Axel Werner Kühl

Axel Werner cooling (* 2. May 1893 in Altona ; † 6 June 1944 in Verden ) was a German Lutheran Evangelical pastor and the church struggle one of the heads of the Confessing Church in Lübeck . He was a resister against the synchronization of the German Evangelical Church by the National Socialists.

Life

Youth, studies and training

Axel Werner Kühl was the son of the medical councilor Axel Waldemar Kühl in Altona and attended the humanistic Christianeum there until he graduated from high school. From 1911 to 1914 he studied Protestant theology at the Universities of Halle , Göttingen and Kiel . In Göttingen he became a member of the Corps Hannovera . After the temporal break in military service in the First World War , he was ordained in 1920 and initially worked as an assistant chaplain in Neumünster and in Westerland on Sylt.

Pastor in Lübeck

In 1922 he became a pastor in the Evangelical Lutheran Church in Lübeck and initially took over a pastor's position at the Nusse Church in the Nusse exclave south of Lübeck in the Lauenburg region , before he became chief pastor at the St. Jakobi Old Town Church in Lübeck in 1928 . As a pastor at the Jakobikirche, he won over the student councilor and church musician Bruno Grusnick as cantor in 1930 . Shortly afterwards, both of them met the composer and church musician Hugo Distler , who in 1931 took up the position of organist at the church through Günther Ramin . The Jakobikirche thus became an important center of the renewal movement of Protestant church music in the late Weimar Republic . Even after his departure from Lübeck in 1937, Kühl and Distler remained in constant correspondence until Distler's suicide in 1942. As a member of the Berneuchen Movement and its Michael Brotherhood , Kühl also campaigned for the renewal of worship services and introduced the Easter Vigil celebration in a Lutheran church in Lübeck for the first time in St. Jakobi .

Entry into the Confessing Church after the seizure of power

The leadership of the Lübeck regional church was taken over by the National Socialist Senator Hans Böhmcker from June 1, 1933, as Senate Commissioner for the affairs of the Evangelical Lutheran Church , who had the Evangelical Lutheran Church in Lübeck subordinate to a church committee controlled by him. With the appointment of Bishop Erwin Balzer , the synchronization took place . Balzer owed the installation to his party membership and belonged to the German Christians who had already achieved an overwhelming majority in the church elections in Lübeck in July 1933.

Pastor cooling was before 1933 a member of the Federation of German church and the Young German Order , but was replaced in 1934 the Pastors at from which the Confessing Church should emerge, and soon became the spokesman for the Brethren and to 1939/40 the Council Lübeck and also as Representative of the Lübeck regional church in the Luther Council . Together with the pastor of the Aegidienkirche Wilhelm Jannasch , whom he did not support in everything, he was one of the more exposed opponents of the German Christians in the Lübeck regional church. In 1936 the dispute escalated and, together with eight other pastors from the Confessing Church, Bishop Balzer dismissed him from church service.

Reprisals and professional bans

In January 1937 he was also expelled by the Gestapo from the area of ​​the then still independent city-state, the other pastors of the Confessing Church in Lübeck were placed under house arrest. These measures by the National Socialist German Christians aroused public interest throughout Germany and led to tumultuous demonstrations among the population of the Hanseatic city. When the chairman of the Reich Church Committee (RKA) of the German Evangelical Church, Wilhelm Zoellner , wanted to act as mediator as a result of the dispute in February 1937 between the DC church leadership and the BK pastors in Lübeck, the state police forbade him to travel there at the instigation of the Reich Church Ministry under Hanns Kerrl . On February 12, 1937, Zoellner resigned.

