Frank Richter (theologian)

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Frank Richter, 2016

Frank Richter (born April 20, 1960 in Meißen ) is a German theologian , civil rights activist and non-party politician . He has been a member of the Saxon state parliament since 2019 , where he belongs to the SPD parliamentary group.

During the Peaceful Revolution in the GDR , he became known as the founder of the Group of 20 in Dresden. From 2009 to 2016 Richter was director of the Saxon State Center for Political Education ; from February 1, 2017 to July 30, 2018 Managing Director of the Frauenkirche Foundation in Dresden . In September 2018 he was a candidate for the mayor of Meissen and was narrowly defeated by the previous incumbent in the runoff election.

Richter regularly moderates and analyzes conflicts and problems in the areas of xenophobia and migration in Saxony .

Life and tasks

Frank Richter grew up as the son of a Protestant bricklayer and a Roman Catholic office clerk in Großenhain and attended the Pestalozzi High School (POS) there . Influenced by his Catholic upbringing, he was forced to take a critical look at the state ideology of the GDR and was unable to achieve his goal of studying pedagogy for political reasons. After graduating from high school in 1978, he attended the Catholic pre-seminar in Schöneiche near Berlin , where he learned Latin and Greek , and from 1979 to 1981 he was a construction soldier for the NVA in Stralsund . He then studied theology at the Erfurt seminary and in Neuzelle . In 1987 he was ordained a Catholic priest . He spent his time as chaplain in Dresden- Pieschen until 1989 and then became cathedral vicar at the Dresden court church . As such, he took part in the demonstrations against the GDR regime in autumn 1989 . From 1994 to 1997 Richter was diocesan youth pastor of the diocese of Dresden-Meißen , then pastor in Aue until 2001 . From 2001 to 2005 Richter was a consultant for religion and ethics at the Comenius Institute in Radebeul .

In 2005 he was laicized to get married. He switched to the Old Catholic Church , for which he worked as a pastor in Offenbach from 2006 to 2007 . After difficulties with the community environment, the family moved to another town in Hesse in 2007 . Frank Richter worked for some time as a Latin and ethics teacher at the Dreieichschule grammar school in Langen near Frankfurt am Main. He converted again and has been a member of the Evangelical Church ever since .

At the suggestion of the Saxon Ministry of Culture , Frank Richter was appointed director of the Saxon State Center for Political Education in February 2009, which he headed until the end of 2016. In 2011 he was appointed moderator of the working group on February 13th, which was set up by Dresden's mayor Helma Orosz in 2009 , which aimed to coordinate the democratic initiatives to commemorate the bombing raids on Dresden in February 1945 . After disagreements about the goals of the working group, he left it in October 2013.

In the asylum debate in Saxony, Richter has made a name for himself as a mediator and moderator since 2013. Because of his understanding and dialogue with xenophobic attitudes and protests, he is sometimes classified as a “Pegida-Understander”, whereas the head of the board of trustees of the Saxon state headquarters Lars Rohwer praised his mediating work: “He is the best diplomat we are currently in Dresden have. "When it became known in August 2016 that Richter would be leaving the Saxon State Center for Political Education at the end of the year and switching to the Frauenkirche Foundation , the Dresdner Neuesten Nachrichten described Richter's departure after almost eight years of management as the" end of an era ".

Richter had been a member of the CDU since the early 1990s , but left the party in 2017. As a justification he referred, among other things, to the lack of a culture of debate in the Saxon CDU regional association .

In September 2018 Richter entered as a non-party candidate with the support of the electoral alliance Citizens for Meißen - Meißen can do more! as well as the parties Die Linke , Bündnis 90 / Die Grünen and SPD for the election of the Lord Mayor in Meißen. To do this, Richter moved to his hometown and gave up his position as managing director of the Frauenkirche Foundation on July 30, 2018. In the first ballot on September 9, 2018, Richter prevailed with 36.7% against the CDU-supported incumbent Olaf Raschke , who achieved the second-best result with 32.5%. Since both missed an absolute majority, the second ballot decided two weeks later. In the runoff election, Richter was defeated by the incumbent, supported by the CDU and AfD , on September 23, 2018 with a difference of less than one hundred votes: 43.5 percent of the voters for Raschke with 4,772 eligible voters, for Richter 4,675 and thus 42.6 percent of the voters.

