Friedrich Heckmann (born March 6, 1941) is the director of the research institute European Forum for Migration Studies[1] and emeritus professor of sociology at the School of Social and Economic Sciences at the University of Bamberg. His main research, teaching and consulting interests focus on migration and social integration. Heckmann contributed significantly to the institutionalisation of migration and integration research in Germany through the launch of the research committee Migration and Ethnic Minorities (1985) within the German Sociological Society and the co-founding of the European Forum for Migration Studies in 1993 as one of the first research institutes on migration and integration in Germany. Moreover, he established migration studies in the sociology department of the University of Bamberg.[2]
Heckmann studied sociology, history and economics in Münster, Kiel, Lawrence, Kansas, United States and Erlangen-Nuremberg. His teachers included Helmut Schelsky (Münster), Gerhard Wurzbacher (Kiel; Erlangen-Nuremberg) and Gary M. Maranell (Lawrence). As a Fulbright Scholarship student, he received a Master of Arts in sociology from the State University of Kansas in Lawrence (1967). While being assistant lecturer at the University of Erlangen-Nuremberg, he earned a Ph.D. with an empirical study on socialization processes (1972). Heckmann was a project leader at the Research Centre for Social Sciences at the University of Erlangen-Nuremberg and was also a lecturer at the University of Bamberg. In 1980, he gained his habilitation at the University of Bamberg with a study on immigration in Germany. In 1982, he was appointed professor at the University of Economics and Politics in Hamburg, but returned to the University of Bamberg in 1992. Since the founding of the European Forum for Migration Studies, Heckmann has been a consultant to the German Federal Government, the European Commission, to local and municipal governments, foundation (non-profit) and civil society organizations.
Having worked within the fields of socialization, family research and history of sociology, Heckmann began to focus on migration and integration research with his habilitation (The Federal Republic: A country of immigration?, Klett-Cotta, Stuttgart, 1981). Socio-structural analysis evidenced a status of belonging of the so-called guest workers; in addition historical and internationally comparative analysis demonstrated that Germany had been transformed into a country of immigration. Conceptual and theoretical works of Heckmann contribute to a theory of minorities, to the concept of ethnic colony, to the dimensional analysis of integration processes and to the theory of prejudice as both attitude and ideology. Much of this found in his book “Ethnische Minderheiten, Volk und Nation. Soziologie inter-ethnischer Beziehungen (Enke 1992). Since the foundation of the European Forum for Migration Studies, Heckman has led numerous empirical research as well as practice-oriented projects.[3] The form's projects mainly concern migration theory, migration statistics, migration politics, citizenship, urban[4] and educational integration, studies on discrimination as well as evaluations of implemented policies and measures. Many projects are carried out in cooperation with other European institutions and organizations.[5]
