Die »Jungtürken« der Kommunikationswissenschaft

摘要

This article presumes that the identity of an academic discipline is defined by the people pursuing it, and thus at least indirectly by the societal and individual experiences these people were shaped by. Biographical interviews present a portrait of a generation of professors who greatly influenced the field of communication science in the German-speaking countries during the last four decades. This generation of the so-called »Young Turks« was born between 1929 and 1940, experienced the chaos of the 2nd World War as children or adolescents and studied German Publizistik-or Zeitungswissenschaft in the 1950s or 60s to become professional journalists. These professors experienced the low reputation of their field both in the media world and in the university. This explains the importance of this generation’s wish for legitimacy of their field, and is a key to understanding the opening of the discipline to media practice (key-word: journalism programs) and its turn into an empirical social science discipline. It was predominantly the empirical (communication) research that promised a gain in reputation. The »Young Turks« found the appropriate empirical research in the field’s literature published in the United States, as well as in neighbouring social science disciplines, in economics and partly in the new founders of the discipline.