She was once considered the new star of South Hesse sociology: Cornelia Koppetsch
Photo: Photo: wikimedia/Amrei-Marie
The Institute of Sociology at the Technical University of Darmstadt was once very left-wing. Until the beginning of the noughties, it was believed that the Frankfurt School had moved to the neighboring city of Darmstadt. All of the professors teaching there had studied with Horkheimer/Adorno, received their doctorates, or worked for them as assistants.
There was no mention of the left-wing socialist professors like Manfred Teschner, Joachim Bergmann or Helmut Dahmer on the institute’s online presence when it presented its history in 2022; they had been forgotten, so to speak. Even if, after them, no significant political impulses came from the institute apart from the now retired elite researcher Michael Hartmann. Or maybe because of that. This historical depiction of the past has now been confiscated again.
The institute only achieved nationwide attention through the scandal caused by Cornelia Koppetsch. She has been a professor there since 2009 and has wanted or had to forget a few things since then. At the end of the 1900s she was considered a great AfD explainer and best-selling author. For her, the free moralism of a middle class she identified as “cosmopolitan” was partly responsible for the successes of the right, which would direct its propaganda against it. Sahra Wagenknecht saw it similarly. In her self-righteous successful book “The Self-Righteous” in 2021, she also referred to Koppetsch, even though her image was already damaged by then. She was due to win the Bavarian Book Prize in 2019, but instead got in a lot of trouble when it was revealed that she had plagiarized. Among others, the sociologist Andreas Reckwitz, who is overrated as a top social diagnostician. Two of her books were withdrawn from the market.
It then became known that her boyfriend is a local AfD politician in Berlin. He was on trial for racially attacking two Afro-German women in a cafe. Koppetsch had to testify as a witness because she had been in the cafe with him.
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Now the University of Lüneburg has withdrawn Koppetsch’s habilitation – the prerequisite for becoming a professor – again because of “an improper separation between one’s own and others’ formulations and thoughts.” That is why the TU Darmstadt has released the former star sociologist from her position as a professor. This is reminiscent of the case of CDU politician Annette Schavan. After the University of Düsseldorf stripped her of her doctorate in 2013 due to plagiarism, the incumbent Education Minister suddenly found herself without a scientific degree and had to resign. But Chancellor Merkel gave her a nice position as ambassador to the Vatican.
When Cornelia Koppetsch completed her habilitation in Lüneburg in 2006 with a thesis on “The Ethos of Creatives,” the program “Oops!” was on private television. – The Breakdown Show« was very successful. That is not the motto of critical scholarship.
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