The camp university had no library; all lectures and seminars were given from memory, presenting the lecturers’ own ideas and approaches. Elias was a leading figure in this university life, organising lectures and seminars, teaching sociology and social psychology in English, as demanded by the guards. A few years ago, Elias’s notes from the internment camp were rediscovered in England. They not only reveal that the conceptualisation of sociology which Elias eventually published in What is Sociology? in 1970 was clearly formed in his course ‘Sociology I–III’ for the ‘Mona University College’ as it was called (Mona being an old name for the Isle of Man), but also show the wide range of topics covered by the camp-university: modern mathematics, dialectical materialism, modern English poetry, or Hegel’s philosophy figured next to topics like ‘cars’ or ‘colour photography’.

source: Heike Hammer: Hermann Korte’s valedictory lecture on Die Ballade vom Armen Jakob and its first staging in Germany, in: Figurations, Newsletter of the Norbert Elias Foundation, no. 13,  June 2000