Friedrich Borinski

Friedrich "Fritz" Franz Peter Iwan Borinski (born June 17, 1903 in Berlin , † July 4, 1988 in Bremen ) was a German educational scientist specializing in adult education .

Life and activity

Youth, Education and Early Career

Borinski was a son of the lawyer Alfred Borinski († 1912) and his wife, b. Fox. The parents came from Jewish families but converted to the Evangelical Church before the marriage. In 1919 the family moved to Wernigerode. From 1920 he worked for the Young Democrats (until 1923), in which he belonged to the Free German wing .

After attending a grammar school in Wernigerode am Harz, Borinski studied law, sociology and history in Leipzig, Halle and Jena from 1921 to 1927. In 1924 he passed the first state examination in law. In the same year he participated in the establishment of the Leuchtenburgkreis .

In 1927 Borinski received his doctorate with a thesis on Joseph Görres - which he dedicated to the Leuchtenburgkreis - at the Law Faculty of the University of Leipzig as Dr. jur. (PhD date November 25, 1927). Fifteen years later, his doctoral degree dated September 21, 1942, was revoked by the Leipzig University as a result of the systematic depromovation of political emigrants under the Nazi regime.

From January 1928, Borinski, who had worked at the Leipzig Adult Education Center since 1923, ran an educational dormitory for young workers in Leipzig. From autumn 1929 he then worked as a teacher at the community college in Sachsenburg near Chemnitz .

Politically, Borinski belonged to the Social Democratic Party of Germany (SPD) and the German Freischar since 1928 . In this context, he worked from 1930 to 1933 on the Neue Blätter für die Sozialismus .

From autumn 1931 to 1933 Borinski was employed as assistant for adult education by Theodor Litt at the seminar for free national education at the University of Leipzig.

Emigration and World War II

Due to the political conditions that returned to Germany after the National Socialists came to power, Borinski was dismissed from university in 1933 due to his political views and because he was considered a Jew by National Socialist standards. In 1934 he emigrated to Great Britain, where he earned his living by teaching German. Between 1934 and 1939 he studied sociology at the London School of Economics .

During his years in exile, Borinski worked with Otto Strasser and Werner Milch . He also made the acquaintance of Karl Mannheim . Probably because of the collaboration with Strasser, the Nazi police assigned him to the Black Front .

After his emigration, Borinski was classified as an enemy of the state by the National Socialist surveillance authorities: around 1938 he was expatriated by the Nazi authorities and his expatriation was publicly announced in the Reichsanzeiger . In the spring of 1940, the Reich Main Security Office in Berlin put him on the special wanted list GB , a list of people whom the Nazi surveillance apparatus considered particularly dangerous or important, which is why they would be removed from the occupation troops in the event of a successful invasion and occupation of the British Isles by the Wehrmacht Subsequent SS special commands were to be identified and arrested with special priority.

In 1940 Borinski was taken into custody as an enemy alien by the British authorities, who still considered him a German national . He was temporarily deported to Australia, where he set up and ran a camp school in an internment camp near Sydney. In 1941 he was finally allowed to return to Great Britain.

In 1943 Borinski participated - together with Werner Milch and Minna Specht - in the founding of the German Educational Reconstruction Committee (GER) in London, which was initiated by the British government with the planning of rebuilding the educational system in Germany after the end of the Nazi regime -Dictatorship was commissioned. From 1943 to 1946 he also acted as secretary to this body. Some of his theses were implemented by the British military government after World War II . He also worked on the political education of German prisoners of war in Great Britain. So he organized courses and gave lectures before them.

post war period

From 1946 to 1947 Borinski was a tutor at the Wilton Park Prisoner of War Education Center . In this position he worked a. a. with Waldemar von Knoeringen .

In April 1947 Borinski returned to Germany, where he settled in the British zone of occupation. In the following three decades he acquired the reputation of one of the most important protagonists of the professionalization and scientification of adult education in Germany.

After his return to Germany, Borinski took over the position of director of the Heimvolkshochschule Göhrde near Lüneburg from 1947 to 1954 . Also in 1947 Borinski became a member of the culture committee of the party executive committee of the SPD, of which he belonged until 1965. In 1954 Borinski moved from Göhrde to Bremen, where he headed the local adult education center there until 1956 .

From 1953 to 1965 Borinski was a member of the German Committee for Education . In this position, he contributed to recommendations and reports that contributed to adult education becoming a recognized part of the entire educational system in Germany.