After the failed mayoral candidacy, which had attracted attention far beyond Meißen and Saxony, Frank Richter announced that he would write a book about the election campaign and continue to be politically active. In the state elections in Saxony in 2019 , Richter moved into the Saxon state parliament as a non-party candidate in 7th place on the state list of the SPD .

Political Perception

Participation in the citizens' movement in Dresden in 1989

Frank Richter took part in the demonstration on October 8, 1989 on Prager Strasse in Dresden, during which the People's Police surrounded hundreds of people on Sunday evening. Out of the crowd, the then 29-year-old judge and chaplain Andreas Leuschner managed to enter into negotiations with the police officers. Richter and Leuschner formed the group of 20 demonstrators , which was the first opposition group to be officially accepted as a discussion partner of the state power, in Dresden in the person of Mayor Wolfgang Berghofer . Although he withdrew from the group at the request of his bishop after the first dialogue on October 10th in favor of the future mayor of Dresden, Herbert Wagner , due to the canonical prohibition of political activity for Catholic clergy , Richter remained one until the first free elections in March 1990 of the most important exponents of the citizens' movement in Dresden.

Asylum debate and xenophobic protests in Saxony from 2013

Profiling as an intermediary

As early as October 2013, Frank Richter was brought in to act as a mediator between those responsible and worried residents in the conflict about asylum seekers' accommodation in Chemnitz . After the Pegida protests began in Dresden a year later, Richter, as director of the Saxon State Center for Civic Education, organized several dialogue forums at which around 150 proponents and opponents of Pegida as well as politicians were supposed to meet with each other. He took part in talk shows, including Günther Jauch's program on January 18, 2015, to which the then Pegida co-organizer Kathrin Oertel was invited. Richter was criticized by the President of the Federal Agency for Civic Education , Thomas Krüger , as well as from the ranks of the SPD, Die Linke and Bündnis 90 / Die Grünen , the then Pegida organizers Lutz Bachmann and Kathrin Oertel on January 19, 2015 after the cancellation of the Demonstration because of attack threats after the terrorist attack on the Paris editorial office of Charlie Hebdo to have the premises of the Saxon State Center for Political Education available for a press conference . Richter rejected the criticism and stated that his approach had been coordinated with the chairman of the board of trustees, Lars Rohwer. He stands by his decision and, under the circumstances, would probably make the same decision again.

According to Mitteldeutscher Rundfunk , Frank Richter “obviously has great respect among the population” for his dealings with Pegida. During the refugee crisis in Europe in 2015 , Richter took part in citizens' meetings several times at his place of residence in Freital , at which other residents criticized the accommodation of refugees, and tried to act as a moderator for an objective dialogue. After the outbreak of the xenophobic protests in Freital , which received nationwide attention , Richter spoke of a "hard core of people who articulate themselves in a hostile manner, who have to be identified, isolated and after the citizens' meeting of July 7, 2015, which was marked by tumult and loud protests by asylum-seekers must be ostracized by society as a whole. "

Assessments on the radicalization of xenophobic attitudes

In interviews, he spoke about the historical and political background to xenophobia in Saxony. The country has been suffering from a high right-wing extremist rate for years. The culture of conversation and discussion that characterizes an open society is weak. The defense against the stranger supposedly safeguards the weak identity, which in turn has to do with a lack of history. Richter called for more offensive communication with citizens and activists in order to outlaw hate speech against refugees and to fight illegal spaces on the Internet and on the streets. At the same time one has to understand the motives of the protests in order to win people over to the discourse and to awaken understanding for the humanitarian obligation to take in refugees. “To understand does not mean to accept. Wanting to understand is the prerequisite for reasonable discourse. "

In autumn 2015, Richter declared that he had moved his center of life to Markkleeberg , that he had meanwhile “lost a certain distance” from Dresden and “lost the feeling for this city”: “Dresden is too often enough for itself, the citizens should think about that.” The Pegida- Organizers had given him the impression of “neo-Nazis in a different outfit”. After his return to Dresden as managing director of the Frauenkirche Foundation, Richter declared in February 2017 that he would continue to advocate understanding and reconciliation: “I currently see a great need to identify and overcome the turmoil within society.” His pamphlet, listen finally! , which was published in spring 2018 by Ullstein-Verlag and excerpts from Richter also published on the author's blog The Axis of the Good , met with a mixed response. It was seen by some as evidence of an uncritical understanding of the concerns of AfD voters and Pegida supporters, whose radicalization Richter and others could not have stopped with their invitations to the conversation, while others in the all-German “situation description” an “act of recognize personal civil self-defense in a hysterical social and intellectual climate ”. In it, Richter criticizes, among other things, with reference to the Halle psychoanalyst Hans-Joachim Maaz , that even in the early phase of Pegida 2014/2015 a detailed examination and a differentiated political response would have been necessary. Even then, there were inflammatory speeches and right-wing extremist failures by individual speakers, but it was wrong to see the demonstrators “all as right-wing agitators and pullers” and either ignore or defame them.

