Ernst Hornig

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Ernst Hornig (born August 25, 1894 in Kohlfurt , † December 5, 1976 in Frankfurt am Main ) was President or Bishop of the Evangelical Church of Silesia based in Görlitz .

Life

Ernst Hornig was the son of a Reichsbahn official. After the First World War he studied Protestant theology in Halle (Saale) and Breslau . After ordination and a brief activity in Friedland (Silesia) , he took over a pastorate at St. Barbara in Breslau (1928–1946). Thus he became a witness of events in the enclosed fortress city.

Along with Pastor Martin Niemoller he founded in Berlin on September 21, 1933 Pastors , a defense and resistance organization against the German-Christian and Nazi influence in the German Lutheran Church. The members of the Pastors' Emergency Association saw a violation of the commitment to the Holy Scriptures and the Reformation creed through the application of the state Aryan paragraph to the church area. They also knew they had an obligation to financially help the friars who had been removed from office or retired because of their faithful attitude and who had to pay court fees and fines.

Hornig contributed significantly to the printing and dissemination of a memorandum addressed to Adolf Hitler , which was published in 1936 and received great attention in the international press because it established the incompatibility of the Christian faith with the National Socialist racial doctrine and the illegal arrests of political opponents and theirs Denounced transfer to concentration camps. In the same year Hornig was elected as Deputy President in the governing body of the Naumburg Synod . The state criticism of the Confessing Church , as represented by Hornig, was directed against the suspension of moral norms, against the killing of the mentally ill ordered by state authorities and against the extermination of the Jews for racial reasons, which is now called the Holocaust .

Together with Joachim Konrad and the Catholic clergy Joseph Ferche and Canon Joseph Kramer, Hornig had a decisive conversation on May 4, 1945 with the fortress commander Hermann Niehoff , which led to the handover of the fortress on May 6, 1945. He gave a vivid eyewitness account of the three-month period of fortress in the city of Wroclaw, which was enclosed by Soviet troops, and of the city's surrender.

While the German population was forcibly expelled from Silesia after the end of the Second World War, the Old Prussian Church Province of Silesia was able to hold its first provincial synod after the war in Świdnica , which was already Polish . Hornig was expelled at the end of 1946, the consistorial members remaining in Wrocław (Breslau) at the beginning of 1947. That is why the Silesian church leadership moved its seat to Görlitz in the former Soviet occupation zone , where the ecclesiastical province of Silesia became an independent regional church in 1947 as the Evangelical Church of Silesia , with Ernst Hornig as a bishop. But there she soon came into conflict with the local authorities and the SED government in East Berlin. Bishop Hornig was personally affected by repeated attacks in the state press and by the denial of an exit permit to participate in the 3rd General Assembly of the World Council of Churches (1961) in New Delhi (India).

During the uprising that hit large parts of the GDR population in 1953, Hornig campaigned for freedom and human rights.

The Theological Faculty of the University of Kiel awarded him an honorary doctorate (1955) in recognition of his services to the establishment of the church and for his commitment to ecumenism .

His successor in the Görlitz episcopate was Hans-Joachim Fränkel , with whom he had a close friendship and largely the same convictions on church and political issues.

Hornig spent his retirement in Bad Vilbel (Hesse) since 1964 and used it for scientific work.

Publications

  • The way of world Christianity . 2nd Edition. Stuttgart 1958
  • Breslau 1945. Experiences in the enclosed city . Munich 1975
  • The Confessing Church in Silesia 1933–1945. History and documents . Göttingen 1977
  • Circular letters from the Evangelical Church of Silesia 1946–1950 . Edited by Dietmar Neß. Sigmaringen 1994
  • The Silesian Evangelical Church 1945–1964 . Edited by Manfred Jacobs. Goerlitz 2001
  • Review: From Hell of Gurs . The letters of Maria Krehbiel-Darmstädter 1940–1943 . In: FAZ , August 3, 1971

Honors

literature

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Gerhard Scheuermann: Das Breslau-Lexikon , Volume 1. Laumann-Verlag Dülmen 1994, ISBN 3-87466-157-1 , p. 822
predecessor Office successor
Vacancy
Otto Zänker (until 1941/1945 as
Silesian Provincial Bishop)		 Bishop of the
Ev. Church of Silesia
from 1945 provisionally as President
1946–1963 		Hans-Joachim Frankel
personal data
SURNAME Hornig, Ernst
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German Protestant clergyman, Bishop of Görlitz
DATE OF BIRTH August 25, 1894
PLACE OF BIRTH Kohlfurt
DATE OF DEATH 5th December 1976
Place of death Frankfurt am Main