Hellmut Becker

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Hellmut Becker's grave in the Dahlem Forest Cemetery in Berlin

Hellmut Becker (born May 17, 1913 in Hamburg , † December 16, 1993 in Berlin ) was a German lawyer, attorney , education researcher and education politician .

Life

Hellmut Becker - son of the Prussian Minister of Education Carl Heinrich Becker and grandson of the linguist Karl Ferdinand Becker - attended the boarding school Schloss Salem / Bodensee before the Arndt-Gymnasium in Berlin-Dahlem , the High School took off. Becker then studied law at the universities in Freiburg , Berlin and Kiel . He finished his legal training in 1943 with the second state examination in law. Becker followed the National Socialist constitutional lawyer Ernst Rudolf Huber from Kiel to the University of Leipzig in 1937 . After being seriously wounded in the Russian campaign in the autumn of 1941 as a member of the Mountain Jäger Regiment 99 of the 1st Mountain Division off Rostov , he went to Huber at the newly established University of Strasbourg in occupied Alsace . There he shared a house with Carl Friedrich von Weizsäcker , whom he had met through Georg Picht . The Huber couple maintained an elite discussion group in which Becker was accepted.

He married Huber's secretary, Antoinette Mathis , “Toto”, a Franco-German elementary school teacher, and later an author of children's and young people's books. The marriage resulted in six children, including the Berlin lawyer Nicolas Becker , the psychoanalyst Stephan Becker , the social psychologist David Becker and the sexologist Sophinette Becker .

Becker had been a member of the NSDAP since May 1937 , "a matter that he apparently kept secret from even his closest family members after the end of the war". He was also a fan of the poetry of Stefan George and was in contact with members of the George circle , especially Robert Boehringer .

After the war, Becker worked as a lawyer. He supported Huber in his denazification and in 1947 defended the State Secretary of the Foreign Office Ernst von Weizsäcker in the Wilhelmstrasse Trial . Weizsäcker was sentenced as a war criminal for having participated in the deportation of Jews from France. After the Einsatzgruppen trial , Becker stood up for two of the mass murderers sentenced to death there. He represented Martin Sandberger - at the request of Carl Friedrich von Weizsäcker and Carlo Schmid - in appeal proceedings. Sandberger was finally released in 1958. Becker worked as a lawyer for Otto Ohlendorf in collaboration with Warren Magee after he had been sentenced to death, and took care of his appeal for clemency. Becker saw the executed person as a “mass murderer”, but also as a “real intellectual”. Becker was a participant in the Heidelberg Juristenkreis , the aim of which was to make the connections among the defenders of the Nuremberg trials useful for a revision of the judgments.

After 1945, Becker's close friend Georg Picht became the headmaster of the Birklehof , and Becker joined the school board with Carlo Schmid , Kurt Hahn and Carl Friedrich von Weizsäcker. In this way he became a legal advisor to private boarding schools. After a stopover at the Frankfurt Institute for Social Research , Becker became honorary President of the German Adult Education Association (DVV) until 1974 and then Chairman of the Board of Trustees of the Pedagogical Office of the DVV and ensured that adult education and lifelong learning were included in the educational reform Eyes moved. In 1963 he was a co-founder of the Max Planck Institute for Human Development in Berlin and its first director. According to Karl Ulrich Mayer , he was an “unconventional member” of the Max Planck Society as he had neither a doctorate nor a habilitation. In addition, he was not a university professor when he was appointed. As director of the MPI for Educational Research, he was also a member of the German Education Council from 1966 to 1975 . Between 1966 and 1972, Becker was repeatedly a discussion leader at the Bergedorf Talks of the Körber Foundation , in which the federal German educational reform was promoted. Other bodies to which Becker belonged were the advisory board of the Institute for Contemporary History in Munich, the cultural advisory board of the Foreign Office and the Ettlinger Kreis. With Hildegard Hamm-Brücher , whom he had placed with the Hessian Ministry of Culture for the purpose of establishing the comprehensive school , he initiated the Theodor Heuss Prize in 1964 and steered the awarding of the prize with her. In 1961, Becker was one of the signatories of the Tübingen Memorandum against Germany's nuclear armament. From 1959 to 1969 he was a member of the Advisory Board of the Friedrich Naumann Foundation for Freedom . Ironically, he was referred to as the “secret minister of culture” of the Federal Republic because, in cooperation with a Protestant cultural elite (e.g. Picht, Weizsäcker), he particularly influenced educational and cultural policy.

Afterlife

The former Association of German Landerziehungsheime (LEH), today the Boarding School Association , awarded a Hellmut Becker Prize until 2009.

The Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung reported on August 9, 2011 that the headmaster of the Odenwald School Gerold Becker was under the personal protection of Hellmut Becker. Hellmut Becker knew about the pedophile inclinations of his protégé and still helped him to the post of headmaster. In the period of 18 August 2011, by Robert Leicht executed cause Hellmut Becker to Gerold Becker did the Headmaster unrelated with him, even though he knew that he had assaulted his godson.

