Sociologist Steffen Mau: “Bourdieu is still a shining light for me today”

2024-03-10 15:13:22

The Rostock native (born in 1968) grew up in the Lütten Klein prefabricated building district as the son of a shipbuilding department manager and a doctor. After an apprenticeship at VEB Schiffselektronik Rostock, Mau gave up the place he had been assigned to study math and physics and only studied his favorite subjects after the fall of reunification: sociology and politics at the Free University of Berlin. He has been a professor of macrosociology at the HU Berlin since 2015.

Milan Kundera: The unbearable lightness of being

A book that impressively combines the personal and the political. Kundera has inspired me with almost all of his books, but the love story of Tomas, a Prague surgeon, and Teresa, the photographer, against the backdrop of the Prague Spring and the invasion of Warsaw Pact troops, contains so much wisdom and wisdom without being too to become a calendar saying. The paths between East and West, the experiences of repression and the longing for affection and emotional depth are artfully packaged in this book. It’s definitely a biographical highlight for me, because I read the book – I have to say I devoured it – during the final phase of the GDR.

Christoph Hein: The strange friend

A novel that you could only get in the GDR with good connections and under the counter, even though it was published there in 1982. It appeared in the Federal Republic a year later under the title “Drachenblut”. For me, the work captures like no other the social and political climate in the GDR in the 1980s, when many people went into resignation and social attentism spread. The book is about the single doctor Claudia, who becomes increasingly alienated from society, but also into a state of apathy. The novel, more of a novella, tells the story from the protagonist’s first-person perspective and does so with precise and dissecting language that radiates coldness and thereby makes the social situation almost physically tangible.

Brigitte Reimann: Franziska Linkerhand

I’m a big fan of Brigitte Reimann’s letters – so lucid, desperate and non-conformist. They expose the soul, show inner struggles, searching and vulnerability. As a novel, I recommend “Franziska Linkerhand”, an important book in the GDR, which today seems a bit outdated in terms of language and ambition – who bothers with the narrow-mindedness of actually existing socialism? – but also asks general questions about staying true to yourself.

At the center is Franziska, a woman with hopes and dreams who has to realize that the ideologies that promise a better world turn out to be a chimera and lead to stagnation in thinking. A few years ago the book was re-performed as a play at the Deutsches Theater and I was able to take part in an audience discussion: It was impressive to see how strong the heroine can still be a figure of identification for younger and older people today. The sensitive thing that runs against convention is without a doubt a timeless topos.

Hans Fallada: Anyone who eats out of a tin bowl

Nobody has such a deep, almost sociological feeling for marginalized society as Fallada, and hardly anyone has stumbled so often, even in excess. “Whoever eats out of a tin bowl” is a story of failure on the way to a middle-class existence. The underlying diagnosis is that of social rejection and obstructed paths that repeatedly force people back into their origins. Here, the former prisoner Kufalt, despite good intentions, is unable to free himself from the magnetic field of crime. For friends of Fallada, a visit to the Hans Fallada House in Carwitz, Mecklenburg is worthwhile. Water hikers can dock a paddle boat nearby.

Gabriel García Márquez: Chronicle of a Death Foretold

There could be several books by Gabriel García Márquez here: “One Hundred Years of Solitude”, “Love in the Time of Cholera” or “Chronicle of a Death Foretold”. In all of them, the master of magical realism shows his art of language and his unerring sense of the intricacy and depth of human existence. No matter how I spin it, a different book is always my favorite by this author, the most biographically formative being “Chronicle of a Death Foretold”.

The focus is on a wedding celebration and its brutal consequences, a tragedy. In an almost documentary tone, the book contains a biting criticism of exaggerated concepts of honor and outdated sexual morality. The first sentence of the book is a clarion call: “On the day they were supposed to kill him, Santiago Nasar got up at five thirty in the morning to wait for the ship on which the bishop was coming.”

John Updike: Rabbit-Romane

I have always read American literature a lot and with great enthusiasm: Joan Didion, Philipp Roth, TC Boyle, John Irving, Richard Ford, but with John Updike’s Rabbit novels you go right into the heart of what American culture is all about. The life and suffering of former basketball star Harry “Rabbit” Angstrom, his life as a salesman of kitchen utensils and Japanese vehicles and his torn between family boredom and extramarital escapades are great stories. It’s about longing in a suburban format and something constant post-decisional regret (term from psychology that describes a subsequent regret effect in actions and decisions, ed.), the whole life in small checks. The language is terrific.

Wolfgang Koeppen: The greenhouse

This book about the Bonn Republic, the mustiness of the 1950s and the old Nazi elites is a clever examination of questions of opportunism and adaptation to the rules of the political game.

JM Coetzee: Shame

A novel with tremendous power that will make you hold your breath. Coetzee confronts us with existential questions and spells out what it means to be black or white, a man or a woman, in post-apartheid South Africa. The relationship with animals also plays a prominent role. In “shame” people are humiliated and rejected, incurring guilt and attempting humility; This is where historical injustice intersects with individual responsibility. The book resists all temptations to paint a hopeful picture of a society overcoming racism. Rather, many things return as a boomerang. If there is a novel in which submission and self-determination form a close, almost unbreakable connection, it is this one.

Siri Hustvedt: What I loved

A deeply moving novel about the loss of a child, it is set in the intellectual and artistic milieu of New York in the 1960s. The focus is on two couples who are friends and their sons Matthew and Mark, their life crises, separations and attempts to master life. An interesting tension arises from this mutual observation and interconnectedness; the story is told across entire lives. While one couple’s son dies, the other falls into a vortex of instability and drug addiction. The text sometimes seems almost too dense, but this reflexivity captivated me the first time I read it. The book revolves around the big questions of art, love, security, failure and loss, the emotional conflict and the social and intellectual pendulum movements of the protagonists.

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Colson Whitehead: Underground Railroad

Along with Jonathan Franzen, this author is one of the most brilliant voices in recent American literature. I read the book on a long car trip along the east coast of the USA, stopping in the former slave states of Georgia and South Carolina. The historical model is an actually existing smuggling network in the first half of the 19th century, which enabled slaves to escape from the southern states via secret storage locations, middlemen and encrypted communication.

Pierre Bourdieu: The subtle differences

A sociological classic had to be on this list. To this day, for me, Bourdieu is a shining light in sociological diagnosis of society. With “The Fine Differences” he presented a cultural-sociological alternative to economistically narrow class analyzes and questioned whether we were really already in a society “beyond status and class” (Ulrich Beck). This extensive (but in parts difficult to read) book is original in its approach, conceptually innovative and empirically saturated. Terms such as habitus or cultural capital, which are developed in this book, are now also widely used outside of sociological discourse.

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