Eva Hessler

Eva Hessler (born May 18, 1914 in Burgholzhausen (Saxony-Anhalt); † December 13, 2003 in Hildesheim ) was a religious educator and author.

Life

The daughter of a pastor and a teacher was born as the youngest of four siblings. Her mother went blind in 1916 and her father died when she was nine years old. The family of five continued to live in the rectory, but for a long time remained dependent on the support of third parties due to the low pension. After attending primary school, Hessler attended the municipal lyceum in Mühlhausen / Thuringia from 1926 to 1927 and graduated from high school in Droyßig in 1933 . When she returned home, she worked from 1934 to 1936 as a private tutor at the nearby Gut Marienthal for the von Wilmowsky family .

Education and professional activity

In 1936, Hessler began training as a teacher in Schneidemühl , acquired the religious faculties and passed an examination as an organist and choir director on a part-time basis. After exams for teaching in 1938 and 1941, she attended the teacher training college in Havelberg from 1942 to 1945 , where she was responsible for BDM work.

After the war ended, Hessler returned to Burgholzhausen as a teacher. Because of her musical and artistic talent, she was particularly recognized as a teacher. She also took over religious instruction. In 1946 Hessler was appointed district catechist for the Eckartsberga parish . In order to get an employment contract, theological and pedagogical university courses had to be attended, from which she was initially excluded - apparently due to her BDM past. She decided to work for the Evangelical Church, even when the courses were later renewed, and remained in opposition to the communist regime. In Seehausen (Altmark) she initially took over the catechetical seminar of the Protestant Church and in 1950 the leadership of the catechetical upper seminar (KOS) in Naumburg (Saale) . Since the universities in the GDR no longer provided young pedagogues in the subject of religion, Hessler and two other lecturers built up the training for religious educators, which later became a full theology course with catechetics. Degrees at KOS were not recognized by the state but tolerated. In 1961 Eva Hessler did her doctorate with Alfred Jepsen and Ernst Kähler . In a 1974 speech on the 25th anniversary of KOS, Hessler coined the term community education .

In 1980 Eva Hessler moved to Hildesheim, devoted herself more to music, published a book about the houses in Burgholzhausen and continued to work intensively on the theological questions that had emerged from her doctoral thesis. She died on February 13, 2004 in her Hildesheim apartment.

Honors

Her students and friends dedicated a plaque to her in the Burgholzhausen cemetery. In 2003, a conference building was named after her in the Evangelical Center Kloster Drübeck .

Works

• God the Creator: A contribution to the composition and Deuterojesaja's theology, 1961, Greifswald
• The salvation drama: The way to Yahweh's world domination: (Isa. 40 - 55), 1988, Georg Olms Verlag , ISBN 3-487-09112-7
• Families in Burgholzhausen, 2006 (2nd edition), Working Group for Central German Family Research eV, Kleve
• House book of Burgholzhausen. The homesteads and their residents. Marburg 1995, 2009 (7th edition), Working Group for Central German Family Research eV, Kleve

literature

• Christa-Maria Rahner: Eva Hessler (* 1914) I am not an issue for myself "in: Annebelle Pithan (Ed.): Religious Pedagogues of the 20th Century, Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht , Göttingen, 1997, pp. 241-252
• Matthias Hahn: Eva Heßler, in: Klaus Petzold, Michael Wermke (eds.): A Century of Catechetics and Religious Education in East Germany, Leipzig 2007
• Matthias Hahn (ed.): Eva Heßler. Congregational education as a dialogue between theology and education, Leipzig 2015