Memorial plaque for the 1937 emergency confirmation in Mölln

A consequence of the professional ban against Kühl and other pastors of the Confessing Church was the Möllner emergency confirmation . The confirmation of these pastors were on the Saturday before Palm Sunday 1937 in the Notkonfirmation in St. Nicolai in Mölln , so beyond the control of Lübeckischen country church in the Schleswig-Holstein Duchy of Lauenburg, from Flensburg pastor Ernst Mohr confirmed . Special trains of the Lübeck-Büchener Railway were used for the approximately 1000 people arriving from Lübeck for this service , and during the service, in which he was the only pastor to attend due to the ongoing house arrest of the others, Kühl read a greeting from the Hanoverian regional bishop August Marahrens , whose spiritual direction the Lübeck BK pastors had submitted. In April 1937, this escalating conflict succeeded in Lübeck. Böhmcker resigned from the Lübeck church leadership on October 31, 1937.

In 1940, Kühl was called up for military service as a reserve officer. The captain d. Res. Died of his own hand in 1944 with his regiment in Verden an der Aller. In addition to his wife, he left a son and four daughters.

estate

The written legacy of Axel Werner Kühl (382 archival items, mainly correspondence with friends and family members, diaries and memories, sermon manuscripts as well as manuscripts and typescripts for lectures and publications.) Was handed over in 2013 and 2017 by one of his grandchildren as a deposit to the regional church archive in Kiel; the stock was developed in 2017.

Publications

• Wolfram von Eschenbach and Martin Luther - An inkling and fulfillment in the history of the German soul in: Der Wagen 1931, pp. 7-12.
• Mountain church. 7 sermons in front of a Protestant spa community in Switzerland. Lübeck 1932.
• From solstice to Christmas night. In: Annual letters of the Berneuchener Kreis 1935, p. 16
• The youthful figure of German Christianity. In: Annual letters of the Berneuchener Kreis 1935, p. 115
• The image of man. In: Gottesjahr 1936, pp. 41–44

literature

• Hannelore Braun, Gertraud Grünzinger: Encyclopedia of Persons on German Protestantism 1919-1949 Göttingen 2006, p. 147, ISBN 3525557612 ( digitized version )
• Manfred Gailus, Wolfgang Krogel (ed.): From the Babylonian captivity of the church in the national: Regional studies on Protestantism, National Socialism and post-war history 1930 to 2000. Berlin: Wichern Verlag 2006. ISBN 3-88981-189-2
• Antjekathrin Graßmann (Ed.): Lübeckische Geschichte. Schmidt-Römhild , Lübeck 1989, p. 720ff. ISBN 3-7950-3203-2
• Christian Luther: The church emergency law, its theory and its application in the church struggle. Göttingen 1969, p. 184 ff. ISBN 3525555229 ( digitized version )
• Karl Friedrich Reimers: Lübeck in the church struggle of the Third Reich: National Socialist leader principle and Evangelical Lutheran regional church from 1933 to 1945. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht 1964
• Martin Thoemmes : "... that he may protect us at our end ..." The last sermon of the Jakobi pastor Axel Werner Kühl. In: Lübeckische Blätter 2008, issue 11 (PDF; 1.4 MB), pp. 186–188.
• Bertram Schmidt: The Lübeck Confession Pastor Axel Werner Kühl (1893-1944): A political biography , Schmidt-Römhild, Lübeck 2013 ISBN 978-3-7950-5211-9

Individual evidence

1. ↑ The Hugo Distler Archive , which was set up in the pastors' houses of the Jakobikirche am Koberg after Distler's death, is now in the city ​​library (Lübeck) .
2. ^ The incorporation of Lübeck into Prussia through the Greater Hamburg Law took place only a little later.
3. ↑ Reimers (Lit.), p. 365. Reimers sums up: Despite his party ties, Böhmcker was a man distinguished by personal integrity and excellent legal knowledge, who knew how to conduct Nazi church policy with great prudence and independence, without ever being conscious of elementary basic German laws Legal tradition to perish. (!)
4. ↑ Holdings 98,144 (estate of Axel Werner Kühl), see Julia Brüdegam: Estate of Axel Werner Kühl. In: dusted ... from archives in the north church 6 (2018), p. 50f ( digitized version )