Eberhard Achterberg

Eberhard Achterberg, 1974 in Preetz (technical high school in the Plön district).

Eberhard Achterberg (born January 9, 1910 in Oliva ; † August 11, 1983 in Neumünster ) was a German religious scholar , publicist , important National Socialist functionary in the Rosenberg office and later a leading member of the German Unitarian religious community , university lecturer and high school teacher. He is the father of Bernhard Achterberg and Gerd-M. Achterberg .

Life

Eberhard Achterberg had been a member of the NSDAP since February 1930 and at times also an SA man. From 1934 to 1936 he published in Bernhard Kummer's magazine Nordic Voices . In 1935 his contribution Germanic Religion in the Controversy of the Present appeared .

He was born in 1940 at the University of Jena with a thesis on luck and fate in the Germanic way of life. An investigation into the type, occurrence and meaning of the Old Norse words for luck and fate in the Islendinga sögur zum Dr. phil. PhD. At the end of the same year he became the deputy "editor-in-chief" of the National Socialist monthly magazine published by Alfred Rosenberg (subtitle: "Central political and cultural journal of the NSDAP" ). From July 1941 he was her "Hauptschriftleiter" (chief editor). Rosenberg took over Achterberg in his office, which officially represented an office for the supervision of the entire spiritual and ideological training and education of the NSDAP. From March 1942 to January 1943 he was head of the department for “Jewish and Freemason Issues” on behalf of August Schirmer .

Achterberg never denied his Nazi past and publicly dealt with it as a once “there and for it”. In a letter to Erich Fried in 1983 he wrote:

Half a century has passed since we "came to power". Still the guesswork of how it came about. Only we, who were actively involved then out of conviction, we still have to be silent; we are not allowed to say what moved us then, what it looked like in the republic. Our contribution to the elucidation of what was before 1933 is undesirable. You only ever want to hear contemporary witnesses who were all "against" back then. That inevitably gives the wrong picture and therefore does not, in my opinion, help to prevent the dangers of the future. And the new signs are scary. I do not see the danger in the "neo-Nazis", I see them with great concern in the growing xenophobia, in the still effective, old Nazi enemy image of communism, in the popular mood for the death penalty, in the resistance to liberalization in the Prison, in criminal law and in the sexual area (§ 218 and § 175). I see a danger in the increasing use of violence by the "authorities" against the citizens, in the discrimination of the peace movement and the restriction of basic rights. Because I was active and convinced at the time, I advocate that such a development should not be allowed to happen again.

After the Second World War, Achterberg lived with his family in Schleswig-Holstein. He put his journalistic work with the German Unitarians on a new basis, which was strongly influenced by Albert Schweitzer . Achterberg was one of their important opinion leaders and "outstanding exponents" and worked for 14 years as editor of the magazine Glaube und Tat - German-Unitarian sheets (today: unitarian sheets ), where he mainly focused on issues of value orientation, anti-authoritarian education , and social politics and of personal togetherness. Later he was state spokesman for the public corporation German Unitarian religious community in Schleswig-Holstein .

A teaching position for German and philosophy at the Bundeswehr University in Hamburg was revoked when one of his sons refused to do military service. In the 1970s he taught at the Fachgymnasium in Plön.

Shortly before his death in 1983, Achterberg was elected "Head of the Spiritual Council" of the German Unitarians. He died of a heart attack.

Fonts

The German East - Task and Obligation . In: National Socialist monthly books, issue 130, Jan. 1941, 12th year, pp. 14-20.
Need of God . In: National Socialist monthly issue, issue 152/53, Nov./Dec. 1942, 13th year
Quo vadis, France? In: National Socialist Monthly Issues, Jan. 1943, pp. 55–58.
Counter forces in art . In: National Socialist monthly issue, issue 155/56, 1943, 14th year.
Our faith. The book for free people. Self-published, Sülfeld 1951.
Master Eckhart . In: Glaube und Tat, issue 7/1960.
Belief in the atomic age . In: Glaube und Tat, issue 6/1962.
The human being as a whole and unity . 1964.
Albert Schweitzer. A life at the turning point . Helmut Soltsien Verlag, Hameln 1968.
Work for Peace as a Religious Mission . In: Glaube und Tat, No. 12, 1971.
Education for tenderness . In: Reality and Truth, Issue 2, 1977.
Values as an orientation aid in human interaction . In: unitarian sheets, issue 6, 1980.
Size and Limits of a Religious Humanism . In: The Humanist, Volume 8, 1982.
The power that carries us. Finding meaning in a threatened world . 232 pp., Verlag Deutsche Unitarian, Munich 1985, ISBN 3-922483-05-4 (a posthumous collection of texts from 1952, created by his son Bernhard Achterberg )

literature

Hans-Dietrich Kahl : Eberhard Achterberg, January 9, 1910 - August 11, 1983 , in: unitarian sheets for holistic religion and culture , 2/2010, pp. 91–97.

Individual evidence

↑ Christine Koch: The library system in National Socialism: a research status analysis . Tectum Verlag, 2003, p. 14.
^ Heinrich Beck, Johannes Hoops (ed.): Reallexikon der Germanischen Altertumskunde . Verlag Walter de Gruyter, 2003, p. 423.
↑ Here, quoted from the appendix by Hans-Dietrich Kahl: Eberhard Achterberg , in Unitarian Blätter , 2/2010, p. 95 f., Fried's answer is also there (excerpt: “Of course, I think that people like you have to speak should come. ” ) and another letter from Achterberg to Fried. Fried published the first letter (from which is quoted here) in the appendix to his contribution As a German-speaking Jew, seeing Germany today in the shadow of the past. Germans and Jews today , ed. by A. Wojak, Gütersloh 1985, pp. 72-73.
↑ Oskar Hegel in the Unitarian sheets , No. 4 from 1986, p. 163.
^ Peter Bahn in the brochure Building Blocks 1, Writings on the Foundation of Unitarian Religiosity. Ad Fontes; On the sources , published by Bund Deutscher Unitarians, 1991, p. 6.

personal data
SURNAME	Achterberg, Eberhard
BRIEF DESCRIPTION	German religious scholar and National Socialist functionary
DATE OF BIRTH	January 9, 1910
PLACE OF BIRTH	Oliva
DATE OF DEATH	August 11, 1983
Place of death	Neumunster

[1] Christine Koch: The library system in National Socialism: a research status analysis . Tectum Verlag, 2003, p. 14.

[2] Heinrich Beck, Johannes Hoops (ed.): Reallexikon der Germanischen Altertumskunde . Verlag Walter de Gruyter, 2003, p. 423.

[3] Here, quoted from the appendix by Hans-Dietrich Kahl: Eberhard Achterberg , in Unitarian Blätter , 2/2010, p. 95 f., Fried's answer is also there (excerpt: “Of course, I think that people like you have to speak should come. ” ) and another letter from Achterberg to Fried. Fried published the first letter (from which is quoted here) in the appendix to his contribution As a German-speaking Jew, seeing Germany today in the shadow of the past. Germans and Jews today , ed. by A. Wojak, Gütersloh 1985, pp. 72-73.

[4] Oskar Hegel in the Unitarian sheets , No. 4 from 1986, p. 163.

[5] Peter Bahn in the brochure Building Blocks 1, Writings on the Foundation of Unitarian Religiosity. Ad Fontes; On the sources , published by Bund Deutscher Unitarians, 1991, p. 6.