Enlarge image
Hermann Bausinger in Tübingen: Real-life science instead of folk traditionalism
Photo: Luise Poschmann / picture alliance / dpa
Farewell to a innovator in German cultural studies: the Tübingen ethnologist Hermann Bausinger died at the age of 95.
His wife, Brigitte Bausinger, confirmed this to the dpa news agency on Thursday.
Several media had previously reported.
Bausinger is considered the father of empirical cultural studies.
As a professor at the University of Tübingen, Bausinger played a key role in ensuring that folklore developed into a modern university subject, overcoming the folkish that was already inscribed in its name.
Accordingly, Bausinger's research area included not only traditional customs but also contemporary everyday culture.
In doing so, he shaped his department.
Bausinger was born in Aalen in 1926.
At the end of the 1940s he began studying at the University of Tübingen.
In the subjects of German, English, history and folklore, he passed the state examination and received his doctorate.
In 1960 Bausinger became a professor in Tübingen, where he set up the Ludwig Uhland Institute for empirical cultural studies.
In the course of his career he received many inquiries from other universities, but remained loyal to his institute in Tübingen - legendary is the sentence with which the Württemberg students are said to have prevented him from moving to the Lower Saxony flatlands: »Dear God in Tübingen, as a guy in Göttingen . "
ime / dpa