Hans Bender (1907–1991) was for four decades the public face of serious German-language parapsychology. In 1950 he founded in his home town of Freiburg im Breisgau the Institute for Border Areas of Psychology and Mental Hygiene (IGPP); in 1954 he was appointed at the Albert Ludwig University Freiburg to the only chair for "Border Areas of Psychology" that has ever existed at a German university. He corresponded with C. G. Jung and Wolfgang Pauli, brought the Dutch clairvoyant Gerard Croiset to Germany several times, led the investigation of the famous Rosenheim poltergeist case 1967/68, and shaped through books, lectures and television appearances the image of what counts as "serious parapsychology" in the German-speaking world. The IGPP exists to this day.
Who was Hans Bender?
Bender was born in 1907 in Freiburg im Breisgau, the son of an old Baden family. He studied philosophy, psychology and Romance languages in Freiburg, Tübingen, Berlin and Paris – the last station is important because there he came into contact with the French school of dynamic psychology and the circle around the Parisian parapsychologist Eugène Osty. In 1933 he took his doctorate under Erich Rothacker in Bonn. His habilitation was completed in 1944 in Bonn (initially in 1941 at the then German-run University of Strasbourg) – an academic career under conditions that later German history of science has critically reappraised and that the IGPP under Eberhard Bauer has documented openly.
After the war Bender returned to Freiburg, where he taught from 1948 first as a private lecturer, from 1950 with his own institute, from 1954 as a full professor. His Freiburg Sunday lectures became over the decades an academic institution; the lecture hall was regularly full, students from other faculties came for the subject matter.
The 1950 founding of the IGPP
Even before his appointment to a regular chair, Bender founded in 1950 in Freiburg the Institute for Border Areas of Psychology and Mental Hygiene as a private research institution. The name was a programme: Border Areas of Psychology, because Bender expressly wanted to distance himself from the word "parapsychology" with its German-language Spiritualist connotations; mental hygiene, because his concern was the psychological coping with unusual experiences, not their metaphysical interpretation.
The IGPP worked from the start in three branches: experimental investigations, documentary collection of spontaneous reports (the famous "Spontaneous Phenomena Archive"), and psychological counselling of people who could not cope with unusual experiences. This last function – professional, free-of-charge counselling – has remained one of its core tasks to this day.
The Freiburg chair, 1954
In 1954 Bender was appointed at the Albert Ludwig University Freiburg to the regular chair for Psychology and Border Areas of Psychology – the first and to this day only appointment of its kind at a German-language university. The appointment, against the resistance of established psychology circles, was a political act of the Baden state government and of the university itself. Bender was thereby the only German university teacher allowed to teach "parapsychology" as a regular academic subject.
After Bender's emeritation in 1975 the chair was not reappointed – it was converted into a regular psychology professorship. The function has lived on since then at the IGPP, which after Bender's death in 1991 was continued under Eberhard Bauer and Walter von Lucadou, and later as a foundation.
The Bender method
Bender's methodological approach was consistently psychological, not physical or occultist. Unlike J. B. Rhine at Duke University, who worked with Zener cards and statistics, Bender was above all interested in spontaneous psi experience – premonitions, the dying impression, the haunting in the house. He collected thousands of reports through the IGPP, analysed them in content and psychologically, and from that developed an empirically grounded phenomenology of unusual experience.
Three methodological principles characterise his work:
- Class separation. Like Richet in Paris and J. J. Thomson in Cambridge, Bender distinguished clearly between telepathy, clairvoyance, precognition, haunting and "animism" – each class with its own methodological grid.
- Mental-hygienic responsibility. For those concerned, a psi phenomenon is often first of all a crisis – not a spiritual distinction. Bender insisted that professional counselling had to be part of the work, not an afterthought.
- A sceptical basic attitude. Bender was not a believer. In many cases he demonstrated fraud or normal explanations. Precisely this strictness made him credible for the seriously held findings.
The Rosenheim case, 1967/68
In the autumn of 1967 bizarre incidents began in the law office of attorney Sigmund Adam at Königstrasse 13 in Rosenheim (Upper Bavaria): fluorescent lamps burst in series, the telephone system called the speaking clock by itself (in a frequency that drove the phone bill to absurd heights), drawers opened on their own, pictures rotated on the walls. The Federal Post and the city utilities could not explain the events by measurement. In November 1967 Bender was called in.
Bender brought an unusual investigation team to Rosenheim: two physicists from the Max Planck Institute for Plasma Physics in Garching (Friedbert Karger and Gerhard Zicha), Siemens technicians, film cameras and measuring devices. Over several weeks phenomena were repeatedly reproduced under observation. The Garching physicists explicitly documented in their report that the observed events could not be explained by electromagnetic fields, vibrations or similar conventional causes.
Bender identified the 19-year-old apprentice Annemarie Schaberl as the focus person: the phenomena occurred only in her presence, had their intensity peak during her conflict phases at work, and ended entirely when she left the office. This configuration – a "haunting focus" as a young person in an emotional stress situation – is Bender's standard finding from several similar investigations over the years.
