Franz Löffler (anthroposophist)

Franz Loeffler on the memorial stone in Gerswalde

Franz Löffler (born November 22, 1895 in Kreuzstätten , † November 5, 1956 in Arlesheim ) was a German curative educator .

Franz Löffler came from a wealthy farming family in the Banat . He received an extraordinarily varied education at the Piarist high school in Temesvár . Then he began to study painting in Vienna. During the First World War he volunteered with the Honvéd Hussars and was captured by Russia in July 1917. Löffler came to a camp east of Lake Baikal . He was badly mistreated after a failed attempt to escape. Only through the intervention of the “Angel of Siberia”, Elsa Brändström , could he be saved. In March 1919, on his way home from captivity in Moscow, he witnessed Lenin's appearance at the First Congress of the Communist International .

After returning to his homeland, Löffler was expelled from the new Romanian regime for political reasons. He went to Jena and studied philosophy, education and psychology there. There he came into contact with Johannes Trüper , Ernst Lehrs and other anthroposophically oriented people.

Then he traveled to Stuttgart for a while to attend the Waldorf School there. Here Löffler met Karl Schubert , Caroline von Heydebrand , Eugen Kolisko and Herbert Hahn . He probably met Rudolf Steiner here and became his pupil. In November 1923 Löffler began his work as a handicraft teacher and educator at the “Sophienhöhe” curative education institution near Jena . Here he met the daughter Änne of the head of the institution Johannes Trüper and married her in spring 1925.

Together with Siegfried Pickert and Albrecht Strohschein , Löffler founded the "Lauenstein" house in 1924 with nine foster children. In 1929 he and his group of children went to Gerswalde in the Uckermark on the former estate of the von Arnim family . After 1945, the curative education home continued to operate as an eight-grade Waldorf school, albeit not using this name. In the fall of 1950 the school was closed by the state. Löffler is imprisoned for ten weeks.

Then he and his son-in-law Hermann Girke, who had been a teacher in Gerswalde, founded the "Caroline-von-Heydebrand-Heim" in Berlin-Zehlendorf , which still exists today. During a trip to Arlesheim in July 1956, Franz Löffler fell seriously ill. Speaking Hungarian, he died in Arlesheim on November 5, 1956, the day after the Hungarian uprising was put down .

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  The curative education home in Gerswalde

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  Memorial stone for Franz Loeffler in Gerswalde

literature

• Hermann Girke: Franz Löffler. A life for anthroposophy and healing education in the fate of time . Dornach 1995. ISBN 3-7235-0905-3

Web links

• Research Center for Culture Impulse