Suppl. 23 - Kollektivbiographie

HSR Supplement No. 23 (2011): Schröder: Kollektivbiographie

Wilhelm Heinz Schröder: Kollektivbiographie als interdisziplinäre Methode in der Historischen Sozialforschung: Eine persönliche Retrospektive.

Wilhelm Heinz Schröder is one of the initiators of the Historical Social Research in Germany and he has decisively formed its development since the 1970s. He was among others the director of the center of historical social research (of the GESIS), co-president of the working-group QUANTUM, managing editor of the international journal “Historical Social Research / Historische Sozialforschung” and head of the postgraduate ZHSF methods seminar (“Herbstseminar”).

Schröder has academically worked on numerous themes, his research focus was however on the “historical parliamentarism-, elite- and biography research”. Schröder became famous especially through his long lasting large-scale projects on the social democratic members of parliament in the German Reichs- and Landtag. These projects have set scientific scales for both “lexical biography” and “collective biography”.

The HSR Supplement contains 1) an autobiographic essay of the author with impressions on his research-life, in which he emphasizes the collective biography as a forming individual constant; 2) an overview about/on the significance and distribution of collective biography as well as two practical guidelines on the application of research strategies of the (British) prosopography and (German) collective biography; 3) (focused) reprints of 6 selected articles on the large-scale project “Social democratic parliamentatian”.