Assessment of the causes of the riots in Chemnitz in 2018

In Richter's opinion, the xenophobic riots in Chemnitz in the late summer of 2018 are “the result of neglecting the perception of the growth of a right-wing extremist scene, especially in Saxony .” He sees this as the result of a “policy of condescension” in which authoritarian patterns of thought and behavior reverberate. Richter denounces a cultural and political "educational emergency" in the state, "for which the current government, especially the CDU-led government, is responsible". The NPD invested in Saxony with various measures 10 or 15 years ago, which the state government had glossed over. The rule of law must now restore its monopoly of force . But work has to be done in advance and not only when, as in Chemnitz, "the child [...] has already fallen into the well". While economic and technical infrastructure are well developed in many cities in Eastern Germany, politics have "neglected the social, civil society, political and ethical infrastructure" sustainably and over a long period of time. There is a "difficult to define borderline between Western and Eastern Europe [...] somewhere right through the middle of Germany". The eastern part did not go along with the "waves of liberalization and pluralization and also a little Americanization" as the western part of Germany and was culturally strongly influenced by the view to the east or south-east. Saxony has a "very homogeneous population" and is a "topographically, geographically, also historically coherent country [...] that had little experience with pluralization and diversity, which in many respects ticks like Poland, for example."

Hobbies

Richter wrote the texts for several compositions by the Großenhain musician Stefan Jänke , including three musical oratorios and a children's musical.

Publications

  • Words grow slowly - from the fall of '89. 2nd edition, Hille, Dresden 1998, ISBN 3-932858-04-2 .
  • In the somersault of my feelings. Hille, Dresden 2004, ISBN 3-932858-06-9 .
  • Value education at school - possibilities and limits (= series of publications on the basics, goals and results of the parliamentary work of the CDU parliamentary group of the Saxon state parliament, vol. 39). Dresden 2005.
  • "Last year was the best year." In: Eckhard Jesse , Thomas Schubert (ed.): Between confrontation and concession. Peaceful revolution and German unity in Saxony. Ch. Links, Berlin 2010, ISBN 978-3-86153-608-6 , pp. 21-38.
  • Finally listen! Because democracy means conflict. Ullstein, Berlin 2018, ISBN 978-3-550050-57-2 , limited preview in the Google book search.
  • Does Saxony still belong to Germany? My experiences in a fragile democracy. Ullstein, Berlin 2019, ISBN 978-3-550-20035-9 .

