Mümliswil memorial

The Mümliswil Memorial is the first national memorial in Switzerland for home and contracted children . It is set up in Mümliswil in a former children's home.

Since 2013 it has housed an exhibition on the history of children in care , contract children and other victims of compulsory welfare measures in Switzerland up to the turn of the millennium.

In 2013, Federal Councilor Simonetta Sommaruga officially apologized to the contract children. They had to work under inhumane conditions. There were regular violent or sexual attacks in the homes. Federal Councilor Eveline Widmer-Schlumpf had already apologized to the victims of compulsory welfare measures in 2010 . Up until the 1970s, thousands of children and young people in Switzerland were housed in homes and institutions because they were considered difficult to bring up, they were said to have an illegal lifestyle and they were illegitimate.

The Guido Fluri Foundation is the owner of the memorial .

Focus

History of the memorial

The former cooperative children's home Mümliswil-Ramiswil was built in 1939. The impetus for this came from the childless couple Bernhard and Pauline Jäggi. Bernhard Jäggi was a politician and for many years head of the Association of Swiss Consumers' Associations - today Coop. With the home founded in 1937, he wanted to enable physically weak children to go on holiday and relax. The home was intended as a temporary or permanent replacement for the home and family. The architect was the former home child Hannes Meyer (1889–1954), the second Bauhaus director. The children's home was closed in 1973 and a course center was housed in the building until 2003. In 2011 the Guido Fluri Foundation bought the home.

politics

Closely linked to the first national memorial for home and contract children in Mümliswil is the Swiss popular initiative "Reparation for contract children and victims of compulsory welfare measures", the so-called reparation initiative . This was submitted on December 19, 2014 with 110,000 votes and came about on January 12, 2015. In January 2015, the Federal Council decided to work out an indirect counter-proposal. An important step towards compensating the victims was the almost unanimous acceptance of the counterproposal to the reparation initiative by the Council of States.

architecture

The Mümliswil children's home is one of the most outstanding examples of socially committed architecture, which is underlined by the origin of the architects. The building should correspond to the nature of children and not depict hierarchies. It was built by the Swiss architect and second Bauhaus director Hannes Meyer , who himself spent part of his youth in the bourgeois orphanage in Basel. The building is considered to be architecturally significant and is a listed building.

Others

In 2014, on the occasion of the memorial's first anniversary, the Swiss artist Stephan Schmidlin presented the sculpture "Looking away". In 2015, a meeting of former contract children took place in Mümliswil.

Web links

Mümliswil memorial

Individual evidence

[1] SRF, May 2013, Mümliswil becomes a memorial for home and contract children

[2] SRF, June 2013, Mümliswil - Memorial Against Forgetting

[3] SRF, June 1, 2013, report on the new Mümliswil memorial

[4] National information point on the Nike cultural heritage at the Mümliswil memorial

[5] NZZ, April 2013, Federal Councilor Simonetta Sommaruga apologizes to contract children

[6] Swiss television SRF, broadcast 10vor10, October 2011, Das Schicksal der Verdingkinder

[7] Federal Councilor Eveline Widmer-Schlumpf apologizes, original source interview victim Bündner Tagblatt, January 2015 ( memento of the original from April 2, 2015 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. @1@ 2

[8] Observer, March 2011, Compulsory welfare measures

[9] National Information Center on Cultural Heritage, former model institution closed due to abuse of children

[10] SRF Regional, June 2015, meeting of former children in care

[11] Initiative page of the initiators

[12] NZZ, January 2015, submission of the reparation initiative

[13] Swiss television SRF, January 14, 2015

[14] SRF, September 2016, An initiator's coping with the past

[15] Tagesanzeiger, September 2016, Now we can bury misery

[16] SRF Tagesschau, June 30, 2018, exploited and abused

[17] Swiss television SRF, June 2014 on the anniversary of the Mümliswil memorial

[18] Solothurner Zeitung, June 2014, Memorial Against Forgetting

[19] SRF, June 2015, meeting of former contract children