ABSTRACT
Urs Jaeggi gained prominence simultaneously as a literary and a scholarly writer during the 1960s. Then a young professor of sociology, he was an important voice of the 1960s movement and a mentor of student leader-activist Rudi Dutschke. By 1969, Jaeggi was well known for a volume of short stories, two novels, and an influential sociological study, Macht und Herrschaft in der Bundesrepublik (1969). West Germany was to remain the country of his life and career. Jaeggi was close to the Dortmund “Group 61” (literature of the worker’s world) and became a prominent theorist of Literatursoziologie (the sociology of literature). With this background, Jaeggi’s literary themes were antiestablishment and highly critical of bourgeois society and politics, and they evolved into an opus seeking alternative thought and lifestyles and the emancipation of the individual from societal, political, and aesthetic constraints.
