Jürgen Hartmann, RC 34 President from 1986 to 1990,
ISA Vice-President Finance from 1994 to 1998, passed away on 2 March 2015.
| Always in a good mood, cheerful and friendly, kind, open-minded, welcoming, positive, cooperative, helpful, warm-hearted, understanding, an internationally active scientist, a skilful organiser, an inspiring personality – this is how friends and colleagues remember Jürgen.Jürgen was born in Remscheid-Lennep/Germany on 18 March 1944. As his father died in the war, Jürgen was raised by his mother. Little Jürgen frequently spent his afternoons in the local bookstore. The voracious reader quickly made friends with the owner who permitted him to read all the books he liked free of charge in the shop’s backroom. |  |
| Jürgen gratefully absorbed whatever he could get hold of about other countries and cultures, he studied maps and even train timetables. This kindled his academic aspirations and inspired his wish to travel the world. It helped him develop such abilities as reading at lightning speed and always finding his way, no matter where he was, as if he were a ‘human navigator’. Being the son of a working mother, Jürgen also quickly learned how to prepare tasty meals, a skill he creatively practised and perfected throughout his life. Jürgen did his Master of Economics at the University of Cologne in 1969. As a student, he took on summer jobs in Stockholm and got a scholarship from Uppsala University, where he met his Swedish wife Solveig. In 1973, he received his Ph.D. for his doctoral thesis on the student revolt in Sweden. After his graduation, he worked at the Department of Sociology of Uppsala University until 1993, lecturing all across Sweden. From 1980 to 1982, he moved to Vienna to work as Head of Research at the European Centre for Social Welfare, Training and Research, an UN-affiliated organisation, and directed the international project Integration of Youth into Society from 1983 to 1986. This marked the start of his international career. Jürgen’s first contact with the ISA dates back to the 9th ISA World Congress of Sociology held in Uppsala in July 1978. ISA’s Executive Secretary Izabela Barlinska, then a young student helping at the Congress Secretariat, recalls that she met Jürgen at the information desk. Being a young professor of the University of Uppsala, Jürgen felt that his help as a representative of the local academic community was very much needed. And it definitely was! Both were inexperienced and new to the ISA structure, but both were eager to help the others. It was there and then that they became friends forever. Working in an international setting with colleagues from different parts of the world was vital for Jürgen. He joined ISA’s Research Committee 34: Sociology of Youth, served on its board as Treasurer (1982-86) and was elected President in 1986. His predecessor, Petar-Emil Mitev, notes that “during the Cold War, Jürgen made a crucial contribution to turning RC 34 into a model for cooperation between youth researchers in West and East Europe. Youth researchers from Eastern European countries could always count on his well-intended support and true devotion to common academic goals.” “Jürgen’s leadership at a crucial time of the RC 34 positioned him perfectly to observe and understand the massive changes in young people’s situations triggered in the Soviet Union by Glasnost and Perestroika”, says John Bynner, who came to admire his far-reaching analytic perspective and insightful comments on what was taking place when he worked with him in the comparative project on European Youth and New Technologies (1987-1990). Run by the European Coordination Centre for Research and Documentation in the Social Sciences in Vienna, this project was sponsored by RC 34 and had special and unique value in spanning the fall of the Berlin wall and the demise of the Soviet Union. John Bynner describes Jürgen as “a true internationalist bringing home to the less well initiated like myself the need to get away from blinkered national perspectives towards an understanding of relative differences in cultural assumptions and national priorities for which in Eastern Europe non-military and consumer interest in IT was low down on the list. Young people, through their growing demand for IT capability and cross-national media access (ICT), and as the next generation, were thus becoming one of the major harbingers of change. It is hard to appreciate now that Jürgen’s idea of a certificate of computer competence, with the status of a driving licence, was seen, at the time, as utopian in Eastern countries. He recognised early on the significance of the transformation of the transition to adulthood brought about through new technology and the consequences of individualisation, polarisation and widening inequality in an increasingly globalised world which was its aftermath. The fact that we wrestle with these things today as central to youth politics and policy is, in no small part, one of Jürgen’s influences that we can cherish to this day.” As a truly international scientist, Jürgen managed to initiate cooperation with Chinese youth researchers