In 1956 Borinski became full professor for educational sciences / adult education at the Free University of Berlin . He held this post until his retirement in 1970. Since 1968 he has also been chairman of the Berlin Committee for UNESCO Work. Before that, he was a member of the board of trustees of the UNESCO Institute for Education in Hamburg from 1951 to 1965 .

In addition to his university activities, Borinski held numerous positions in the field of adult education in the 1950s and 1960s and was a member of numerous committees in this area: He was the Senate Commissioner for Adult Education (1954), Director of the Pan-European Studies (1954-1960), Senate Commissioner for Political Affairs Educational work (1960–1963), member of the Max Planck Institute for Educational Research (1963–1968), head of the adult education department of the Educational Science Institute and member of the German Education Council (1967–1969).

Since the end of the war, Borinski has presented numerous papers and essays on subjects related to education. His best-known work, Der Weg zum Mitbürger , appeared in 1954. In this he distances himself from the civic education that dominated the Weimar Republic, which he rejects because of its static image of the state and its conservative and authoritarian educational goal. As an alternative, he argues in his book for a "civic education" which should aim at the "whole person" and "the whole of life" and should always include political education.

From 1973 to 1982 Borinski worked for the Volkshochschule Baden-Baden.

Borinski's estate, which comprises seventeen boxes, is now held by the Schulenburg Institute.

family

Borinski was married to Maja Kahn since 1945.

Fonts

• Joseph Görres and the formation of the German party , Leipzig 1927.
• Youth movement. The Story of German Youth 1896-1933 , London 1945. (with W. Milch) (in German 1967 and 1982)
• The way to become a fellow citizen. The political task of free adult education in Germany , Düsseldorf-Cologne 1954.
• Marxism-Leninism. History and shape . 1961 (co-author)
• Science and Society , 1963. (Co-author)
• The education of active minorities as a goal of democratic education , in: Cologne magazine for sociology and social psychology , issue 3 (1965), p. 528ff.
• Society, politics, adult education - documents from four decades , 1969.
• Free University of Berlin 1956–1972 , in: Josef Gerhard Farkas (ed.): Festschrift for Michael de Ferdinandy on his 60th birthday , Wiesbaden 1972, pp. 228–245.
• Workers 'education in Leipzig in the twenties , in: Anne-Marie Fabian: Workers' Movement, Adult Education, Press , Cologne / Frankfurt 1977, pp. 11–24.
• On the history of the Leuchtenburgkreis , in: Ders. (Ed.): Youth in political protest , Frankfurt a. M. 1977, pp. 15-97.
• The German Volkshochschule. An Experiment in Democratic Adult Education under the Weimar Republic , edited, introduced and provided with annotations and a prosopographical appendix by Martha Friedenthal-Haase, 2014. (posthumously)

literature

Secondary literature :

• Martha Friedenthal-Haase / Tetyana Kloubert: "Adult education and democracy. On an unpublished manuscript by Fritz Borinski from British exile 1944/45", in: Bildung und Erziehungs , 62 (2009) 1, pp. 37–52.
• Siegfried Mielke (Ed.) With the collaboration of Marion Goers, Stefan Heinz , Matthias Oden, Sebastian Bödecker: Unique - Lecturers, students and representatives of the German University of Politics (1920-1933) in the resistance against National Socialism. Lukas-Verlag, Berlin 2008, ISBN 978-3-86732-032-0 , p. 403 (short biography).
• Josef Olbrich: "Fritz Borinski - Vita and Work. From Practice to Science of Adult Education", in: Franz-Josef Jelich / Robert Haußmann (ed.): Fritz Borinski. Between Education and Politics - A Historical Review , Recklinghausen 2000, pp. 11–33.
• Wolfgang Sander / Peter Steinbach: Political Education in Germany. Profiles, people, institutions , (= publication series of the Federal Agency for Civic Education, Vol. 1449) Bonn 2014.

Entries in reference works :

• Konrad Feilchenfeldt (Hrsg.): German Literature Lexicon. The 20th century. Biographisches-Bibliographisches Handbuch, Vol. 3 (Blaas-Braunfels), Munich and Zurich, pp. 432f.
• Who is Who ?: Das Deutsche Who's Who , 1974, p. 103.

Web links

• Biography of Borisnki at the Federal Agency for Political Education

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Michael Hepp / Hans Georg Lehmann: The expatriation of German citizens 1933-45 according to the lists published in the Reichsanzeiger , 1985, p. 575.
2. ^ Estate of Prof. Dr. Fritz Borinski .