Erica Küppers

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Erica Küppers (born December 20, 1891 in Essen , † September 16, 1968 in Bad Vilbel ) was a German Protestant theologian , student councilor , member of the Confessing Church (BK), persecuted by the Nazi regime and the first ordained pastor of the Evangelical Church in Hesse and Nassau .

Life

After graduating from university in 1911, Küppers studied Protestant theology , philosophy and German in Göttingen , Zurich , Leipzig and Heidelberg . Küppers has been a member of the circle of friends around Karl Barth and later around Charlotte von Kirschbaum since she was a student in Göttingen . She put the exam for teachers from. She then became a teacher at the private Odenwald School in Ober-Hambach , where teaching was reform-oriented. After that she was accepted into the school service of Lower Saxony . In 1926 she was appointed to the teaching and education institute for girls in Droyßig near Zeitz . From there she went on a scholarship to Bonn and Bethel , where she continued her theology studies up to the first theological exam. However, she did not succeed in obtaining a doctorate because she got into serious disputes with the director who was appointed to Droyssig in 1933. In December 1933 she was transferred to Magdeburg . She joined the Confessing Church early on, to whose Dahlemite wing she belonged. She made her opposition to racism and anti-Semitism public. Because she refused to take the oath on Adolf Hitler , she was given leave of absence in August 1935 and forcibly retired on October 24 of the same year . Because she nevertheless gave several lectures against the exclusion and discrimination of Jews , she was banned from speaking in the entire administrative district of Magdeburg in 1936 . On December 1, 1936, she entered the service of the municipal association of Evangelical Women's Aid in Frankfurt / Main .

After the liberation from the Nazi tyranny, she worked on behalf of the Evangelical Brother Council of the BK to rebuild church life. In January 1950 she took over the editing of the newly founded newspaper "Bekennende Kirche auf dem Weg", the news paper of the Brotherhood of the Evangelical Church in Germany . In July 1950 she was even able to take her Second Theological Examination and enter the Vicariate . On the 1st Advent in 1950 she was ordained by Church President Martin Niemöller , a long-time friend . Küppers was now officially allowed to bear the title of vicar, but she was still not allowed to call herself a pastor. In December 1950 she took up a position as a prison chaplain in the Preungesheim women's prison . The synod of the Evangelical Church in Hesse and Nassau (to which Küppers himself belonged from 1951) only passed a female pastor law in 1959 , which allowed her and other women to bear the title of pastor.

Together with other friends from the Confessing Church, she had been one of the editors of the BK magazine The Voice of the Congregation for a decade since 1949 .

Honor

  • After her death, a church parish hall in Weiterstadt was named Erica-Küppers-Haus in memory of her . It is on Herrngartenweg 5 .

Publications

  • God's people . Voice publ., Frankfurt a. M. 1962.
  • The voice of the Christian in the German poem 1933–1945 . Bechauf, Bielefeld 1948.
  • Working aid for dealing with the Jewish question in community evenings, in lessons and in catechetical courses . Lembeck, Frankfurt a. M. 1950.
  • Confessing Church . Chr. Kaiser, Munich 1952.

literature

  • Marlies Flesch-Thebesius : Our theological mothers: For example Carola Barth and Erica Küppers from Frankfurt . In: Joachim Proescholdt (Ed.): Evangelical personalities in Frankfurt on May. Lectures on the 1200th anniversary of the city of Frankfurt am Main . Frankfurt am Main 1995, ISBN 3-922179-27-4 .
  • Marlies Flesch-Thebesius: Flower of the steppe. The life of Pastor Erica Küppers 1891–1968 . In: Series of publications of the Evangelical Regional Association Frankfurt am Main, 1st edition 1994, ISBN 978-3-922179-23-8 .

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Herbert Mochalski; August Wilhelm Fresenius (Ed.): Confessing Church on the way. Information and news sheet of the Brother Council of the Evangelical Church in Germany . tape 1 , no. 1 , January 15, 1950, p. 23 f .
  2. ↑ http://www.darmstadt-land-evangelisch.de/index.php?id=46 Retrieved March 14, 2012
personal data
SURNAME Küppers, Erica
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Protestant theologian and pastor
DATE OF BIRTH December 20, 1891
PLACE OF BIRTH eat
DATE OF DEATH 16th September 1968
Place of death Bad Vilbel