Amy Buller

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E. Amy Buller: Darkness over Germany (1943)

Ernestine Amy Buller (born November 9, 1891 in London ; died 1974 in London) was a British education manager.

Life

Amy Buller grew up in a Baptist family in South Africa . She returned to England in 1911 and visited Germany several times to learn the language before the outbreak of World War I in 1914. She studied history at Birkbeck College and received her academic degree in 1917.

Buller converted to Anglo Catholicism . From 1921 she worked as an employee of the Student Christian Movement (SCM), first in Manchester and from 1922 in London. She organized international meetings, conferences and visitor groups in other countries. From 1929 she was a member of the executive committee of the SCM. She left the SCM in 1931 and moved to the University of Liverpool as a warden (mentor) in a dormitory .

Even after the handover of power to the National Socialists in 1933, she continued to organize visits by English clergy, teachers and economists to Germany. Buller was impressed by the manifestations of National Socialism and understood the mass enthusiasm as an expression of a substitute religion. Her visitor groups, which she accompanied herself, were looked after and supervised by German state organizations and party organizations of the NSDAP. She identified four types among her German supervisors: the academically trained representatives of the Nazi regime who were able to propagate Nazi politics and ideology at home and abroad; the staunch “Nordic” ideologues who were able to effectively fulfill their viewing requests from a less demanding clientele; the educated citizens, who represented a higher civilization at social meetings, but at the same time suffered from their life's lies and therefore reported sick; and the cold, careerists and potential murderers who came after Joachim von Ribbentrop and Walter Hewel . In 1933 she and her group of visitors visited a camp of the Reich Labor Service . In 1935, she was along with other foreign guests to the Nazi Party of the NSDAP after Nuremberg invited. They and their groups spoke to officers, members of the SS, pastors, mothers, teachers, children and young people. Buller registered enormous enthusiasm and delusion and only occasional rejection, fear of spying and discouragement. Resistance to the Nazi regime was only possible on a small scale in the years up to the end of her trips to Germany in 1938. The London ambassador Joachim von Ribbentrop found in 1937 that he could not use the British visitor groups for propaganda purposes as intended and obstructed the continuation of the meetings organized by Buller.

The tenor of her book is an accusation of ideological manipulation of a generation of young Germans whose need for belonging and devotion has been abused for inhumane purposes. Buller wrote her book from the perspective of a post-war period in which the not yet founded United Nations would be faced with the daunting task of giving the seduced German youth a new orientation and identifying groups in Germany that could be involved. She noted that she had been in contact with Germans from the bourgeoisie, but not from the labor movement, for thirty years. The persecution of the Jews was also not an issue in their conversations in Germany.

Buller left her job in Liverpool in 1942 and planned to start a non-university college with a Christian perspective. After the plan to establish the college in the abandoned buildings of the Katharinen Foundation in Regent's Park, the house of Windsor let her use the Cumberland Lodge in Windsor Park . The foundation created in 1947 was initially called the Foundation of St. Catharine , from 1966 King George VI and Queen Elizabeth Foundation of St. Catharine and later after the seat of the Cumberland Lodge . University students and other visitors have the opportunity to work on and discuss socio-political issues outside of their study subjects. Buller held the office of (Honorary) Warden until 1966.

Fonts (selection)

  • E. Amy Buller: Darkness over Germany . Foreword by AD Lindsay . London: Longmans, Green, 1943
    • Darkness in Germany: what the Germans thought. Interviews with an Englishwoman 1934–1938 . Foreword by Kurt Barling. Munich: Elisabeth Sandmann, 2016, ISBN 978-3-945543-09-2 .

literature

  • Arthur Walter James : A Short Account of Amy Buller and the Founding of St. Catherine's Cumberland Lodge . Private print, 1979.
  • Angela Schwarz: The journey to the Third Reich. British eyewitnesses in Nazi Germany 1933–1939 . Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, Göttingen 1993, short biography p. 399f. (Dissertation Duisburg 1991)
  • Andrea Seibel: Oral History from Nazi Germany . Review. In: Literary World , June 25, 2016
  • Gina Thomas: You had no idea what was really coming , review, in: FAZ , August 16, 2016, p. 12

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ E. Amy Buller: Darkness over Germany. 1943, p. 131.
  2. ^ E. Amy Buller: Darkness over Germany. 1943, p. 78.
  3. ^ E. Amy Buller: Darkness over Germany. 1943, pp. 37-42.
  4. ↑ Angela Schwarz: The Journey into the Third Reich. 1993, p. 126, p. 280f.
  5. ↑ Angela Schwarz: The Journey into the Third Reich. 1993, p. 353.
  6. ^ E. Amy Buller: Darkness over Germany. 1943, p. Vif.
  7. ↑ Angela Schwarz: The Journey into the Third Reich. 1993, p. 236, p. 292, p. 372.
  8. ^ E. Amy Buller: Darkness over Germany. 1943, p. Vi
  9. ↑ The liberal politician Walter James was director of Cumberland Lodge from 1974 to 1982.
personal data
SURNAME Buller, Amy
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Buller, Ernestine Amy (full name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION British education manager and author
DATE OF BIRTH November 9, 1891
PLACE OF BIRTH London
DATE OF DEATH 1974
Place of death London