Ernst Weissert

Ernst Weißert (born July 20, 1905 in Mannheim , † January 2, 1981 in Stuttgart ) was a German Waldorf teacher . He was general secretary of the Anthroposophical Society in Germany, co-founder and director of the Federation of Waldorf Schools , the Hague Circle and the Friends of Waldorf Education .

Childhood and studies

Ernst Weißert was born in Mannheim and was strongly influenced by the architecture, theater and art there. His father was a teacher at the Mannheim auxiliary school and with wealthy Jewish families. He attended the community school and then the Karl-Friedrich-Gymnasium . At the age of thirteen he witnessed the revolutionary scenes in Mannheim at the end of the First World War and turned to the liberal People's Party. In 1919/20 he took part in the Left and Wandering Birds, where he made life-defining friendships with young people who were looking for a life of truthfulness and spirit-conscious community. He turned to the theater, first as an extra at the National Theater, then in leading roles in productions at the grammar school and prepared himself for acting.

He got to know Rudolf Steiner , heard his lectures in Mannheim at the age of 17 and, after graduating from high school, attended the second Stuttgart educators' conference at the Waldorf School, where he encountered Rudolf Steiner's educational impulse. Then he decided to become a teacher. In 1924 he became a member of the Anthroposophical Society and the Tübingen Pedagogical Working Group, in which students prepared themselves for educational work in the Waldorf School. In the same year he took part in the three-week dramatic course and the karma lectures by Rudolf Steiner in Dornach.

From 1926 Ernst Weißert studied philology and archeology in Heidelberg , but in 1927 he moved to Athens as a private tutor with a German family. There he met its director Ernst Buschor at the German Archaeological Institute . After this time, in which he immersed himself in Greek and especially in plastic art, he returned to the Archaeological Institute in Heidelberg. In 1928 he married a German-Greek woman there and soon had their first son. In 1930 he finished his studies and separated from his wife.

Work as a Waldorf teacher

Soon afterwards he moved to Berlin. There he met his second wife Elisabeth Caspari, and with her he had nine boys and three girls over the years. At Easter 1931 he began to teach at the Rudolf Steiner School in Berlin, initially Greek, Latin, French and gymnastics, later as a class teacher. The political situation for Elisabeth and Ernst Weißert became difficult because Elisabeth came from an important Jewish family. In the summer of 1937, when the teachers at the private schools were supposed to swear in on Hitler, the college of the Rudolf Steiner School decided to self-seal. With around 85 children, including 30 Jewish, and four colleagues, Ernst Weißert held a retraining course for the students until Easter 1939, when he worked as a private teacher. He was arrested by the Gestapo for “continuing a prohibited pedagogy”, but was released again after a few weeks. In 1943 his wife and children were evacuated and in 1944 he moved to Tübingen until the position order came, which he was able to change to a medical service in Ulm.

Immediately after the end of the war, Ernst Weißert took over the elementary school in Weilheim with 82 children and then, at Easter 1946, continued to work as an upper level teacher at the Waldorf School in Stuttgart-Uhlandshöhe for German, History and Art History. For 19 years he lived modestly with his family in a barrack donated by the Americans on the school grounds. He remained a teacher at this school until September 1968.

Ernst Weißert was active in rebuilding the Anthroposophical Society in Germany from 1946. In 1959 he was appointed to the board and from 1961 to 1978 he was one of its general secretaries.

The Association of Independent Waldorf Schools

The Association of Independent Waldorf Schools was convened in 1933 as a negotiating partner for the nine Waldorf schools with the authorities in Berlin at the time. In 1946 it was re-established by Ernst Weißert and Erich Schwebsch, who took over management for the first time. When Schwebsch died in 1953, Ernst Weißert took over the management and from 1969 he worked full-time for the federal government, which then comprised 28 schools. When the number of Waldorf schools being founded on an international level increased sharply in the 1970s, he called on the school movement “to shed everything that had survived and to awaken to what promised the future”.

In his presentation “Pedagogical Religion” he describes how the ability to become an art of education can grow: “The teacher must always ask himself how he develops an organ that is close to the child's being.” He will strive for a “spiritual-pedagogical sense of touch” . “This sense of touch or child's sense gradually opens up an attitude of soul full of adoration, love, devotion”. And such “devotion to the delicate, the young and the growing” (Weißert 1971, p. 491f) becomes the art of treating people as a spiritual task of the 20th century.

Startups and initiatives

Ernst Weißert's visions and initiatives were far-reaching. With the annual teachers' conference he tried to bring the school movement forward and at the same time connect it to its origins. The first public summer conferences were organized from 1950, which led to the parent-teacher conferences in 1956. Here the overall context of the school movement came into its own, which he was able to describe in an inspiring way. The teacher circular, the pedagogical research center, the meeting of those willing to start up, where the founding initiatives of budding Waldorf schools met, can all be traced back to his initiative. For the international school movement he initiated the Hague Circle, which was to be an international organ of awareness, and in 1971 founded the Friends of Waldorf Education .

Web links

• The development of the Friends of Waldorf Education - founded by Ernst Weissert.
• Article research and training - Anthromedia - Internet portal anthroposophy.

Supplementary literature

• Matthias Weißert: We were thirteen. History and stories of a large family. Muschel, Cologne 2012, ISBN 978-3-936819-52-6 .

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Ernst Weißert article by Nana Goebel, entry Research Center for Culture Impulse - Biographies Documentation
2. ↑ Ernst Weissert Entry Research Center for Culture Impulse - Biographies Documentation