The Rosenheim case became the best-known haunting investigation of post-war German history. Bender was interviewed several times on television; the film documenting the investigation was broadcast on several programmes. Later critics (Allen, von Lucadou) have pointed to methodological weaknesses; Bender stood by his findings to the end.
International networks – Jung, Pauli, Rhine, Croiset
Bender was in regular contact with the most important international voices in psi research. With C. G. Jung he corresponded from the mid-1940s about haunting phenomena and synchronicity; the Bender-Jung letter file is today in the IGPP archive. He also exchanged ideas with Wolfgang Pauli – Pauli was interested in Bender's haunting findings in the context of his own psychophysical speculations with Jung.
With J. B. Rhine he had an ambivalent relationship: methodologically they differed (Bender preferred the spontaneous-case phenomenology, Rhine the statistical card trials), but organisationally they pulled in the same direction. Bender was a regular guest in Durham; Rhine visited the IGPP several times. Bender's most important practical partner outside the German-speaking world was however the Dutch clairvoyant Gerard Croiset (1909–1980), whom Bender brought to Freiburg several times and used in cooperation with police authorities (missing-persons search, crimes).
Bender as a public figure
Unlike most of the other figures in our series, Bender became publicly very well known – not in spite of, but because of his subject matter. He was a regular guest in TV discussion programmes, from the 1950s onwards published popular books (Unser sechster Sinn, Telepathie, Hellsehen, Psychokinese, Verborgene Wirklichkeit), and through his calm, academically reserved diction maintained the image of the serious researcher in the field. His famous appearances on SWF and ARD shaped the German-language perception of parapsychology as a serious if borderline science for two generations.
Hans Bender died on 7 May 1991 in Freiburg. His chair was not reappointed – but the IGPP, which he had founded in 1950, lives on.
"Parapsychology is not an attempt to prove the miraculous. It is an attempt to investigate unusual experiences seriously – with the methodology of psychology, with the patience of detective work, without any worldview-driven prejudgement."
— Paraphrase of a basic attitude of Hans Bender's from his lectures and popular books of the 1970s
The IGPP today
The Institute for Border Areas of Psychology and Mental Hygiene was reorganised step by step after Bender's death – today it is an independent foundation based in Wilhelmstrasse in Freiburg, led among others by Eberhard Bauer and Wolfgang Fach. It is one of the few continuously working parapsychological research institutions in Europe (comparable with the Rhine Research Center in Durham and the Parisian Institut Métapsychique International (see our Richet portrait)). The IGPP archive with Bender's correspondence, haunting case files and the spontaneous-phenomena collection is one of the most important source holdings of 20th-century German-language history of science in this area.
The IGPP's free telephone and personal counselling service for people with unusual experiences is still active. That is Bender's real institutional legacy: not only the research but also the professional care for those affected.
What remains
- Institutional anchoring. Bender is the only person ever to have held a regular university chair for parapsychology in Germany. This fact is often overlooked in the popular discourse.
- Methodological class separation. Telepathy, haunting, clairvoyance, precognition – each phenomenon with its own methodological grid. The same position we have observed in Thomson, Rayleigh and Richet.
- A bridge between generations. In his own person Bender linked the Jung/Pauli world with the Rhine world. This bridge was nowhere else in the German-speaking world so densely tied.
- A lasting institute. The IGPP has existed for 75 years without interruption. The free counselling service continues. This continuity is rare in the field of psi research.
Bender belongs in the historical line we are tracing on this site: Kepler, Crookes, the Curies, Lodge, Rayleigh, J. J. Thomson, Richet, Jung, Pauli, Einstein, Rhine, PEAR, Josephson, Dürr, Wigner. Among them he is the one who, for the German-speaking world, built the institutional scaffolding within which the subject became academically discussable at all.
Sources
- Hans Bender: Verborgene Wirklichkeit. Parapsychologie und Grenzgebiete der Psychologie. Olten/Freiburg 1976 (several editions).
- Hans Bender: Unser sechster Sinn. Parapsychologie heute. Stuttgart 1971.
- Hans Bender: Telepathie, Hellsehen, Psychokinese. Aufsätze zur Parapsychologie. Piper, Munich 1980.
- Hans Bender: Zur Entwicklung der Parapsychologie 1944–1964. Bouvier, Bonn 1972.
- Friedbert Karger & Gerhard Zicha: Physikalische Untersuchungen des Spuk-Falls Rosenheim. Zeitschrift für Parapsychologie und Grenzgebiete der Psychologie, Vol. 11 (1968).
- Eberhard Bauer & Walter von Lucadou (eds.): Spektrum der Parapsychologie. Festschrift für Hans Bender. Aurum, Freiburg 1983.
- Eberhard Bauer: Hans Bender (1907–1991). Leben und Werk. Several papers in the Zeitschrift für Parapsychologie und Grenzgebiete der Psychologie and on igpp.de.
- Institute for Border Areas of Psychology and Mental Hygiene (IGPP), Freiburg – institute history, archives and counselling service online (igpp.de).