Dürerschule Hochwaldhausen
The Dürerschule Hochwaldhausen was a reform school in the high Vogelsberg that existed between 1912 and 1920 . It was under the direction of Georg Hellmuth Neuendorff . The successor institution at the same location, but with a different educational concept, was the mountain school from 1921 to 1929 .
founding
The Dürerschule emerged from the spirit of the youth movement , which rebelled against the "established" education system, civil society and, most recently, the rampant industrialization, the destruction of nature and urbanization.
The school was initiated by Georg Hellmuth Neuendorff. From 1909 he had worked at the Free School Community of Wickersdorf, which had only been founded a few years earlier . In 1911 he left Wickersdorf with the intention of founding his own school, where he could bring in and implement reform pedagogical ideas from his previous practice.
The choice of location fell on Hochwaldhausen in Vogelsberg in the Grand Duchy of Hesse . It was a climatic health resort founded by Jean Berlit in 1903 and still under construction . Jean Berlit himself had wanted to set up a student hostel in Hochwaldhausen as early as 1908 . In 1910 a corresponding house was built in the style of homeland security architecture. Four neighboring small country houses in the Heimatschutz- Jugendstil were also used to accommodate the students.
Berlit and Neuendorff quickly came to an agreement on founding a reform school in Hochwaldhausen. Together with 30 well-known intellectuals (including Thomas Mann ) they campaigned for the establishment of a free school community in the climatic health resort. It was named Dürerschule and was finally opened on September 2, 1912 as a private high school with boarding school.
The name Dürerschule was reminiscent of the famous Renaissance artist Albrecht Dürer . It was chosen by Neuendorff himself to suggest that art, as the highest function of human culture, is at the center of education.
Pedagogical concept and school operation
The focus of the Dürerschule was on physical education in order to guide the students to a healthy and “reasonable” life. To achieve this goal, sports (including gymnastics , swimming , cycling , winter sports , hiking , soccer ) were practiced. Gardening and work in the school's own workshops for carpentry and precision engineering were also on the curriculum.
As a state requirement, the Dürerschule had to teach according to the curriculum of the Oberrealschule or Realgymnasium . In addition to the usual cultural-technical teaching offers, topics from the areas of humanities, history, language teaching, art, idealism, religion, education for self-employment, freedom and constitution were of central importance. Teaching was based on the principle of co-education .
The school community Dürerschule consisted of the educators, the educational advisory board, the management and the student body. There was also a student committee as a form of student co-administration . There were no school classes , but rather free working groups , learning groups and comradeships in protégé-protégé relationships.
The Dürerschule had an external impact through the Bund Dürerschule , which was established in 1916 and which also published its own magazine and yearbook with reports in the Ehrenklau publishing house in Lauterbach. Neuendorff, who revered peasantry as a "primeval way of life", also devoted himself to folklore . Together with his students he documented old half-timbered buildings in Ilbeshausen and celebrated old rural festivals with them. In 1914 he organized the 1st Vogelsberg Heimattag in Herbstein with Franz Como from the Lauterbach Museum Association .
Recognized teachers, motivated by the idea of the educational school, worked at the Dürerschule . Among them were Herman Schmalenbach and Herman (Chaim) Müntz . The teaching staff was very heterogeneous, which often led to tensions with the comparatively authoritarian Neuendorff. His style of upbringing was more based on the Führer principle , combined with a thoroughly ethnic and anti-Semitic attitude. After 1918 this led to clear opposition within the student body.
End of Dürer's school
In October 1920, a 19-year-old student at the Dürerschule committed suicide by arsenic on the train from Lauterbach to Fulda and was also pregnant. The following investigation revealed that Neuendorff had systematically committed sexual abuse on several schoolgirls. The headmaster fled Hochwaldhausen and Germany for Argentina . However, he was caught and served a six-year prison term.
The Dürerschule was closed in the same year. With a completely different concept and under different management, a new boarding school was founded in 1921 at the same location, the mountain school .
See also
literature
- Karl August Helfenbein: The social education of the Dürerschule Hochwaldhausen. Lauterbach 1986
- Gerhard Kalkhof: The history of the climatic health resort Ilbeshausen-Hochwaldhausen. Grebenhain 1993
Coordinates: 50 ° 31 ′ 5.8 ″ N , 9 ° 18 ′ 45.6 ″ E