Gerhard Juergensohn

Gerhard Juergen son (* February 9 ^jul. / 22. February  1911 ^greg. In Mogilev ; † 23. March 1996 in Berlin ) was a German theologian . From 1964 he worked as senior consistorial councilor of the Evangelical Church of Silesia based in Görlitz . From 1969 to 1977 he was Deputy Chairman of the Board of the Conference of Evangelical Church Leaders in the GDR .

life and work

Gerhard Juergensohn comes from a Baltic German family; for generations his male ancestors were Lutheran pastors in Latvia . His father Wilhelm Juergensohn (1869–1972) had a pastor's position in Tuckum , his grandfather Peter Anton Juergensohn (1833–1918) in Edsen . During the Russian Revolution of 1905 there were also uprisings in Latvia. a. Baltic Germans were attacked. Worried about the revolution and its bloody suppression, Wilhelm Juergensohn left Latvia with his family in 1906 and, after a stopover as a pastor in New Weimar in Volga, then in 1910 he was pastor of the German-Lutheran congregation of Mogiljow , at that time the capital of the tsarist governorate Mogiljow , now Belarus .

Gerhard Juergensohn was born in Mogiljow a year after his father moved and took office. During the First World War , Mogilev was occupied by German troops in 1918. The Juergensohn family left the city together with the German occupation forces that withdrew in 1918. After a stopover in Tuckum, Wilhelm Juergensohn settled in 1919 as a pastor in Pomerania , where he found employment as an assistant preacher in Giesebitz in the Stolp district from 1919 to 1922 . Wilhelm Juergensohn then took over a pastor's position in Wolkwitz in the Demmin district , which he held until his retirement in 1938.

Gerhard Juergensohn first attended grammar school in Stolp , and after the family moved to Wolkwitz, he went to Joachimsthal grammar school in Templin as a boarding school student , where he graduated from high school. From 1929 to 1934 Juergensohn studied theology at the University of Berlin . On 21 June 1937 he was in Berlin ordained .

After positions as assistant preacher in Messow in the Crossen district and in Reetz in the Belzig parish , Juergensohn received his first pastor's position in Reetz in 1940 . He married in January 1940 in Belzig; In 1942 the first of three children was born. Juergensohn was drafted into the Wehrmacht in 1940 , but escaped service at the front because of a heart defect diagnosis. Instead, he served as a soldier, later a non-commissioned officer in a guide dog squadron with which he was taken prisoner by the Americans at the end of the war. After staying in a Rheinwiesenlager the US Army , he was released in 1945, and returned with his family to Reetz, where he occupied his pastorate again.

In 1952 he moved with his family to Bad Wilsnack , where he became pastor and superintendent of the Havelberg-Wilsnack church district .

In 1964 Juergensohn was appointed theological senior consistorial advisor of the Evangelical Church of Silesia , based in Görlitz . Together with the appointment of his predecessor Hans-Joachim Fränkel as bishop at the same time, a generation change took place at the head of the “rest of Silesian” regional church. According to the SED district leadership of the Dresden district , Juergensohn “the most reactionary superintendent of the Berlin-Brandenburg Church” got the senior consistorial post.

In 1969 Juergensohn was elected deputy chairman of the newly constituted Conference of Evangelical Church Leaders in the GDR , his place of residence was still Görlitz. From 1972 to 1977, Juergensohn also temporarily headed the Inner Mission and the Diaconal Work / Relief Organization of the Evangelical Church in the Görlitz church area, which has now been renamed .

In 1977 Juergensohn retired and moved to West Germany with his wife. First they lived in Hockenheim , then in West Berlin , where they spent their twilight years in the “ Otto Dibelius ” residential home in Berlin-Mariendorf . Gerhard Juergensohn was buried in 1996 in the Protestant cemetery Alt-Mariendorf II.

literature

• Christian Halbrock : Evangelical Pastor of the Berlin-Brandenburg Church 1945–1961: Official Autonomy in the Guardian State? Lukas-Verlag, Berlin 2004, ISBN 3-936872-18-X .
• Wilhelm Neander : Lexicon of Baltic German Theologians since 1920 , 2nd expanded edition, edited by Helmut Intelmann. Eberlein, Hanover 1988.
• John Shreve: Reetz: a village in the Brandtsheide 1861–1961 . Reetz municipality, Reetz 1993.

Individual evidence

1. ^ Neu-Weimar at the Volga German Institute of Fairfield University
2. ↑ Hans-Christian Diedrich: "... our dream to achieve unity": Protestantism (Lutheranism and Calvinism) in today's Belarus . Office for Religious Education [u. a.] the Ev.-luth. Landeskirche in Braunschweig, Wolfenbüttel 2001, p. 74. ( Online ( Memento of the original from March 9, 2016 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link has been inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove it Note .; PDF; 5.5 MB) 
3. ↑ Hans-Christian Diedrich: "... our dream to achieve unity" . Wolfenbüttel 2001, p. 86.
4. ^ Wilhelm Neander: Lexicon of German Baltic Theologians since 1920 , 2nd edition. Hannover 1988, p. 90. (Entry no. 347, "Juergensohn, Wilhelm (1869–1972)")
5. ^ ^{A b c d e} Wilhelm Neander: Lexicon of Baltic German Theologians since 1920 , 2nd edition. Hannover 1988, pp. 89-90. (Entry no. 345, "Juergensohn, Gerhard (* 1911)")
6. ↑ John Shreve: Reetz: a village in the Brandtsheide 1861–1961 . Reetz 1993. (excerpts online )
7. ↑ Christian Lotz: The Interpretation of Loss: Political Remembrance Controversies in Divided Germany about Flight, Expulsion and the Eastern Territories (1948–1972) . Böhlau, Cologne 2007, ISBN 978-3-412-15806-4 , pp. 247-248.
8. ↑ John Michael Wischnath: Church in action: the Evangelical Relief 1945-1957 . Vandenhoeck and Ruprecht, Göttingen 1986, ISBN 3-525-55714-0 , pp. 394-395.
9. ^ Gerhard Juergensohn (1911–1996) (obituary and obituary). In: Die Kirche , Evangelische Wochenzeitung, Berlin 1996.