Hans Weil

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Hans Weil (born September 8, 1898 in St. Johann , Saarbrücken ; died June 5, 1972 in New York City ) was a German educator.

School time and studies in Germany

Hans Weil came from a wealthy Jewish merchant family in Saarbrücken and the Lehrberger publishing family in Frankfurt. Due to a disease of spinal polio , he suffered a speech impediment and stayed behind in school. From 1912 he attended the Odenwald School and from 1914 the Dürerschule Hochwaldhausen , from 1917 he was back in Heppenheim and in 1920 he passed the Abitur at the State Realschule in Saarbrücken . He studied history and economics in Heidelberg, Frankfurt am Main, Munich and received his doctorate in 1930 in Göttingen under Herman Nohl . Because of the outstanding quality of his dissertation , he was able to study at theGoethe University Frankfurt habilitation with Paul Tillich and Carl Mennicke . Feidel-Mertz counts Tillich, Mennicke and Weil among the formative educators at the Goethe University at the end of the Weimar Republic , who are close to the Religious Socialists and the labor movement.

In his two inaugural lectures at the Goethe University in Frankfurt, he dealt with Herbart and the category of “insertion”. As a private lecturer , he held an introductory lecture in education in the winter semester of 1932/33. After the handover of power to the National Socialists in January 1933, he was asked not to read in the summer semester of 1933, and on April 13, 1933, his name was on the list of lecturers who were to be dismissed on the instructions of the new Prussian Minister of Education, Bernhard Rust . After an attempt to found a school for "half-Jewish" children in Germany failed, Hans Weil fled to Italy .

As a Jewish emigrant in Italy

Weil first went to Florence , where he took on the position of director of studies at the rural school home in Florence , which was founded by Werner Peiser and Moritz Goldstein , although he did not agree with the more traditional educational orientation of the country. Therefore, together with Heinz Guttfeld , who had also previously worked at the rural school in Florence, he founded the school on the Mediterranean in Recco . It was opened on March 1, 1934, initially with four students who had come over from Florence and was located in the "Villa Palma", which still exists today.

In its early years, the school worked on a more informal basis: Tuldung from the German Consulate General in Genoa and from the local Italian authorities. When Weil tried to legalize this status in 1936, the Italian side indicated to him that objections from Germany were opposed. On July 31, 1937, an order was issued to close the school, which at the time had about thirty students and employed eight Italian employees, until mid-September 1937. Protests against this were unsuccessful, as was the attempt to continue the school under Italian management.

As a foreign Jew, Hans Weil had to leave Italy in February 1939. Apart from that of two pupils, nothing is known about the further fate of the children.

The second emigration

Weil's wife Senta, who was not Jewish and came from the Baltic States, was able to travel to the USA in November 1939 together with their two children Anselm and Constanze. Hans Weil initially went to Great Britain, but could not find a job there. He followed his family through Ireland in 1940.

In New York, Hans Weil initially worked as a portrait photographer, as he was no longer able to establish himself as a university teacher or school founder due to a linguistic handicap due to his early polio. He continued to write and publish, but that did not lead to a secure scientific existence. For Columbia University he evaluated documents about the behavior of German scientists during the Nazi era, which disturbed him very much and in 1946 prompted him to reject a request from Goethe University Frankfurt , which offered him to take up his previous position as a private lecturer.

Because of his poor economic situation, friends of Hans Weil tried since the mid-1950s to persuade Goethe University Frankfurt to set up a professorship for reparation . This did happen, but for more than ten years the university leadership failed to inform the Philosophical Faculty, where Weil's professorship was to be established, and Weil himself about the establishment of the professorship. It was not until 1967 that the university admitted its failure to Weil, but at the same time informed him that he had now reached retirement age. Weil shared the fate of Philipp Schwartz , whom the medical faculty of the Goethe University refused to return in 1957 because, at 63, he was allegedly too old.

Hans Weil died on June 5, 1972 in New York.

