Village community center
A village community center (DGH) is a publicly funded building for communal use in rural communities and villages , especially in Hesse . Similar institutions of church sponsors are the community centers , there are further overlapping terms for the community center , community center , neighborhood house, district center and community center .
Buildings with a similar function were called culture houses in the GDR .
History of the village community center
As early as the 1920s, village community houses were built in what is now the state of Baden-Württemberg to strengthen the structure in rural areas. In Hesse, August Franke (SPD) took over this idea and set up the first DGH in Haldorf in 1950 . In September 1950, in Hirschaid near Bamberg in Bavaria , a village community center called the Peasant Woman's House was built. According to the Hamburger Abendblatt from September 26, 1950, this contained
- “... a very comfortably furnished common room, a library, bathroom and sauna, laundry room with machines that the individual company cannot afford, drying room, cider and press room with fruit press, slaughter room with electrical machine equipment, cooling room, pantry, room with a bag-mending machine, a Bakery with dough kneading machine and electric oven. "
It became the model for many other village community centers. This was taken up in 1951 by the Hessian Prime Minister Georg-August Zinn and began with the implementation of a major social reform, the Hessen Plan that he had propagated . Financing was provided equally by the municipality and the state. Other federal states also followed this idea and began to build village community houses, sometimes also called town houses. The first house in Lower Saxony was built in Offleben in 1957 and the Baldramsdorf community opened the first in Austria in 1956.
Situation in Hessen
The establishment of village community houses (rural areas) as well as town houses (small towns) was a key point of the so-called Hessen Plan drawn up at the beginning of the 1950s under the leadership of the then Hessian Prime Minister Georg-August Zinn . The aim of these facilities was, on the one hand, to create spaces for cultural life, which on the one hand could simply mean a pub, but in a broader sense, above all, rooms for clubs. Mention should be made here of the so-called rural women’s associations , which came into being practically across the board from the beginning of the 1950s and have now developed into a self-confident and by no means dusty center of village life in many places, from agriculture and household to theater and cinema visits, to maintaining tradition and local history .
On the other hand, village community houses should bring progress and modernity to rural areas in a purely practical manner (communal bathrooms, TV rooms, communal freezers, but also kindergartens and - where none or no longer available - simply a "pub" as a communication center).
In the initial phase, village community houses were built as independent complexes; from the 1970s, with the start of the school reform in Hesse, increasingly empty village schools were converted into village community houses through conversions and extensions. The hundredth village community center was inaugurated in Arnoldshain in June 1958 . Only in 1988, when the third funding period of the Hessen Plan expired, the establishment of village community houses in Hessen was completed. Today there are around 1500 village community centers across the whole of Hesse. Due to the increasing loss of what were once pioneering modern facilities such as bathrooms, TV rooms or communal freezers, which have also become household standards in rural areas over the years, their task has developed into an institution similar to the community center.
Furnishing
They were the location for communal washing facilities, freezer rooms, a sewing room and other communal facilities as well as an event location for cultural and club activities as well as family celebrations. Often a more modern bakery was attached or integrated. Many village community houses were the location of the village library. In many cases, they were spatially connected to other community facilities such as fire brigade bases, kindergartens or the like.
literature
- Heinrich Fischer: The Hessian village community center. One way of creating social institutions in rural communities . Wiesbaden 1954
- Thomas Fuchs: Make the city your image! About the modernization of rural areas . Pfaffenweiler 1996
Web links
- Association for social-cultural work eV - professional association of neighborhood and town houses, district and community centers in Germany
- aus Heim und Reich (1938): A Westphalian village community center
Individual evidence
- ↑ archiv.abendblatt.de (PDF; 2.27 MB)
- ↑ ( Page no longer available , search in web archives: hersfelder-zeitung.de.dedi25.your-server.de )
- ↑ bueddenstedt.de
- ↑ baldramsdorf.at ( Memento from December 1, 2007 in the Internet Archive )
- ↑ Civilization upgrade . In: Die Zeit , No. 25/1958