ABSTRACT
The author's interest in biography did not begin with his father. The first public expression was an essay on his teacher at the University of Chicago, Louis Wirth. The first impetus for this turn of his interests came from outside. At a meeting of the Deutsche Gesellschaft fur Amerikastudien in 1963, he was approached by Thilo Ramm, then Professor of Law at the University of Giessen, asking him whether he was interested in publishing a selection of his father’s writings from the 1920s in order to bring them to the attention of the contemporary German public. The intellectual affinity naturally went deeper than this encouragement from friends. His father had made the inquiry into the personal and political motivation of German judges a major issue. Self-knowledge, not preoccupation with self, seems to the author an important methodological tool. Fashions in sociology suffer from rapid obsolescence.
