Heimgarten (adult education center)
The Grenzland - Volkshochschule "Heimgarten" in Neisse -Neuland ( Silesia ) worked between 1913 and 1933 as a Catholic meeting place and educational center.
history
Meeting place
Initially, what would later become the Heimgarten site was intended as a meeting place and hospitality facility for the local association of the Kreuzbündnis in Neisse, where more than 500 adult members and the children and young people belonging to them could meet without being exposed to the indulgent drugs that are inevitable elsewhere .
Mainly Bernhard Strehler succeeded in setting up such a meeting place around the turn of the year 1913/1914 in the suburb of Neisse-Neuland, despite uncertain financing. It consisted of two connected buildings in the country house style with work rooms, guest rooms, two book rooms and a spacious hall (for more than two thousand people) with a modern style stage and was surrounded by a 10,000 square meter garden area with a playground, an open-air stage and a large glass hall for rain-protected events in Outdoors.
The site and the home soon became popular meeting places not only for abstinent members of the Kreuzbund, but also for the entire population, especially for workers, because they could stop there without being forced to drink. During the war years 1914 to 1918 , the home housed wounded soldiers.
Community College
After the military defeat of the Central Powers, the Silesian border area also got into the political dispute with neighboring states over the assignment of territories and new borders. The Paris suburban treaties had imposed crushing reparations on the German Reich , the territorial cedings had severed tried-and-tested economic ties, and in some peripheral areas militias fought with armed force to draw the future border. All of this put the German economy in distress, businesses and sole proprietorships ran into debt or had to close, many became unemployed, state and private welfare did not exist or could not provide effective help.
In this situation, members of the Quickborn decided to hold training courses and courses in the Heimgarten, the participants of which should be imparted factual knowledge and intellectual stimulation in order to be able to better face the difficulties of the present. For the new “Heimgartenwerk”, friends and sponsors founded the “Heimgartengenossenschaft (eGmbH)” as the legal sponsor in 1923. The hyperinflation took the German money back then every two weeks nine-tenths of its value. As a makeshift, comrades had to bring in three hundredweight of rye to acquire a share in the cooperative. The new cooperative leased the premises and buildings of the meeting place for a small fee from the Neisser Kreuzbündnis (with the condition that the home garden had to remain free of stimulants).
Ernst Laslowski took over the business and organizational administration, Prof. Klemens Neumann the pastoral, educational and musical direction. Various institutions and associations, but mainly the Heimgartenwerk itself, organized camps, courses and retreats on varying topics (duration 3 to 21 days). The system was also made available for family days, community evenings, and folk festivals.
Home community college
In 1926, the Heimgartenwerk built an additional building so that the many training participants could also live at their training facility. It was named "Dr. Bernhard Strehler House" after the founder of the home garden. On its five floors it contained a chapel, training rooms, apartments for Heimgarten employees and, above all, accommodation for the training participants. The state of Prussia and local communities had contributed to the financing, as well as (with official approval) a goods lottery with thousands of tickets, which Quickborn members certainly had to sell to friends and neighbors in their home communities.
At the turn of the year 1927/1928, Klemens Neumann suffered two strokes and died in mid-1928. The Heimgarten had lost one of its pillars, but continued its popular education work in the living spirit of the deceased until the state revolution put an end to it.
In 1927 the farmers' (elementary) college was founded in a new building in the immediate vicinity. Today the building is used by Caritas. All three types of folk high schools were united in Neisse-Neuland, for girls, for workers and for farmers.
Destruction of the home garden
After the National Socialists came to power in 1933, a camp for the voluntary labor service was set up on the site, which was converted into the Reich labor service in mid-1935 . The former home garden was used as a Nazi school home (proven for 1937)
At the beginning of the war in 1939 , the German Wehrmacht took over the home garden and later a school for kindergarten teachers.
Since the end of the war, the area around Neisse (now Nysa ) has belonged to the state of Poland , the former Strehlerhaus is divided into apartments, of the first two buildings only the former hall with a stage remains, the local sports club uses it as a game and exercise hall.
Content, performance
The designers of the VHS (later Heim-VHS) "Heimgarten" were mainly guided by the ideas of the youth movement . Just like them, they strived to overcome the rigid forms of the previous epoch and instead to find a lively, "moving" way of life, both for themselves and for the growing youth.
- Instead of "widespread" (extensive) more "creative" (intensive) education .
- Shaping the whole person: not only his knowledge and thinking, but also his actions and being.
- Not just funneling knowledge, but gaining human education.
- Not just multiplying information, but shaping and deepening human values.
- Less instruction, more animation. Knowledge is a prerequisite, but it must not remain rigid theory. Knowledge only becomes useful when people really do it. This requires inner abilities, mental powers in people.
So that skills and powers can develop naturally and humanely, education on the move with young people sets the priorities differently than the then conventional education. The outer world experience is consolidated in the inner experience. In any case, when it is internalized, it is valued: either constructive or destructive. Positive emotion promotes positive motivation and vice versa ("movement" dialectically as effect and cause).
Value-creating feedback begins with giving one's surroundings a pleasing shape: aesthetic room design, visual arts and crafts. With the same intention, youth-active education complements the (still indispensable) careful imparting of knowledge through artistic creation, which the individual experiences both for himself and as a participating or contributing member of his group. Forms especially cultivated in the "Heimgarten" were songs, games, dance, customs and festivities. Justification in retrospect and confidence in the outlook, in short, inner support (for the individual as well as for the group) also convey prayer and other pillars of religion .
See also
literature
- Hermann Fuhrich: The home garden: studies and sources for Catholic popular education work. A. Laumannsche Verlagsbuchhandlung, Dülmen (Westphalia) 2000, ISBN 3-89960-227-7 .
- Marcin Worbs: Quickborn and Heimgarten as a cultural-religious event in Upper Silesia (1909 - 1939). Wydzial Teologiczny Uniwersytetu Opolskiego, Opole 1999, ISBN 83-88071-75-0 .
Individual evidence
- ^ Silesia: a quarterly journal for art, science and folklore, Volume 3, Kulturwerk Schlesien, 1958, p. 32.