In 2013 an exhibition at the Max Planck Institute for Human Development commemorated Becker's 100th birthday, and in October 2014 a documentation of the exhibition appeared online.

Works

  • (together with Alexander Kluge ): Cultural policy and expenditure control: On the theory and practice of auditing. Klostermann, Frankfurt a. M. 1961.
  • Quantity and quality. Basic questions of education policy , Rombach, Freiburg im Breisgau 1968.
  • Gerd Kadelbach (Ed.): Theodor W. Adorno. Education to come of age. Lectures and discussions with Hellmut Becker 1959–1969. Suhrkamp, ​​Frankfurt a. M. 1971, ISBN 3-518-36511-8 .
  • Education as a profession. Conversations about education and politics. Edited by Frithjof Hager. R. Piper, Munich 1992, ISBN 3-492-11487-3 .

literature

  • Gerold Becker (Ed.): Lust and burden of the enlightenment. A book on the 80th birthday of Hellmut Becker , Beltz, Weinheim 1993, ISBN 3-407-83130-7 .
  • Educational research and policy. Speeches for the 80th birthday of Hellmut Becker , Max Planck Institute for Human Development, Berlin 1994, ISBN 3-87985-034-8 .
  • Eckart Conze , Norbert Frei , Peter Hayes , Moshe Zimmermann : The Office and the Past . German diplomats in the Third Reich and in the Federal Republic , Karl Blessing Verlag, Munich 2010, ISBN 3-89667-430-7 , ISBN 978-3-89667-430-2 .
  • Karl Ulrich Mayer : Hellmut Becker, May 17, 1913 to December 16, 1993 . In: Max Planck Society: Reports and communications 2/94 - annual report and annual accounts 1993, obituaries.
  • Ulf Morgenstern : "Bildungsbecker" and "Liberaler Feuerkopf". Hellmut Becker (1913–1993). In: ders., Kristina Michaelis (Ed.): Merchants, Cosmopolitans, Art Patrons. The Gelnhausen upper middle class families Becker and Schöffer. Am Goldenen Fuss, Hamburg 2013, pp. 106–113.
  • Ulrich Raulff : Circle without a master. Stefan Georges Nachleben , CH Beck, Munich 2009, ISBN 978-3-406-59225-6 .
  • Kerstin Singer, Ute Frevert : 100 Years of Hellmut Becker (1913–2013) - Documentation of the exhibition on life and work at the Max Planck Institute for Human Development , online publication, October 2014, doi : 10.14280 / 08241.29 online, PDF .
  • Philipp Glahé: The Heidelberg Circle of Jurists and its Struggle against Allied Jurisdiction: Amnesty-Lobbyism and Impunity-Demands for National Socialist War Criminals (1949–1955) . In: Journal of the History of International Law , Volume 21 (2019), pp. 1-44, ISSN: 15718050-12340125.

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ a b Heike Schmoll: A German educational catastrophe. In: Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung , July 29, 2013, p. 7.
  2. ↑ Cf. Ulrich Raulff: Circle without a master. 2009, p. 474.
  3. ↑ Ulrich Raulff: Circle without a master. 2009, p. 383, p. 403 ff., P. 471 f.
  4. ↑ Eckart Conze, Norbert Frei, Peter Hayes and Moshe Zimmermann: The office and the past. German diplomats in the Third Reich and in the Federal Republic . Munich 2010, p. 405 f.
  5. ↑ Ulrich Raulff: Circle without a master , 2009, p. 404 f.
  6. ↑ Ulrich Raulff: Circle without Masters , 2009, p. 391.
  7. ^ Klaus Heuer , Lisa Steffny (editor): Part of Hellmut Becker's estate. (pdf, 1.1 MB) German Institute for Adult Education - Leibniz Center for Lifelong Learning , 23 August 2017, p. 2 , accessed on 23 February 2019 .
  8. ↑ Melanie Mühl : On television: Odenwaldschule: You had the power to destroy children. In: FAZ.net . August 9, 2011, accessed November 2, 2019 .
  9. ^ Robert Leicht: Odenwaldschule: Closed society. In: Zeit Online . August 18, 2011, accessed November 2, 2019 .
  10. ↑ See Kerstin Singer, Ute Frevert : 100 Years of Helmut Becker (1913 to 2013) - Documentation of the exhibition on life and work at the Max Planck Institute for Human Development. (pdf, 11.3 MB) Max Planck Institute for Human Development, October 9, 2014, accessed on November 2, 2019 .
personal data
SURNAME Becker, Hellmut
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German lawyer and educational researcher
DATE OF BIRTH May 17, 1913
PLACE OF BIRTH Hamburg
DATE OF DEATH December 16, 1993
Place of death Berlin