D. Gusti a wilhelmiánus Németország egyetemi oktatóiról

Abstract

Based on the autobiography of D. Gusti, the aims of this paper were twofold: a.) in relation to the relationship-network of the life path: the university years in the Wilhelmian period and the reconstruction of his memories about his professors; b.) in relation to the story I was interested in which way he described his understandings, his preserved perceptions and experiences from this period, and whether he actually realized that his university years fell under the period of the revolutionary paradigm change of modern sciences. The double-aim coherence is elaborated along three place-time dimensions that correspond with Gusti’s three narrative episodes of his study period (beginning period: Berlin, – middle period: Lipcse, – final period: Berlin). The theoretical–methodological considerations of the narrative story forms (autobiography, life story) require that the life path and the story should equally complement each other. In the contrary, in the case of Gusti’s autobiography both in terms of structure and content, the episodes and the connected impressions and experiences from the university years are most of the time not personal self-reflections from his memory, but cited from outside sources, mainly published sources. This is due to the fact, that during Gusti’s university years his relationship to his reformer, paradigm changing professors was mainly formal, not a vivid dialogical relationship. In the contrary, his memories of Simmel’s presenter rhetoric and sociological view reveal his actual interests, that not simply refer his non-understanding of Simmel’s insights, but to his non-interest in Simmel’s irrelevant sociological thematic originating in his socialization and habit as Simmel’s thematic is not applicable in that rural, modernizing and initial nation forming context in which Gusti was born. Gusti’s autobiography is subjective and intentional, a self-representation serving to strengthen his personal identity-legitimization and at the same time it is pedagogical and narcissistic. Besides all these characteristics of his autobiography, it cannot be considered as an apart type neither in terms of its structure, nor in terms of the length of the life term (first 25 years of his life), despite of even if Gusti called his undertaking as „auto-sociology”. His autobiography can be considered as a mixture of literary and non-literary narrative self-representation that contributes data to the understanding of the history of the society (fashion, behavior, mentality, morality, carrier model, etc.) in a given period.