Jan Philipp Fürchtegott Reemtsma (born 26 November 1952) is a German literary scholar, author, and patron who founded and was the long-term director of the Hamburg Institute for Social Research. Reemtsma lives and works mainly in Hamburg.[1]
Reemtsma was born in Bonn, West Germany.[2] The son of cigarette manufacturer Philipp Fürchtegott Reemtsma and Gertrud Reemtsma[3] (née Zülch),[4][5] he studied German literature and philosophy at the University of Hamburg (PhD), where he has been active as a professor of German literature since 1996.[6][7][8][9] Reemtsma sold his inherited majority stake in the Reemtsma group in 1980 to the Hamburg entrepreneurial family Herz (Tchibo).[10] In 1996, Reemtsma was kidnapped by Thomas Drach.[11][12]
Musician and music producer Johann Scheerer is his son.[13]
Reemtsma founded the Arno-Schmidt-StiftungArno Schmidt Foundation) in 1981.[14][15][16] In 1984 he founded the Hamburger Institut für Sozialforschung (Hamburg Institute for Social Research (HIS)).
(Reemtsma and HIS produced two exhibitions about war crimes of the Wehrmacht[17] collectively known as the Wehrmacht exhibition. The first exhibition opened in 1995, and traveled to 33 German and Austrian cities. Reemtsma has also written a bestselling account of his experiences during a 1996 kidnapping (published in German as Im Keller in 1997, in English as In the Cellar in 1999, in French as Dans la cave in 2000 as well as in many other languages).
Main article: Hamburg Institute for Social Research |
From 1984 to 2015, Reemtsma was the director of the Hamburger Institut für Sozialforschung (HIS).[18][19]
The three research units of the HIS are:[20]
Reemtsma also headed the 1995 project Violence and Destructiveness in the Twentieth Century (Gewalt und Destruktivität im 20. Jahrhundert).[21]
Two exhibitions were realized:
((cite book))
: CS1 maint: location missing publisher (link)