Alfred Menzel

Alfred August Friedrich Menzel (born January 21, 1883 in Eckernförde , † August 14, 1959 in Leipzig ) was a German opponent of the Nazi regime , educator and author .

Life

After attending a middle school , a so-called “private preparandum” and the teachers' seminar in Eckernförde, he became a primary school teacher there in 1903. In 1904 he made an external high school diploma in Kiel , with which he could study. After completing his studies , he received his doctorate in 1909 in Kiel on The Basics of Fichtean Science and Kantian Criticism . In 1911 he completed his habilitation in Kiel on the importance of mathematics for Kant's pre-critical development . Thereupon he became a non-civil servant extraordinary professor in Kiel . He was previously a member of the SPD and the Monistenbund , so according to his résumé he was not promoted to full professor in Kiel. His commitment to popular education should be emphasized. He was one of the founding fathers of the Kiel Adult Education Center. He left the university there and became a teacher at the higher Israelite school in Leipzig . He held this position until the Reichspogromnacht . Until December 4, 1944, the day of his arrest, he worked at the Berthold School , a vocational school for the commercial sector.

Menzel had been arrested for illegally wiretapping enemy broadcasts . The same thing had happened to his lodger Margarete Bothe a few days earlier. He fled the Leipzig Surgical Clinic in April 1945, as the People's Court had even brought charges against him of public hostility, insulting the leaders and defeatism . He could hide and so survive the end of the war unnoticed.

In October 1945 he was appointed honorary professor for education at the University of Leipzig . At the same time he became director of the Institute for Practical Pedagogy at the university. In 1947 he was vice dean of the faculty. In 1953 Menzel retired after he had increasingly withdrawn from office.

Menzel died in 1959.

Fonts

• The origin of moral consciousness. 1919.
• The foundations of the monistic worldview. Hamburg 1922.
• Kant's Critique of Pure Reason. A guide to studying. Berlin 1922.
• Proverbs of the peoples, volume 1. Stuttgart 1948.

literature

• Barbara Kowalzik: Alfred Menzel. In: Leipziger Calendar 2003, p. 294.
• Wulf Bothe: Margarete Bothe (1914-1945). In: Gerald Wiemers (Ed.): Sächsische Lebensbilder , Volume 6. Stuttgart 2009, pp. 45–95, here p. 63 f.
• Alfred Menzel in: Klaus-Dieter Eichler , Ulrich Johannes Schneider : On the everyday history of philosophy in Leipzig , Leipziger Universitätsverlag, 2004, ISBN 978-3-86583-029-6 .
• Barbara Kowalzik: Teacher's book: the teachers of the Leipzig Jewish school work 1912-1942, presented in biograms , Leipziger Universitätsverlag, 2006, ISBN 978-3-86583-117-0 . ( on google books )

Web links

• Alfred Menzel in the professorial catalog of the University of Leipzig
• Literature by and about Alfred Menzel in the catalog of the German National Library