Alphons Silbermann

Who was Alphons Silbermann?

Alphons Silbermann was a German Jewish sociologist, musicologist, entrepreneur and publicist.

Born in Cologne, he studied musicology, sociology and law at the Universities of Cologne, Freiburg i. Br. and Grenoble. After he gained his doctorate, the rise of Nazism led Silbermann to emigrate to Netherland and 1938 from Amsterdam via Paris, where he worked as a waiter, to Sydney. In Australia he started as a dishwasher but went soon from rags to riches with his own fast food restaurant Silver's Food Bars. He actually initiated the first fastfood chain of Australia and was a very successful entrepreneur.

His academic career startet 1944 in Sydney at the State Conservatory of Music. As an empirical culture-sociologist he went back to Europe in 1951. In 1958 René König brought him back to Cologne, where he taught at the University. 1964 he was called at the University of Lausanne as a successor of Vilfredo Pareto and later at the University of Bordeaux.

Alphons Silbermann was a member of the "Cologne School" along with René König and others. He was one of the editors of the Kölner Zeitschrift für Soziologie und Sozialpsychologie and foundet the Institut für Massenkommunikation. He was an important German pioneer of empirical methods, as against the ideological biases of many contemporal colleagues like his favorite opponent Theodor W. Adorno.