Niklas Luhmann in a television conversation with Alexander Kluge
*Alexander Kluge: You were born in 1927. What idea do you associate with the year 1927?*
Niklas Luhmann: Well – it's enough for me that I was born.
*Musil, for example, is very much concerned with the ten years before his birth and also with the year of his birth.*
I've never actually considered that, but I don't know if the name Gumbrecht means anything to you? He's now writing a book about the year 1926*, what all happened there. For example: Heidegger was forced to habilitate ...
*because he …*
… and wrote his main work »Sein und Zeit« (Being and Time) in the same year.
*And that is Gumbrecht's year of birth?*
No. But it's about the idea that what happened in that year was something special.
~
* Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht, »1926. Ein Jahr am Rand der Zeit«, 2001.
*So collecting is not your style?*
No, no, not at all. However, I rate the role of chance very highly. Also in the whole context of evolution.
*You say somewhere that an entire life course is made up of coincidences. Are you really of this opinion?*
Yes. Of course, one must be able to recognize and seize coincidences! And that requires a certain preparation.
*Perseverance.*
Yes! For example, even the whole production of love requires preparation. One has read novels, Klopstock for example, and so one already knows what. "And then she came, and then it was Leda*, and then it was just about him." It's about this preparedness. Because if he hadn't read a novel beforehand, he might not have found Leda at all.
*In 1944 you are an air force helper, it says in your biography.*
1943.
*That means that in 1945 you were really in the war effort, so to speak, and were taken prisoner?*
So, the whole war situation still comes back to me in dreams, that shooting is going on and bombs are falling. Then you just count and have enough experience to know that you don't have to throw yourself on the ground right away because it's wet there. You have to look for a place a little further away. It still whistles a bit until it finally bursts.
~
* Cf. Ludwig Tieck: Franz Sternbalds Wanderungen. In: Ders, Werke in vier Bänden, Munich 1963, Vol. 1, p. 966.
*Where were you there?*
That was Heilbronn, where we were also pretty much bombed out in the city. But regardless of that: Before birth there was nothing, and during the war you had the feeling that now we are in a state where it can't get any worse. When you see how someone walking next to you gets a shell in the face, and how he looks before and how he looks after, then you have the feeling: What are people actually complaining about today?
*You went on to study law. What made you decide to do that?*
Yes, it seemed a bit orderly to me. And I had the idea that in the legal field you could at least see why something was done this way and not another way. I was actually interested in the problem of order. Not so much at first, then later, in the course of my studies, more and more. Also the argumentation potential.
*And then, at some point, you became a senior government official in 1954.*
At first I had to do my traineeship, which didn't start until 1953. Then I spent a year more or less living in libraries …
*In libraries, why?*
Because I wanted to work a little, read, Italy, Paris.... But then, of course, I also had to provide for my income, and then very quickly, in one year in a higher administrative court, I made a very unconventional career.
*As an administrative clerk.*
Yes, and then came to the Ministry of Culture. There it was a matter of setting up an order for the non-published court decisions. At the same time, I was an assistant to the president and a kind of expert witness in the senates. From there I went to a ministry, on the occasion of a change of government in Hanover, to investigate the lawsuits that the old government had lost or would certainly lose, to cancel them if necessary, and then stayed in the ministry.
*If, for example, you had the task, in a second life, speaking in the subjunctive, so to speak, of establishing a university, an "advanced studies" university, – would that be something you could imagine?*
Yes. I went into the university career via Schelsky in the first place on the occasion of a foundation, because there was the idea that everything would be different.