Hans Wagner deceased

Born on January 11, 1937, as the eldest of seven children of brewer Johann Wagner and his wife Katharina in Nesselwang in the Allgäu region, he began his studies at the Philosophical-Theological University in Dillingen and transferred to the University of Munich in 1955, where he studied philosophy primarily under Alois Dempf and psychology under Philipp Lersch. “After a two-semester excursion into dentistry,” he notes in the curriculum vitae accompanying his dissertation, he soon turned to his major subject of journalism, which Hanns Braun had just taken over from the institute's founder, Karl d'Ester. Not coming from a wealthy family, he earned his way through college by working as a tram conductor, among other jobs. From 1959 to 1962, he was already a research assistant in the then still very small institute team. In 1965, he became one of the few doctoral students admitted by Hanns Braun, earning his doctorate with a dissertation on The Factual Order of Social Communication. He felt that this attempt to systematize newspaper studies was necessary because, while he actually wanted to examine the radical ideological communication of a political group after the First World War, the Ludendorff movement, he noticed that the discipline still lacked the tools to carry out such an analysis. In this way, the young Hans Wagner already fell for one of his future core topics, communication theory. Methodology and content analysis, theory of journalism, and history of communication were to be added later.

But first, he gained experience in communications: Hans Wagner, a devout Catholic, had already completed a solid journalism apprenticeship as a student at the then highly respected Munich Catholic Church Newspaper. In 1962, Cardinal Julius Döpfner entrusted him with setting up and managing the press office of the Archdiocese of Munich and Freising, one of the earliest diocesan press offices in Germany, and at the same time he established the press office of the German Bishops' Conference. He initially remained connected to the institute through teaching assignments; in 1966, his fascination with journalism led him back to an assistant position.

Mainly occupied with teaching first-year students in Munich, he also took on a temporary professorship in Salzburg and qualified as a professor in 1975 with a dissertation that unfortunately remained unpublished: Die Partner in der Massenkommunikation (Partners in Mass Communication). The first volume, Theorie und Wirklichkeit (Theory and Reality), provides an “ideological critique of the leading theories of mass communication”; the second volume, Vermittelte Kommunikation der Gesellschaft (Mediated Communication in Society), promises a newspaper science “foundation and model for a theory of mass communication.” Subsequently working as a private lecturer, scientific advisor, and professor at the institute, he was appointed to a professorship in 1980 and retired in 2002. He was particularly challenged by the management of the institute after Otto B. Roegele's retirement in 1985, when he remained the only professor and had to initiate new appointments. He also served Ludwig Maximilian University as a long-standing lecturer and member of the Senate of the University of Politics, as vice dean of the Faculty of Social Sciences from 1990 to 1996, and as dean from 1996 to 2001.

Hans Wagner's extraordinarily extensive work was recorded and honored in 2002 in a commemorative publication on the occasion of his 65th birthday, Medien und Mittler sozialer Kommunikation (Media and Mediators of Social Communication), edited by Ute Nawratil et al. The publication also includes all of the students who had earned an academic degree under his supervision up to that point, with a few more added later. Wagner continued to publish even after his retirement. In 2021, the third edition of his standard work Qualitative Methoden der Kommunikationswissenschaft (Qualitative Methods in Communication Studies), now co-edited with Philomen Schönhagen, was published, and the series ex libris kommunikation, which he founded and edited, also published by Nomos in Baden-Baden, has now grown to 20 volumes.

Hans Wagner, also and especially as a prominent representative of a minority school of thought in his field, namely the Munich School of Journalism, had many battles to fight. Those who had the privilege of knowing him, his students, and all those who were close to him as colleagues and co-workers mourn with his family for this mentor who rested in his faith in God, was cheerful and approachable, always helpful, and a masterful debater—a scholar who mastered his field in its entirety and exemplified the meaning of the word “professor”: someone who fearlessly stands up for what he has recognized as valid.

Heinz Starkulla Jr.