Hamburg. The red thread runs through the city: it connects people who appreciate, admire and find each other surprising. They decide to whom they pass it on: to others who work here, who do something special for Hamburg, who are considered role models. We started with former mayor Henning Voscherau. Today in the 24th episode: Andreas Hieronymus

Life is no pony farm where different cultures meet in our country, in our city. What exactly happens where milieus, lifestyles, dreams, languages and opportunities collide as if they were continental plates? To investigate this, someone has to go directly into the critical zones without fear of being touched.

Andreas Hieronymus, head of the Institute for Migration and Racism Research, lives right in the centre of his field of research. Beckstraße is a cinematic piece of old Hamburg in the Schanzenviertel, between the former slaughterhouse and the Neuer Pferdemarkt. Narrow, hardly suitable for cars, the houses do not deny their proletarian origins. But they are now spruced up.

The sociologist has lived in this area for 25 years and his trained eye registers: “What used to be a working-class neighbourhood with students is becoming a middle-class residential area; the redevelopments are driving out the migrants, for example, but other people are no longer to be found here either – the kind of weird birds that were traditionally at home in St. Pauli. The previously balanced mix is tilting.”

When Hieronymus speaks, you can immediately hear that the man has a migrant background himself, as he comes from Stuttgart. Over coffee at the kitchen table under the roof on the third floor, it turns out that his family history is even more colourful. And that the Elbe is something of a unifying thread in it. “I’m a Swabian from Hamburg with Czech roots on my mother’s side and Italian roots from my father.” After the war, his family was expelled from the neighbourhood of Usted nad Labem – Aussig on the Elbe in the Czech Sudetenland. Some of them travelled to Leipzig and Torgau, others to Stuttgart via Munich. “It’s easy to forget that twelve million people were displaced during and after the world war and therefore live with a migration background that society simply represses.”

The father, given up for adoption as a child, ended up in Meiningen in Thuringia. He left Hieronymus’ mother with his three children and embarked on an unsettled life of wandering. He wanted to take over a farm in South Africa in the 1960s, went to Sicily, wanted to go to America and finally returned to the GDR via Hamburg in 1969 – “only convinced communists, criminals and fathers who had to pay maintenance did that back then”. Four more of his father’s children were born there. Hieronymus now knows almost all of them: “The older I get, the bigger my family becomes.” He himself lives in a stable partnership.

Perhaps it is because of his family history that he began to think about migration and the opportunities that lie in foreign countries at an early age. He was born in 1963 and grew up in modest circumstances. “Social housing, an uneducated background, Sinti and Roma, Greeks, Italians in the neighbourhood – that brings communication skills.” He does his community service abroad. In Ireland, even before globalisation and the economic upturn turned the country of emigration into a country of immigration. He made sure that the children of the “travelling people” in Ireland learned to read and write and that unemployed young people went to school. He still loves Irish music today, for example that of the singer Christy Moore.

Hieronymus returns from Ireland and goes to university, “the first academic in the family”, which is something to be proud of. Basic studies in Freiburg, 1987 move to Hamburg. And in 1989, a year abroad at Bosporus University in Istanbul, an elite English-language university that opened up new opportunities in his life. “I missed reunification there,” he says. When he returned, Germany had changed and Hieronymus had learnt Turkish. He cultivates his critical view of change.

He is doing his doctorate in Hamburg – on how coexistence between Turks and Germans is changing the language in Altona and St Pauli. “Because what is described as false German is basically the precursor to the formation of a new dialect.” He wants to know: How does this mixed language work? And what does it mean for group formation, for belonging and being excluded?

He made astonishing discoveries: Anyone who grows up with a Turkish majority does not necessarily feel excluded, but learns. “They adopt styles and languages, they learn Turkish so well that you can’t help but wonder which region of Turkey they actually come from? But they’ve never even been there.”

As a sociologist, Hieronymus prefers to be outside. He is not afraid of contact, he can address young people in their own language, knows the ritualised language duels, is taken seriously and learns many things that remain closed to others.

