Georg Müller (historian)

Georg Müller (born August 5, 1893 in Kassel , † May 26, 1978 in Bielefeld ) was a German historian, Germanist, philosopher and educator. He founded the Friedrich von Bodelschwingh School in Bethel, which he directed from 1925 to 1959.

Live and act

Georg Müller grew up in Kassel as the son of a businessman. In his youth he was the leader of the “ Wandervogel ” youth movement . In Jena and later in Marburg he studied German, history and geography and graduated with the state examination in the summer of 1920; later there was an additional examination in philosophical propaedeutics. After the outbreak of World War I , he volunteered for the army on August 5, 1914. During the Second Battle of Flanders in 1917 he was captured by the English, from which he was released in 1919.

In 1921 he married Johanna Dombois. At the beginning of 1923 he did his doctorate with the Marburg philosopher Paul Natorp with a thesis “On historical understanding”. In the same year he followed a call to Bethel to expand the middle school there. At Easter 1925 he founded the Friedrich-von-Bodelschwingh-Schule, a six-stage advanced school for boys with an adjoining schoolhouse. This Protestant school gained a national reputation with its reform pedagogy .

Georg Müller got access to dialectical theology through the Bethel theologian Georg Merz . In 1927 he refused an appointment to head the new Pedagogical Academy in Frankfurt (Oder) , which was sponsored by Minister of Education and Cultural Affairs Becker . In 1932/33 he was an advisor to the district commissioner for voluntary labor service . In 1933 he took part in the Westphalian Provincial Synod and the Westphalian Confessing Synod as a synodal . In numerous lectures he fought against the uncritical glorification of Germanic religiosity .

In addition to running the Friedrich von Bodelschwingh School in 1934, he taught philosophy and intellectual history at the Bethel Church University , which he held for 21 years. He taught the same subject from 1946 to 1948 at the Pedagogical Academy in Bielefeld . In 1950 he published these lectures under the title “Last and Consolation of German History”. In 1939/40 he took part in World War II as a reserve officer .

His book “Last and Consolation of German History” took up essential suggestions from a work by Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy , “The European Revolutions or: The Character of Nations”. This earned him a lifelong friendship with its author, which influenced many of Müller's scientific publications in the 1950s and 1960s. At the same time he dealt intensively with other linguistic thinkers such as Franz Rosenzweig , Martin Buber , Hans Ehrenberg and Ferdinand Ebner . In 1963 he was a co-founder of the Eugen-Rosenstock-Huessy Society, which he headed as president until his death in 1978.

After his death, parts of his extensive works were included in the Eugen-Rosenstock-Huessy archive in Bethel.

Georg Müller is the father of the ecologist Dieter Mueller-Dombois from the University of Honolulu (Hawaii), the lutenist Eugen Müller Dombois at the Schola Cantorum Basiliensis , the flautist and musicologist Richard Müller-Dombois from the Detmold University of Music , and the architect Wolfram Müller-Dombois in Berlin. Probably the most influential student of Georg Müller was the historian and educator Karl Heinz Potthast .

Fonts

• On the meaning of a Protestant school , Chr.-Kaiser-Verlag, Munich 1931.
• Ideal images and reality of Germanic religion , ed. from the Evangelical Press Association for Westphalia, 1934.
• Evidence of Germanic religion , Chr.-Kaiser-Verlag, Munich 1935.
• Biblical roots of our understanding of history , Heilmann-Verlag, Hamburg 1949.
• The burden and consolation of German history , Eilers-Verlag, Bielefeld 1950.
• From the life of a Protestant high school , in the series: The Bible in School and Life, Heilmann-Verlag, Hamburg 1950.
• Goethe and the German present , Luther-Verlag, Bielefeld 1955.
• Educational contributions . 1960 (including a comprehensive bibliography with a total of 129 publications by Georg Müller)

• Furthermore: approx. 50 articles for various journals in the fields of history, philosophy and education

Editorships

• Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy The secret of the university. Against the disintegration of the sense of time and the power of language , Kohlhammer-Verlag, Stuttgart 1958.
• Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy: Yes and no. Autobiographical fragments , Lambert Schneider Verlag, Heidelberg 1968.

literature

• School in the shelter of Bethel. Georg Müller and his companions , ed. by Karl Heinz Potthast, Bethel-Verlag, Bielefeld 1993, 135 pages.
• Andreas Leutzsch: Between World and Bielefeld: Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy, Georg Müller and their archive in Bielefeld-Bethel , in: 91st Annual Report of the Historical Association for the County (JBHVR) Ravensberg, Bielefeld 2006, pp. 225–250.