Arno Poetzsch

Bust of Arno Pötzsch in Cuxhaven near the St. Petri Church

Arno Pötzsch (born November 23, 1900 in Leipzig , † April 19, 1956 in Cuxhaven ) was a German educator, Protestant pastor and poet of hymns.

biography

Arno Pötzsch was the son of an employee in a textile shop, his mother was a nurse. He grew up in simple circumstances and attended elementary school. He actually wanted to become a teacher, but had to drop out of training for health reasons.

During the First World War he volunteered for the Imperial Navy at the age of 17 . The end of the war brought him into a crisis of faith and life. Then he got to know the Moravian Church , where he found support and new courage. Pötzsch worked in the Kleinwelka Brethren near Bautzen and Herrnhut as an educator and carer. He was recommended to become a social worker . In 1930, however, he decided to study theology.

In 1935 he joined the Evangelical Michael Brotherhood , a binding spiritual community founded in 1931. It was there that he met his official brother Kurt Reuber , with whom he remained friends. After the surrender of the 6th Army in Stalingrad in early 1943, he dedicated several poems to Reuber, the draftsman of the Stalingrad Madonna. His first poems were written during his studies.

Pötzsch became pastor in Wiederau near Rochlitz (Saxony) in 1935 and pastor at the Garrison Church in Cuxhaven in 1938 . From there he also had to look after the Holstein coastal towns and Heligoland. During the German occupation of the Netherlands in World War II, he was a naval pastor in The Hague . There he received in 1941 the book dedicated to him by the Swiss literary scholar and essayist Fritz Ernst (1889-1958) about his maternal great-great-grandfather Peter im Baumgarten , the famous foster son of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe.

Many of his poems and songs were written in response to the horrors of World War II . He himself referred to them as "emergency songs of the church". From March 1948 to 1956 he was parish priest at the former garrison church in Cuxhaven, which he was familiar with, and since 1950 the St. Petri Church.

His spiritual poems from the war and the post-war period can be found in many devotional and hymn books. Margot Käßmann quoted the first two lines of Pötzsch's song on her resignation on February 24, 2010:

You cannot fall deeper
than just in God's hand,
which he has mercifully stretched out for the salvation of us all
.

He was buried in the Brockeswalde cemetery in Cuxhaven.

Honors

The Arno-Pötzsch-Platz in Döse was named after him in 1995.
A bust of him is on the outside wall of the church office of St. Petri Cuxhaven.

Publications

Letters and Writings 1938–1952. Edited and commented by Michael Heymel . Darmstadt 2019.
In the light of eternity: spiritual songs and poems. Complete edition. Ed .: Marion Heide-Münnich. Verl. Junge Gemeinde, Leinfelden-Echterdingen 2008.

Hymns

You invited us to your Lord's Supper as guests. ( EG 224)
My God owns the world. (EG 408)
You can't fall any lower (EG 533)
Sing, sing, sing, sing, sing peace on earth. (EG 541: regional part Hesse and Nassau / Kurhessen-Waldeck)
Stay with us when the day slips away. (EG 542: regional part Württemberg)
You gave life to the world. (EG 668: regional part Württemberg)
A word has been said. (EG 586: Regional part Baden, Alsace, Lorraine, Palatinate / 590 - Regional part West and RG 256)
Lord God, give us this daily bread. (EG 633: Lower Saxony regional section, Bremen / 630 - Northern Elbe regional section)
You always stand in front of the doors of your world. (RG 374)
I will sing to the Lord as long as I live and am. (RG 731)

literature

Sonja Wolff-Matthes: In God's hand: Arno Pötzsch: a picture of life. LVH, Hanover 2000.

Web links

Commons : Arno Pötzsch - collection of images, videos and audio files

Literature by and about Arno Pötzsch in the catalog of the German National Library

Individual evidence

↑ Cf. Fritz Ernst: To Mr. Naval Pastor Arno Poetzsch in ** [The Hague]. In: Fritz Ernst: From Goethe's circle of friends. Studies around Peter in the Baumgarten. With twenty-five illustrations (cover and cover based on a design by Pierre Guachat). Eugen Rentsch, Erlenbach / Zurich 1941, pp. 5–7, here p. 5. On Peter im Baumgarten, Arno Pötzsch's “ Haslital ancestor”. His ancestor was his wife (marriage in 1786 in Berka an der Ilm ), Johanna Friederike Louise Wächter, widowed in Baumgarten, née. Hoffmann (1768–1814), who was widowed in Berka in 1800 and married the Weimar actuary Johann Justin Ludwig Wächter (1772–1827). See Reinhard Breymayer : Goethe, Oetinger and no end. Charlotte Edle von Oetinger, born von Barckhaus-Wiesenhütten, as Werther "Fräulein von B.". Heck, Dußlingen 2012, p. 68 with note 174.
↑ Magazine sigh of relief , federal publishing , Witten 4/2014, p 7 (Right: Verlag Junge Gemeinde, Leinfelden-Echterdingen).

personal data
SURNAME	Poetzsch, Arno
BRIEF DESCRIPTION	German educator, pastor and hymn poet
DATE OF BIRTH	November 23, 1900
PLACE OF BIRTH	Leipzig
DATE OF DEATH	April 19, 1956
Place of death	Cuxhaven

[1] Cf. Fritz Ernst: To Mr. Naval Pastor Arno Poetzsch in ** [The Hague]. In: Fritz Ernst: From Goethe's circle of friends. Studies around Peter in the Baumgarten. With twenty-five illustrations (cover and cover based on a design by Pierre Guachat). Eugen Rentsch, Erlenbach / Zurich 1941, pp. 5–7, here p. 5. On Peter im Baumgarten, Arno Pötzsch's “ Haslital ancestor”. His ancestor was his wife (marriage in 1786 in Berka an der Ilm ), Johanna Friederike Louise Wächter, widowed in Baumgarten, née. Hoffmann (1768–1814), who was widowed in Berka in 1800 and married the Weimar actuary Johann Justin Ludwig Wächter (1772–1827). See Reinhard Breymayer : Goethe, Oetinger and no end. Charlotte Edle von Oetinger, born von Barckhaus-Wiesenhütten, as Werther "Fräulein von B.". Heck, Dußlingen 2012, p. 68 with note 174.

[2] Magazine sigh of relief , federal publishing , Witten 4/2014, p 7 (Right: Verlag Junge Gemeinde, Leinfelden-Echterdingen).