Helmut Ensslin

Helmut Eugen Ensslin (* May 24, 1909 in Ulm ; † May 27, 1984 in Stuttgart ) was a Protestant pastor and the father of Gudrun Ensslin .

Life

Helmut Ensslin studied theology at the Eberhard-Karls-Universität Tübingen . There he joined the Normannia Association . After completing his studies, Helmut Ensslin became a pastor, including in Stuttgart-Bad Cannstatt . During the Nazi regime he was a supporter of the opposition Confessing Church . He was married to Ilse Ensslin, who gave birth to daughter Gudrun in 1940. The couple had six other children. Helmut Ensslin was also active as a painter .

1970s

Pastor Helmut Ensslin was not a pietist , but a supporter of Karl Barth's dialectical theology . He rejected the activities of his daughter Gudrun Ensslin in the Red Army Faction (RAF). Nevertheless, he tried to understand the motives of the group and sought personal contact with his daughter, which brought him a lot of public hostility. In 1972, in the news magazine Der Spiegel , Ensslin criticized the way the press, the state and society dealt with the student movement of 1967/68 : “This movement was ridiculed by a large part of the press and what had to arouse particular passion for the positive ethical content of this movement - criminalized, but ultimately swept out of the public by police operations, in which they would probably not have found any politically effective basis in the current workforce. ”He wrote about the RAF that“ this group itself no longer counts on tolerance on the part of society and is precisely that has developed to the severity that only makes unreasonable demands on the parents, but no longer gives them the opportunity to address them. "

Helmut Ensslin called for the alleged " solitary confinement" and other alleged disadvantages for the prisoners from the RAF to be lifted and therefore also took part in an initiative founded by relatives of RAF prisoners. His daughter Gudrun committed suicide in the Stuttgart-Stammheim correctional facility in October 1977 .

Ensslin in the feature film

In the film Die Bleierne Zeit from 1981, Helmut Ensslin is interpreted by Franz Rudnick as a petty-bourgeois, high-handed family man. In the 2008 film Der Baader Meinhof Complex , the pastor is portrayed by the actor Michael Gwisdek . The fictional film shows Helmut and Ilse Ensslin in several sequences and reflects the positions that Helmut Ensslin took in the 1970s with regard to his daughter. In the 2011 film Who if Not Us , Helmut Ensslin is portrayed by Michael Wittenborn .

literature

• Gudrun Ensslin u. a .: Draws the dividing line every minute - letters to her sister Christiane and her brother Gottfried from prison 1972–1973. ed. by Christiane Ensslin and Gottfried Ensslin. Konkret Literatur Verlag, Hamburg 2005, ISBN 3-894-58239-1 .
• Gerd Koenen : Vesper, Ensslin, Baader. Primal scenes of German terrorism. Fischer Taschenbuch-Verlag, Frankfurt am Main 2005, ISBN 3-596-15691-2 .

swell

• Archives of the Normannia Association

Individual evidence

1. ↑ ^{a b} Helmut Ensslin: All those parents ... In: Der Spiegel . No. 9 , 1972, p. 46 ( online ).