Awards

literature

Web links

Commons : Frank Richter  - Collection of images, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Eckhard Jesse, Thomas Schubert: Frank Richter. In this. (Ed.): Between confrontation and concession. Peaceful revolution and German unity in Saxony. Ch.links, Berlin 2010, p. 318f. in Google Book Search
  2. ^ Josefine Janert: The Dresden theologian Frank Richter: priest, civil rights activist, moderator . In: Deutschlandfunk Kultur , January 29, 2017, accessed on September 23, 2018.
  3. ↑ Dominik Brüggemann: Differences in content with the Lord Mayor - Frank Richter no longer moderator of the working group February 13th. In: DNN . October 2, 2013, accessed February 7, 2014 .
  4. ↑ a b c Why Saxony is a breeding ground for xenophobia. In: The world . August 26, 2015, accessed November 2, 2015 .
  5. ↑ a b Elisa Simantke , Matthias Meisner : After Pegida Press Conference: Regional Center for Political Education of Saxony under pressure. In: Der Tagesspiegel . January 21, 2015, accessed February 4, 2015 .
  6. ↑ Peter Stawowy: Frank Richter leaves the Saxon State Center for Political Education (SLpB). In: Flurfunk Dresden. August 24, 2016. Retrieved August 24, 2016 .
  7. ^ Annette Binninger: An exit as a wake-up call. In: Saxon newspaper . August 10, 2017. Retrieved August 10, 2017 .
  8. ↑ a b Frank Richter wants to become mayor. In: Saxon newspaper. March 21, 2018, accessed July 9, 2018 .
  9. ^ "The potential of the city lies in the citizens of the city" . In: MDR, August 24, 2018; Doreen Reinhard: Frank Richter: And law and swimming pool . In: Die Zeit Nr. 34/2018, August 16, 2018, both accessed on September 10, 2018.
  10. ^ Ine Dippmann: Frank Richter leaves the Frauenkirche Foundation. In: MDR AKTUELL. April 24, 2018. Retrieved July 9, 2018 .
  11. ↑ Peter Anderson: Frank Richter moves to Meissen. In: Saxon newspaper. April 19, 2018. Retrieved July 9, 2018 .
  12. ↑ Mayor election in Meißen: Richter wins ( Memento from September 10, 2018 in the Internet Archive )
  13. ↑ a b Winfried Mahr, Frank Richter (Interview): Frank Richter after the election defeat: “First of all, I'm unemployed”. In: Leipziger Volkszeitung , September 23, 2018, accessed on September 26, 2018.
  14. ↑ Olaf Raschke re-elected as Lord Mayor of Meißen. In: Freie Presse , September 23, 2018, accessed on September 28, 2018.
  15. ↑ Applicants from the state lists for the election to the 7th Saxon State Parliament on September 1, 2019 (as of July 29, 2019) (PDF; 29.2 kB).
  16. ↑ Frank Richter wants to join the Saxon state parliament. In: Mitteldeutscher Rundfunk . November 12, 2018, accessed August 7, 2019 .
  17. ↑ Harald Lachmann: The mediator Frank Richter. In: Schwäbisches Tagblatt . January 24, 2015, accessed November 4, 2015 .
  18. ↑ Christian Schulze Pellengahr: The prohibition of political activity for clergy according to Catholic and Protestant church law as well as in the current state church law. Taking into account the state and constitutional history of Germany and Austria (writings on state church law). Peter Lang, Frankfurt am Main a. a. 2009, ISBN 978-3-653-01495-2 ( abstract online ).
  19. ↑ Martin Fischer: Asylum seekers accommodation in Chemnitz: Frank Richter should settle the conflict. In: DNN . October 28, 2013, accessed November 4, 2015 .
  20. ^ Nils Minkmar: Circle of chairs instead of enlightenment. In: FAZ . January 19, 2015, accessed November 2, 2015 .
  21. ↑ a b Frank Richter rejects criticism of Pegida-PK. (Not available online.) In: MDR.DE . January 21, 2015, archived from the original on February 4, 2015 ; Retrieved February 4, 2015 .
  22. ↑ Thielko Grieß: Tragedy of Freital. In: DLF . July 7, 2015, accessed November 2, 2015 .
  23. ↑ Heavy dispute over refugee accommodation in Freital. In: N24 . July 7, 2015, accessed November 2, 2015 .
  24. ↑ Stefan Locke: The unbearable shallowness of being. In: FAZ.net. October 19, 2015, accessed May 4, 2017 .
  25. ^ Stefan Seidel: Dresden and the hatred. In: Sunday, 07/2017. Evangelische Medienhaus GmbH, Leipzig, February 19, 2017, accessed on May 4, 2017 .
  26. ↑ Matthias Meisner: From mediator to keyword giver of the right. In: Der Tagesspiegel , March 12, 2018, accessed on September 24, 2018.
  27. ↑ Christian Eger: He is considered to be a “Pegida understanding”: Frank Richter calls for a rethink in democracy. In: Mitteldeutsche Zeitung , April 6, 2018, accessed on September 25, 2018.
  28. ↑ Frank Richter: Finally listen (1) . In: Achgut.com , March 31, 2018, accessed September 24, 2018.
  29. ↑ Christoph Heinemann , Frank Richter (Interview): Riots in Chemnitz: “Result of a neglect of political education” . In: Deutschlandfunk , August 31, 2018, accessed on September 28, 2018.
  30. ↑ Stefan Jänke: CV. ( PDF ; 44 kB) Grossenhain-Reinersdorf men's choir, November 6, 2010, p. 2 , archived from the original on February 12, 2014 ; Retrieved October 31, 2011 .
personal data
SURNAME Judge, Frank
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German theologian and politician (CDU, non-party)
DATE OF BIRTH April 20, 1960
PLACE OF BIRTH Meissen