under the umbrella of RC 34. It is no coincidence that in the two periods following his presidency, RC 34’s Vice Presidents for Asia were from China. Jürgen played a key role in diplomatically paving the way for the first RC 34 conference ever held in China, i.e. Asian Modernisation and Youth (Shanghai, 1993). Jürgen was also an excellent networker. Helena Helve, Nordic Youth Research Coordinator (1998-2004) and RC 34 President (2002-2006) considers Jürgen a pioneer of Nordic youth research. Helena was impressed by “the fascinating keynote speech about youth movements in Europe in the 1960s and 1970s Jürgen gave at a Nordic youth research conference. Jürgen actively promoted the cooperation of Nordic youth researchers. He was one of the founders of the Nordic Youth Research Symposium NYRIS and the Nordic youth research coordination. Even when he had become a well-known international scientist, he always considered himself a Nordic youth researcher. His work has internationalised and made Nordic youth research known all around the world.” Jürgen was also a member of CYRCE (Circle for Youth Research Cooperation in Europe e.V.) founded by his successor, Sibylle Hübner-Funk, in 1990, which contributed to building up and strengthening European youth research. Jürgen’s broad knowledge, teaching experience and the gift to present complicated issues in a comprehensible way made him a sought after presenter. There was something special in his style of presentation. Even when he spoke to a wider audience, the listeners felt he was speaking to them individually. After his RC 34 presidency, Jürgen was elected to the ISA’s Executive Committee: he served on the Finance Committee from 1990 to 1994 and as Vice President Finance from 1994 to 1998. In this role, he was part of the team responsible for the ISA world congresses bringing together around 4,000 sociologists in Bielefeld/Germany (1994), Montreal/Canada (1998) and Brisbane/Australia (2002). Besides youth research, Jürgen’s other passion was the need to enhance international understanding through exposure and experience in which youth travel, in whatever form it took, from exchanges to tourism, was central. Lyudmila Nurse still vividly remembers an incident in Moscow in October 1992, where she was an organiser of the international conference Youth and Social Changes in Europe: Integration or Polarisation: “On the first day of the conference, the Director of the Youth Institute received a telephone call from the then Ministry of Science and Technologies which was involved in the development of new youth policies in Russia. They wanted to meet with some of the western scholars who attended the conference. Jürgen was very enthusiastic about the fact that the conference had attracted the attention of the Russian government. We were thrilled to find that we were invited to the Kremlin where our small group was received by Gennady Burbulis, the then State Secretary of the Russian Federation who was thought to be the second most influential politician in Russia after President Boris Yeltsin. At the meeting, the main focus was on how to engage young people of Russia in the democratic process. Jürgen was the first to reply with a suggestion that sounded very simple and straightforward: Young people of Russia must be allowed to travel abroad and to see the world. At first, everybody thought it was such a simple thing to do; then Jürgen went on to explain that the country should also change and be attractive for young people to return. There was an engaging discussion and a great sense of satisfaction for Jürgen that his message about youth mobility was so well received.” Jürgen’s work on youth mobility and travel played a significant role in shaping youth research in this area. He systematically analysed reasons for travelling and profiled youth travellers. In his works on youth mobility and travel in Western Europe, he related European Union policies and the concept of ‘youth mobility’ to the emergence of a European consciousness and a fruitful cooperation in economy, politics and culture. Inter alia, he argued that the European Interrail ticket has contributed to young Swedes’ experience of being ‘European’ to a much higher degree than any institutionalised exchange programme and that young people’s willingness to travel more is correlated with the their ability to speak foreign languages. When Dalarna University entered into a partnership with five other European universities to provide tuition in European tourism management (ETM), Jürgen seized the opportunity and made his interest in tourism his profession as director of the Swedish part of this Masters Programme (1994-2008). He loved teaching and even continued to give lectures to his international students after his retirement. Jürgen was a true friend to many and a great colleague to all RC 34 members. We will miss his team spirit, his cheerful smile and hugs, his hearty laughter, his enquiring mind, wise counsel and encouragement. If we build on the rich legacy he left us, he will live on in our work and memories. |
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