clerk and then took his Abitur.
From 1972 to 1993 he was professor at the Institute for Sociology at the Free University (FU) Berlin, also as a full professor and most recently on a half-post because he learned the craft from scratch with a sculptor.
Since 1985 he has exhibited his works at home and abroad.
The walls in his old Berlin apartment were full of pictures.
He worked eight hours a day in his nearby studio or on the computer, gymnastics and jazz dancing were part of the daily program.
With his second wife he lived half in Berlin and half in Mexico.
His daughter Rahel from his first marriage to the psychoanalyst Eva Jaeggi ("Old love rusts beautifully") has become a philosophy professor.
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feb / dpa