Basically I got the problem solved, but I am trying to find a more elegant solution since the code gets a little bit hard to read. Here´s what I got:
mydf$size_class = ifelse(mydf$absolute_number <= 5,"1-5",ifelse(mydf$absolute_number > 6 &
mydf$absolute_number <= 10,"6-10","x"))
Maybe I need rather some formatting help / hints, convention than a new code :) – those are also very welcome ;)