George Casalis

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Maison Georges Casalis in Strasbourg at 13 quai Saint-Nicolas

George Casalis (born January 4, 1917 in Paris , † January 16, 1987 in Managua ) was a French evangelical reformed pastor , resistance fighter , liberation theologian and university professor.

Life

Casalis, the son of the doctor Alfred Hamilton Casalis, studied Protestant theology in Paris and Basel after graduating from university . In Basel he came into closer contact with the theologian Karl Barth , whose friend and later biographer he became. Ordained a pastor , he worked as a student pastor. When France was occupied by the German Wehrmacht , he participated in the Resistance and was one of the founders of the Cimade . In 1940 he became general secretary of the Christian student movement in non-occupied France. A Protestant group, with his assistance, declared that it was not following the anti-Semitic laws of the Vichy government . In the theses of Pomeyrol , which go even further , it is even declared that the Protestant Church must “resist any totalitarian and idolatric influence”.

From 1943 to 1945 Casalis was parish priest in Moncoutant . Then he went to Baden-Baden as a military pastor . In 1946 he took over the same office in Berlin , where he was also a lecturer at the church college and looked after the evangelical prisoners of the Allied war crimes prison in Berlin-Spandau , which the architect and former armaments minister Albert Speer reported extensively in his prison memoir Spandauer Tagebücher . From 1951 Casalis was pastor of the Lutheran Church in Alsace-Lorraine , among others at the Nikolaikirche in Strasbourg . From 1961 to 1982 he taught as a professor of practical theology at the Faculté de théologie protestante in Paris. In 1970 he was awarded a Dr. theol. PhD.

Casalis took part in the all- Christian peace meetings of the Christian Peace Conference (CFK) of 1964 and 1968. After the crackdown on the Prague Spring by the Warsaw Pact troops , which was justified by the CFK, he retired as a board member. He supported the protests in France in May 1968 and stepped up his efforts for liberation movements, especially in Latin America. After retiring, he still taught at the Protestant theological faculty in Managua, which should also be a sign of solidarity with the Sandinista government in Nicaragua .

Casalis had been married to Dorothée Casalis-Thurneysen (1917-2011), a daughter of Eduard Thurneysen , since 1940 . With her he shared the editor-in-chief of Christianisme social magazine . He translated the doctrine of the pastoral care of his father-in-law into French ( Doctrine de la cure d'âme, 1958).

In Managua a barrio is named after him, in Strasbourg the social project Maison Georges Casalis , in the French Friedrichstadtkirche in Berlin the George-Casalis-Saal.

Fonts (selection)

  • Modern man and the good news. Reinhardt, Basel 1959.
  • Portrait de Karl Barth. Labor et fides, Genève - Paris 1960.
    • Karl Barth. Person and work. Voice publishing house, Darmstadt 1960.
  • Luther et l'Église confessante. Ed. you Seuil. Paris, 1962 (new edition 1983).
  • Protestantism. Larousse, Paris 1976.
  • Les Idées justes ne tombent pas du ciel. Eléments de théologie inductive. éditions du Cerf, Paris 1977.
    • The right ideas don't fall from the sky. Basics of an inductive theology . (Urban Taschenbücher, T-series, Vol. 640.) W. Kohlhammer, Stuttgart 1980, ISBN 978-3-17-004828-7 .
  • Un semeur est sorti pour semer. Cerf, Paris 1988.
  • Gottfried Orth, Bruno Schottstädt (Ed.): The liberating God and our life. Articles and lectures. Ernst-Lange-Institut, Rothenburg oT 1995, ISBN 978-3-928617-11-6 .

literature

media

  • Casalis appeared in a feature film about the Nuremberg Trials as "Kaplan von Spandau". USA / FR Germany / (Great Britain), 1973–1976. Original title THE MEMORY OF JUSTICE / NOT GUILTY? // NUREMBERG AND THE GERMANS [PART 1] // NUREMBERG AND OTHER PLACES [PART 2]

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ The Theses of Pomeyrol in the Virtual Museum of Protestantism , accessed on May 16, 2019.
  2. ↑ Archive link ( Memento of the original from February 19, 2007 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@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / www.cine-holocaust.de
personal data
SURNAME Casalis, George
BRIEF DESCRIPTION French liberation theologian
DATE OF BIRTH January 4, 1917
PLACE OF BIRTH Paris
DATE OF DEATH January 16, 1987
Place of death Managua