Gottfried Strasser

Gottfried Strasser (born March 12, 1854 in Lauenen near Gstaad , † April 9, 1912 in Grindelwald ) was a Reformed pastor and poet from the canton of Bern .

Gottfried Strasser (1854–1912)

biography

origin

Gottfried Strasser grew up as the second son of pastor Johann Strasser, who came from Wangen an der Aare , in the rectory of Langnau in Emmental , where the family had moved in 1855.

Pastor and songwriter

For more than thirty years, from March 1879 until his early death, he was pastor in Grindelwald and became known as the «glacier pastor » and author of the Grindelwald song . This comes from the period from 1897 to 1898, was probably performed in public for the first time to the melody by Johann Rudolf Krenger on January 29, 1899 in the Hotel Eiger in Grindelwald and presented to a larger audience in May 1900 on the occasion of the Oberland Singing Festival in Thun . Another famous song by Strasser is that of the Trueberbueb , which he wrote in 1875 and which was also set to music by Krenger.

Part-time activities

The important representative of Bernese mediation theology was also extremely active in addition to the actual pastoral office: he founded the non-profit association, campaigned for tourism, organized high-mountain courses for mountain guides and was an active gymnast himself, as well as the fire brigade commander , school president, chairman of the SAC rescue station , Field preacher and supporter of the Bernese Oberland Railways . He had the saying put on a Grindelwald schoolhouse:

Church and school side by side these are two fingers on God's hand with which he draws up the world and put people in a better condition.

The family

The Strasser family around 1893

He married his wife Elise, née Rüegg, from the Zurich Oberland in 1881. She gave him eight children:

• Elise (* 1882) was a home economics teacher in Grindelwald for many years
• Johanna (* 1883), partner in Vienna , last lived as a pensioner in Igls ( Austria )
• Gottfried (* 1885), first carpenter, then painter and drawing teacher at the seminar in Bern
• Werner (* 1886), chemist, employee of the Federal Sanitary Administration in the Bern arsenal
• Karl (* 1887), farmer and cheese maker, owner of a dairy in Alsace and Zurich
• Hedwig (* 1888), commercial clerk in Bern
• Gertrud (* 1891), teacher in Bern
• Wilhelm (* 1892), pastor in Cordast , Gampelen and Spiez , field preacher

Politics and statistics

On August 18, 1883, Strasser was elected to the cantonal constitutional council, which by November 1884 prepared a revision of the Bernese constitution of 1846, which had been drawn up before the Swiss federal state was founded in 1848. However, the revision failed in the referendum of March 1, 1885 and only came about in 1893. In the summer of 1887, the pastor of Grindelwald ordered a traffic census that recorded 55,000 travelers to Lauterbrunnen Valley and almost 40,000 to Grindelwald.

Publications and correspondence

Illustration by F. Gysi from Strasser's "Brand von Grindelwald"

From 1888 to 1890 Strasser published the Gletschermann as a “family paper for the community of Grindelwald on useful and pious of old and young” and from 1896 until 1912, the year he died, he exchanged letters with the Austrian folk writer Peter Rosegger . His other correspondents included Johanna Spyri , Emanuel Geibel , Jakob Christoph Heer , Ernst Zahn , Joseph Victor von Scheffel , Josef Reinhart , Joseph Victor Widmann and Rudolf von Tavel . On the Sunday after the devastating fire in Grindelwald on August 18, 1892, he delivered a haunting sermon that appeared in print in Bern in 1893, together with a report on the fire. In response to a request from the Synodal Council of the Reformed Bernese regional church in 1885 , he had previously written For Our Emigrants . His Sermon on the Mount for the opening of the Jungfrau Railway on September 19, 1898 was also published. He liked to add his own drawings to his numerous occasional publications .

The glacier pastor

The “Glacier Pastor” was a real tourist attraction in Grindelwald, so that the Zurich National Councilor Johann Kaspar Baumann (1830–1896) could write: “... to go to Grindelwald and not have seen or met the Glacier Pastor would be something like that for the Swiss have the same meaning as if a devout Catholic made a pilgrimage to Rome and had not seen the Pope ».

Publications (selection)

During his lifetime

• The Napf, the Rigi of the Emmenthals (1408 m) , Langnau 1883
• The Poetry of Sunday , Bern 1883
• The nationalization of the poor with special attention to the district of Interlaken , Interlaken 1885
• The happy marmot. All sorts of singing songs for Swiss alpine clubists and surrounding places , Biel 1887
• Kontra Viktoria-Hütte on the summit of the Jungfrau , Interlaken 1887
• The transition from old Bern in 1798 to Bern in 1888
• The Bernese Oberland , Munich 1892
• Illustrated guide of the Bernese Oberland railways and surroundings. Description - history - sagas , Basel 1892
• The fire in Grindelwald on August 18, 1892 and the sermon given the following Sunday , Bern 1893 (reprint: Grindelwald 1992)
• For the new poor law. The Bernese parts of the country A few lines in the family book , Bern 1897
• Sermon on the Mount for the opening of the Jungfrau Railway on September 19, 1898 , Zurich 1898
• ABC for Swiss mountain guides , Grindelwald 1900
• The disaster on the Wetterhorn on August 20th. 1902: "Four lives fell from the weather beam at once!" Commemorative publication , Grindelwald 1903
• 25 New Year's wishes for my community , Interlaken 1904
• The heart open and no less. The Samaritan hand for the feeble-minded children in the Bernese Oberland. An appeal , Interlaken 1906
• From the edge of the grave to the Oberland! Solace songs , Interlaken 1907
• The Grindelwald men's choir in its first 25 years: 1886-1912 , Grindelwald 1912

Posthumously

• In Grindelwald the glaciers by . Poems, Interlaken 1943
• Gottfried Strasser's correspondence with Peter Rosegger 1896-1912 , edited by Rudolf Rubi, Grindelwald 1967

literature

• Rudolf Rubi, Das Gletscherdorf (= In the valley of Grindelwald , Volume 5), Grindelwald 1993, pp. 111–126

Web links

• Peter Aerne: Gottfried Strasser. In: Historical Lexicon of Switzerland .
• Literature by and about Gottfried Strasser in the catalog of the German National Library
• Grindelwald song
• Trueberbueb
• History of the SAC rescue station in Grindelwald