Review | Scientific caretaking at the professor’s home
How long has it been since students could take exams at their professor’s home or a student assistant was a personal assistant at the lecturer’s or professor’s home? Sociologist and writer Ad van Iterson looks back in a book on the time when he was the home assistant of the venerable sociologist Norbert Elias.
Well, assistant. “Secretary might be a better word,” said UvA sociologist Joop Goudsblom to the young Ad van Iterson when Goudsblom asked him at the end of the eighties of the last century about a job with the famous British-German sociologist of Jewish descent Norbert Elias (1897-1990), who became famous for his research into the civilizing process of humanity. By the end of the sixties, Elias had been a visiting professor at the UvA and had returned to Amsterdam in his old age, where he occupied the top two floors of Goudsblom’s house at 13 J.J. Viottastraat. Elias, now 87, had gone blind, but still had enough energy to want to put his thoughts on paper. To do so, however, he needed a young assistant who could take dictation and then transcribe his texts. “Small mistakes are no problem.”
Tipp-Ex
The newly graduated sociologist Van Iterson liked the idea, especially since he was assured that “I don’t have to worry about Professor Elias’ physical and social needs”. And how interesting could a student job with a highly educated sociologist be? “As a secretary, I’d become a link in the process of publication”. He was given a typewriter, typing paper and a bottle of Tipp-Ex correction fluid, and he was ready to start. The term “informal care” did not exist at the time, but that is essentially what it was, especially since the assistant’s work took place at the professor’s home. And so Van Iterson became a scientific informal carer.
Ad van Iterson, now retired, has written about what he did and the conversations he had with Elias in his memoir (in Dutch) J.J. Viottastraat 13. Norbert Elias en zijn Amsterdamse kring. It is a personal account of the time, which reads like a shortened biography of Elias, with the author’s proximity to Elias’ life shining through in such a domestic setting. And the uncertainty of student assistant Van Iterson. Would he be good enough to become the assistant to a genius like Elias, he wondered.
Semicolon
“As I have already pointed out, comma, we live together in a social universe that is unknown to us, comma, in which we have to find our bearings, comma, so that we act less blindly, full stop. No, semicolon. Change the last full stop to a semicolon.” The assistant notes it down carefully, but then Elias falls silent. Van Iterson: “And I think: he undoubtedly mentioned that before, but not yesterday. This first sentence today doesn’t follow on from where he left off yesterday, although don’t ask me what that last sentence at a quarter past ten last night was.” And then he continues: “Excuse me for interrupting. You just emphasised the word ‘fundamental’. Would you like me to underline it?” Yes, that’s how student assistantships worked until the 1980s.
Of course, we also learn a great deal about the long life of Elias, who was born in the German city of Breslau, now the Polish city of Wrocław. But in fact, a great deal is already known about him: in the 1930s, he fled to Paris and London, where he wrote his most famous work The Civilizing Process in 1939, and where his academic career began at the London School of Economics. In the 1960s and 1970s, he worked at various scientific institutes in Africa and Europe, including the UvA. Elias is considered one of the most important sociologists of the twentieth century. The influential professor of sociology Joop Goudsblom (1932-2020) – who later became almost as famous as Elias – was one of the most important figures in his Amsterdam circle.
Ad van Iterson, J.J. Viottastraat 13. Norbert Elias en zijn Amsterdamse kring (Amsterdam, 2025), price: €24.99 (in Dutch only).
