Gordian Landwehr

Father Gordian Landwehr OP (birth name: Hermann Landwehr, born December 30, 1912 in Lohne (Oldenburg) , † June 11, 1998 in Leipzig ) belonged to the Dominican order and was prior of the Leipzig convent of this order for decades . Landwehr was the most important Catholic preacher in the GDR . The Dominican Order awarded him the rarely awarded honorary title Praedicator Generalis .

Life

Hermann Landwehr was the fourth of a total of twelve children from a general store. He came from a family that was closely related to Catholicism . Two of his brothers also became priests and one of his sisters became a religious. At the age of 13, Hermann transferred from elementary school to the St. Josef Order and Mission School in Vechta near Oldenburg, which is run by Dominicans , where he lived in the boarding school and took his school leaving examination in 1932.

In the same year he joined the Dominican Order in Warburg (Westphalia), studied theology and in May 1936 took the perpetual vows . In 1938 he was ordained a priest. After the draft, Father Gordian had to serve as a medical soldier in the Wehrmacht from 1941 . He was deployed on the Eastern Front until the end of the war. Gordian recognized early on that Wehrmacht soldiers were guilty of many war crimes in the Soviet Union. In his autobiography he reported mass murders of Jews and that his medical unit had not turned over Jewish employees to the SS. Nevertheless, the priest quarreled with himself that he had not mustered enough courage to protect more people from the Nazis' access. During the war, Gordian learned the Russian language in order to be able to better contact the local population. He often celebrated church services for the local Catholics in Minsk and the surrounding area, which was strictly forbidden by the Wehrmacht.

In the spring of 1945, Father Gordian of Gdynia came to Denmark with fleeing troops and German civilians, where he was taken prisoner at the end of the war. As a prisoner of war, he was transferred to a British camp near Lütjenburg in Schleswig-Holstein in autumn 1945 . In May 1946 he returned to his convent in Düsseldorf.

In 1951, Gordian was transferred from Düsseldorf to Leipzig at his own request in order to be able to work as a people's missionary in East Germany. At the Dominican monastery of St. Albert in Leipzig-Wahren , he also worked as a parish priest in the associated parish. In October 1951 he was able to lay the foundation stone of the St. Albert Church, which was consecrated 13 months later by Bishop Heinrich Wienken from Meissen . At the same time, the bishop raised the pastoral office to a parish under the patronage of the Dominican Order.

In 1951 the idea of ​​holding special youth sermons was developed in the Leipzig Oratory and Father Gordian was commissioned to take on these. So he found his actual calling as a tireless, eloquent and charismatic preacher. His sermons soon enjoyed tremendous popularity and after a short time his youth sermons in the Leipzig University Church became a regular institution. He was commissioned by his order and the East German bishops to act as a preacher throughout the GDR. Initially in 30, later even in 50 other cities in East Germany, he reached almost 20,000 young people a month with his sermons by the mid-1950s.

The great effect that Father Gordian had on the Catholic youth in the GDR did not go unnoticed by the communist rulers. In an article in the Sächsische Zeitung in 1957, he was denigrated as a “Natopeacher in Jesuit garb” (sic!). After this public attack, Gordian's superior in the West expected his arrest every day and asked him to return to the Federal Republic. However, with the consent of the Berlin Archbishop Julius Döpfner, the priest stayed in the East, because by leaving he would only have complied with the wishes of the regime. Because of his popularity, the regime did not dare arrest Gordian, although no other Catholic preacher attacked communist ideology as openly as he did. In his autobiography, Father Gordian wrote that an SED official told him in the late 1970s: “Father, you have the freedom of fools here; You can say anything. "

When it became public from 1964 that the SED regime wanted to blow up the Leipzig University Church, Father Gordian condemned this act several times in his sermons and organized the ultimately unsuccessful resistance on the Catholic side. In May 1968 Gordian publicly protested with only a few Leipzig residents against the imminent demolition of the church. While some students and citizens were jailed as a result, Gordian avoided arrest again.

Father Gordian placed great emphasis on building cross-border relationships within the Dominican Order. In the 1960s he made contact with the Polish province of the order. Persecuted Czech and Slovak Dominicans, who lived sporadically in their homeland and had to work in civilian professions, spent days together with the Leipzig friars. On Gordian's initiative, the convent in Wahren also became a meeting place for Dominicans from countries on both sides of the Iron Curtain .

For Father Gordian, the ecumenical cooperation of the Christian denominations was an important concern. In the 1980s he held numerous retreat courses at the invitation of the Evangelical Church , in which pastors in particular took part. Through Father Gordian, the genuinely Catholic religious exercises of the retreat became at home in the Saxon regional church . Course instructors trained by him still carry them out today.

For health reasons, Father Gordian gave up his pastoral office in Leipzig-Wahren in 1987. But in the following years he was still active as a preacher in St. Albert and other Catholic churches in Leipzig. Within the Catholic Church, Father Gordian, who spoke more openly than most priests about political matters, was one of the spiritual pioneers of the 1989 turning point .

After his death, Father Gordian was buried on June 19, 1998 in the Dominican Church of St. Albert in Wahren. In his honor, the former Lützschenaer Strasse in the immediate vicinity of the monastery was renamed Pater-Gordian-Strasse.

Honors

• Praedicator Generalis of the Dominican Order
• Federal Cross of Merit (October 5, 1994)

Works

• Hope for us. Annunciation under Ulbricht and Honecker. (1991)
• Give us back the sky. Words to live for. (1993)
• What I was allowed to experience. (Autobiography 1995)

literature

swell

• Joachim Seeger (Ed.): Selected sermons from Father Gordian Landwehr ; Frankfurt am Main u. a. 2004; ISBN 3-631-51953-2
• Martin Höllen (Ed.): Loyal distance? Catholicism and Church Politics in the Soviet Zone and GDR. A historical overview in documents, Vol. 1 ; Berlin, 1994; Pp. 231-232
• Manfred Queißer: Nato preacher in Jesuit garb ; in: Sächsische Zeitung of November 16, 1957
• Manfred Queißer: Not Christians, but enemies of the people ; in: Sächsische Zeitung of November 28, 1957

Representations

• Thomas Raabe: SED State and Catholic Church. Political Relations 1949–1961 ; Publications of the Commission for Contemporary History. Row B, Research 70; Paderborn 1995; ISBN 3-506-79975-4 ; P. 246 ff
• Theresa Schneider: Defamed as a “political agitator” - celebrated as a role model in faith. Father Gordian Landwehr OP and his significance for the Church in Central Germany ; in: Yearbook for Central German Church and Order History 1 (2005), pp. 66–78
• Joachim Seeger (Ed.): Father Gordian Landwehr. A tireless advocate of the faith in dealing with socialism ; Aachen 2005; ISBN 3-89514-582-3
• Joachim Seeger: Courage of faith under the conditions of socialism based on the sermons of Father Gordian Landwehr ; Frankfurt am Main 2001; ISBN 3-631-37619-7
• Joachim Seeger:  Landwehr, Gordian. In: Biographisch-Bibliographisches Kirchenlexikon (BBKL). Volume 23, Bautz, Nordhausen 2004, ISBN 3-88309-155-3 , Sp. 893-895.

Web links

• Literature by and about Gordian Landwehr in the catalog of the German National Library
• The Leipzig Dominican monastery, Father Gordian's place of work

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Office of the Federal President