He ends up at the Institute for Migration and Racism Research, founded in 1990 by a group of women who were looking for a different perspective on the changes in society and realised that people in other countries were much further along than in Germany, where the first acts of violence against Turks and other foreigners were registered with bewilderment after reunification. They want answers to the question: How must society change so that immigrants here can develop a sense of agency and perspective and organise their lives in the best possible way?

The institute is based in Ottensen, under the roof of Werkstatt 3, a non-profit organisation, all freelancers. “50:50” is how Hieronymus sees his own work, divided between acquiring commissions and research activities. Above all, this means networking. He also sits on the board of the European Network against Racism, which – supported by national networks – is present in almost 30 EU countries. Depending on the project, the institute works in teams of two, three, five or ten researchers, flexibly and close to self-exploitation.

The client is either the EU Commission, which wants to know how efforts to integrate migrants and combat racism are progressing. Or they are foundations that are concerned about the changes in Eastern Europe, for example, towards an open society. Hieronymus says: “Germany is not quite as bad as it looks from the inside when you look at it from the outside.”

“Once a year, we compile a ‘shadow report’ on racism in Germany, examining the labour market, housing market, healthcare market, police and services.” Governments do the same, in figures and statistics. The institute provides concrete examples, fates and stories.

In Hamburg, they worked with large companies such as Budnikowsky to analyse the recruitment tests to see how structural barriers for certain groups could be removed. So that migrants also have opportunities and the companies get good people. “The potential that migrants bring to the table for economic development is often not even recognised,” says Hieronymus.

Sociology at the edge of the continental plates has long been looking beyond the edges of the plate. That’s why he does a lot of travelling. Brussels, Istanbul, Sweden, Cyprus, Palermo, Budapest – projects, networking discussions, conferences. “Weekends are popular for conferences, sometimes I don’t spend a weekend at home for months. Then you sit on a balcony in Budapest, look out over the Danube and the parliament and dream of your allotment in Finkenwerder.”

His is near Airbus, with a few tomatoes and wild strawberries. A refuge in summer. “It’s an old club, from 1901, I think. And very much in transition, a very interesting sociological field.” His gaze remains analytical even in this idyllic setting.

The man with the small rings in his earlobes and the purple jumper over his pale purple shirt not only researches, he also teaches – at the Helmut Schmidt University/University of the Federal Armed Forces Hamburg and with the educationalists at the University of Hamburg. There he realises: “Students often just chase after points, they don’t want to know anything. But there are so many topics: For example, that the removal of the walls between East and West in Europe has resulted in new walls – at the EU’s external borders. If you count the number of drowned migrants in the Mediterranean, they are hardly less deadly, he says.

When it comes to racism, he has his eye on Islamophobia in particular, which experienced a huge upswing following the attacks in New York on 11 September 2001. “It is to the emergence of a united Europe,” says the convinced European, “what anti-Semitism was to the emergence of the German nation state. The problem is always that if you can’t talk positively about yourself, it’s always easier to talk badly about someone else. But we have to define the new European identity in a positive way.”

For Andreas Hieronymus, research always has something to do with his own biography; he is often driven by questions about how certain situations could have turned out differently than they did. Places from the family narrative, such as South Africa or Palermo, are then crystallisation points for dreams, just like the biographical interviews he conducts for his research. “You measure yourself against them, can sometimes recognise your own patterns and learn a lot about yourself.”

Being a sociologist, he says, is “not just a career, but a way of dealing with my biography, of positioning myself in my environment.” It is always his personal questions that he uses to analyse the world and get to the bottom of its mechanisms.

Andreas Hieronymus received the red thread from the Hamburg imam Halima Krausen.

He passed it on to the President of the Hamburg Parliament, Carola Veit (SPD), because he wants to know how the Parliament intends to bring the declaration of intent of the “Coalition against Discrimination”, which Hamburg joined in the summer, to life.