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The main objective of the paper is to identify the logic of the sociological field in the GDR, looking at how it was spatialized in the city of East Berlin. In this regard, I am less interested in providing an overview of the different research streams of the main sociologists operating in the scientific and academic institutes located in Berlin than in reconstructing some crucial dynamics at work there and highlighting their effects at the social and symbolic levels. The underlying idea is that, especially in East Berlin, the sociological knowledge produced was less homogeneous than it has been represented in the existing literature. Without negating the existence of shared aspects characterizing Marxist-Leninist sociology, also superimposed on the political elite, a field analysis enables us to see how the different positions and trajectories of GDR-sociologists had an impact on their approaches to theoretical, epistemological, and methodological questions, and on their understanding and uses of concepts deriving from both Marxist-Leninist and "bourgeois" sociology. In the analysis, I will first compare the social trajectories of two of my interview-partners as paradigmatic of two different sociological habitus depending on their different academic/political socialization, networks, and positions in the field. As a second step, I will present a sketch of the sociological field drawn from 63 curricula of sociologists active in East Berlin in an attempt to pinpoint, on a larger scale, the homologies between the social and symbolic spaces of the field. Thus, the underlying idea is to examine the intersection of the "quasi-structural properties" of the field with its "phenomenological aspects" concerning the "feel for the game." While the two understandings of field are interdependent, it is in the second one that the physical space as a localized social space played a crucial role in defining the material, social, and cultural constraints and opportunities actors faced which, in turn, influenced their practices and choices. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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Based on the concept of cognitive mapping, the article addresses the issues of the production, representation, and conceptualization of space. Focusing on emerging concepts of urban space in turn-of-the-century and Weimar Berlin as developed by the sociologist Georg Simmel, the architectural historian Adolf Behne, and the urban designer Martin Wagner, it is shown to what extent these concepts are bound to technological modes of representation like photography and film. Based on these concepts, it is proposed to extend the concept of cognitive mapping, emphasizing that it not just examines but also produces images of the urban. Thus, cognitive mapping is not just analytical but also constructive. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents information on sociologist George Simmel. George Simmel was born in Berlin in 1858 at the corner of Friedrich-strasse and Leipzigentrasse. His parents belonged to the higher middle class, they were already converted and George was baptized into the Christian community. He was and remained the product of a metropolitan civilization, overwhelming through a variety of sensual, intellectual, technological, poetical and artistic impressions which had their on the future author of the "Sociology of the Senses" and of the analysis of the metropolitan structure and intellectual life. He lived under the horizon of subjective and objective culture implying a sentimental altitude towards nature. Simmel studied at Berlin and finished his Ph.D. in 1881, he become a "Privatdzent" at the same university under Dilthey in 1885. Though Simmel was not a Socrates, the accusations against him are the typical reproaches of all traditionalists and reactionaries against innovators, to corrupt the youth. That the Jews should be singled out as such corrupters of the youth belonged to the academic pattern of anti-Semitism in Germany. It was the tragedy of Simmel that he never stuck to his philosophical intentions but always into psychology. All his books dealing with philosophy of history are frustrated because he conceives of the discipline in terms of psychology.

This article provides information about Leon Petrazycki (1861-1931), a legal theorist and sociologist, who came from the Polish gentry of the Witebsk area, a territory historically Polish, but then and now a part of Russia. After 1918, Petrazycki fled to Poland and did so as a professor at the University of Warsaw. Petratycki was a member of the Polish Academy of Science from 1912 until his death in 1931. Despite his achievements and earlier prominence, Petratycki is now relatively unknown, and his work is not well understood. He attracted much attention early in his career in Berlin because of his brilliant critique of the Burgerliches Gesetzbuch (German Civil Code) when its drafting was nearing completion. Because Petratycki's ideas were couched in the psychological language of the beginning of the century, they are regarded today as products of an introspective, psychological methodology. His later ideas were expressed in more recognizably sociological terms. Petrazycki's intention was to build a science of legal policy, which would give a democratic society a new comprehensive and systematic understanding of law necessary for solving conflicts and avoiding disruptive tensions.