Peter R. Hofstätter

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Peter R. Hofstätter (*1913 in Vienna; † 1994 in Buxtehude) was an Austrian social psychologist.

He was the only child of Robert Matthias Hofstätter, M.D who for many years was the Professor of Gynecology at the University of Vienna

He studied physics and psychology in Vienna and received his doctor title for a work on the development of Japanese and Korean children.

From 1937 to 1943 he was a Army-Psychologist of the Wehrmacht and held the view of the national socialist Racialism. Afterwards he worked in the Reichsjustizministerium (Reich Justice Ministry). Despite his work for the national socialist regime he received a position at the university in Graz in 1945. From 1949 to 1956 he worked as a lecturer in the U.S. at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (M.I.T.) and Catholic University in Washington D.C.

In 1956 he was called back to Germany to become the founding Chancellor of a new university in Wilhelmshafen.

In 1959 he received a position at the University of Hamburg, where he was department chair and held the Lehrstuhl für Psychologie; he retired in 1979. He wrote thirteen books and was a collumnist for the newspaper Hamburger Abendblatt and the newspaper Die Zeit. He edited the Psychologie volumes in the Fischer encyclopedia.