Fonts

  • The emergence of the German educational principle . Bonn: F. Cohen, 1930
  • Edgar Rosemann, Hans Weil, Heinz Guttfeld: Call for the founding of a Jewish work and education center , Frankfurt am Main, Kettenhofweg, April 8, 1933. This text, previously only mentioned by Joseph Walk , contains “113 pages of a detailed technical and theoretical curriculum [ ..] and the basics of successful educational work ”.
  • Pioneers of tomorrow, a call to American youth . Young Men's Christian Associations of North America. International Committee. New York, NY, Association Press, 1945 WorldCat
  • Helping action: a contribution to the theory of pedagogy . Bonn: Bouvier, 1972
  • How the school on the Mediterranean came about in: Hildegard Feidel-Mertz (ed.): Schools in Exile. The repressed pedagogy after 1933 , Rowohlt Taschenbuch Verlag GmbH, Reinbek near Hamburg, November 1983, pp. 110–112, ISBN 3-499-17789-7

literature

  • Hildegard Feidel-Mertz : Educators in Exile: for example Hans Weil (1898–1972) , in: Edith Böhne (Hrsg.): The Arts and Sciences in Exile 1933–1945 . Gerlingen: Schneider, 1992, pp. 379-399
  • Hildegard Feidel-Mertz : Hans Weil (1898–1972) , in: Hans Erler (Ed.): “For my sake the world is created”: the intellectual legacy of German-speaking Judaism; 58 Portraits , Frankfurt: Campus, 1997, pp. 223–228
  • Hildegard Feidel-Mertz : Education for social humanity. Hans Weil's “School on the Mediterranean” in Recco / Italy (1934 to 1937/38). In: Childhood and youth in exile - a generation theme (= exile research. An international yearbook , volume 24, p. 95ff). edition text + kritik, Munich, 2006, ISBN 3-88377-844-3 .
  • Hildegard Feidel-Mertz : Education in exile after 1933. Education for survival. Pictures and texts from an exhibition. dipa-Verlag, Frankfurt am Main, 1990, ISBN 3-7638-0520-6
  • Karl Christoph Lingelbach: The task of education in the global structural crisis of capitalism. On the development of an interdisciplinary approach to social science pedagogy by Paul Tillich, Carl Meinecke and Hans Weil at the Frankfurt Pedagogical University Seminar 1930–1933 . Goethe University Frankfurt, 2006
  • Gerda Stuchlik: Goethe in a brown shirt. University of Frankfurt 1933–1945. Röderberg-Verlag, Frankfurt, 1984, ISBN 3-87682-796-5

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Lehrberger took over the printing company founded by Wolf Heidenheim in the second half of the 19th century .
  2. ↑ Hildegard Feidel-Mertz: Pedagogy in Exile after 1933 , p. 31
  3. ↑ Gerda Stuchlik: Goethe in a brown shirt. P. 94
  4. ↑ Feidel-Mertz (ed.): Schools in Exile , p. 250
  5. ^ Klaus Voigt: Refuge on revocation. Exile in Italy 1933–1945. First volume, Klett-Cotta, Stuttgart, 1989, p. 204, ISBN 3-608-91487-0
  6. ^ Klaus Voigt: Refuge on revocation. Exile in Italy 1933–1945. First volume, Klett-Cotta, Stuttgart, 1989, p. 204, ISBN 3-608-91487-0
  7. ↑ The memory of the school and the Weils have remained alive in Recco to this day: Weil, un'iniziativa coraggiosa & Constanze Weil visits Recco .
  8. ↑ Hildegard Feidel-Mertz: Education for social humanity , p. 110ff
  9. ↑ Hildegard Feidel-Mertz: Education for social humanity , p. 112ff
  10. ↑ 2014: Constanze Weil visits Recco
  11. ↑ Hildegard Feidel-Mertz: Education for social humanity , p. 111
  12. ↑ Hildegard Feidel-Mertz: Education for social humanity , p. 111
  13. ↑ Hildegard Feidel-Mertz: Education for social humanity , p. 111
  14. ↑ Otto Winkelmann: "Refuse for reasons of age". The pathologist Philipp Schwartz (1894-1977) and the Frankfurt Medical Faculty , Hessisches Ärzteblatt, 66th year, 12/2005, pp. 57–58. It is significant that in Notker Hammerstein's two-volume work on the history of the Goethe University ( The Johann Wolfgang Goethe University in Frankfurt am Main ) the subject of the return of the university members expelled by the Nazis is hardly mentioned.
  15. ^ Joseph Walk: Jewish School and Education in the Third Reich , Verlag Anton Hain Meisenheim GmbH, Frankfurt am Main, 1991, ISBN 3-445-09930-8 , p. 311 (note 378)
personal data
SURNAME Because, Hans
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German educator
DATE OF BIRTH September 8, 1898
PLACE OF BIRTH St. Johann (Saar)
DATE OF DEATH 5th June 1972
Place of death New York City