Erudite, practical, popular - Graphology in Germany 1890-1949

The doctoral thesis' deals with the scientification of the semantics of Charakter (personality) in Germany between 1890 and 1933. It is lead by the hypothesis that during the first three decades of the 20th century Charakter became a fundamental category of society. The central bourgeois concept of subjectivity ascribed to the individual in itself universal qualities as rights, agency, and perception. In contrast, Charakter attributed to the single individual a set of certain empiric qualities. So scientific characterologies represent the borderline-case of a science of invidual entities. On the one hand, it is to be demonstrated how a general tendency towards an aesthetic and close-to-life mode in human sciences made a science of character possible at all. On the other hand, it is to examine in how far it were primarily the Lebenswelt and modes of perception of the educated bourgeois classes that were objectivated by the char-acterologies, and thus 19th-century schemes of social inequality were carried on into the 20th century by means of scientific legitimacy.