Home campaign

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The home campaign is the name given to attempts by sub -groups of the Extra-Parliamentary Opposition (APO) from 1965 to publicize and overcome authoritarian and oppressive conditions in the welfare education of the Federal Republic of Germany at that time. The campaign was part of a fringe group strategy aimed at creating social revolutionary awareness among the severely disadvantaged . Although this goal was largely missed, the campaign sparked public debate and gradual reforms in West German welfare education.

prehistory

The journalist Ulrike Meinhof was one of the first media representatives to describe the situation of children and adolescents in West German welfare homes in articles and radio broadcasts: “Outcast or repealed? Home children in the Federal Republic ”( Hessischer Rundfunk , December 9, 1965); "Escape from the girls' home"; “Children in the Federal Republic of Germany” ( specifically , 1966); “The child in society. 'Tail light auxiliary school' ”( Südwestfunk 1967). She called for a legal ban on all types of violence against children and their self-determined learning, similar to anti-authoritarian education . She also relied on research by the pedagogue Gottfried Sedlaczek . However, your critical articles initially had no consequences.

course

The focus of the campaign was on the Frankfurt am Main area and West Berlin . On the night of May 7th to 8th, 1969, young people in the Glückstadt welfare home, including Peter-Jürgen Boock, rebelled .

On June 28, 1969, the so-called "Staffelberg Campaign" took place. Frankfurt apprentices and SDS students visited the Staffelberg Welfare Home in Biedenkopf in 1969 , criticized its strict home rules and cramped accommodation and supported the young people in escape attempts, housing and job searches. With the help of students, around 30 young people fled this home to Frankfurt. They found shelter in the new communes and shared apartments at the time . After the office of the head of the Frankfurt youth welfare office was occupied, living space could be obtained for former children in the home. Residential collectives were established in four apartments. The “supervised youth housing communities”, which are still common today, are based on their model.

The then Frankfurt education professor Klaus Mollenhauer and students from his faculty joined the campaign. The later members of the terrorist Red Army Fraction (RAF) Andreas Baader , Gudrun Ensslin , Astrid Proll and her brother Thorwald Proll were also active in the Staffelberg campaign.

Ulrike Meinhof researched the Fuldatal care home in Guxhagen in the summer of 1969 . She got to know representatives of the Staffelberg campaign such as Baader and Ensslin. Since the autumn of 1968 she herself has been researching the conditions in West Berlin girls' homes, including the Eichenhof in Tegel. Meinhof learned of attacks by the home management on the girls housed there and obtained a guarantee that the home inmate Irene Goergens was released. Meinhof's script for the television film Bambule arose from these experiences . This was supposed to be broadcast on May 24, 1970, but has been discontinued because of the police manhunt for Meinhof since her participation in the Baader liberation (May 14, 1970) and was only shown in 1994.

An important demand of the campaign later consisted of better training opportunities. Further achievements of this first home movement were a differentiation and decentralization of facilities, a reduction in group size, a social outlawing of repressive educational measures and improvements in the qualification of staff.

The idea of ​​the participating students to make the home campaign a means of class struggle soon proved illusory. The conflicting interests and real-life differences between students and those they accepted were too great. After a while, the young people resisted constant discussion in the plenary and the tutelage of the students and preferred to take their affairs into their own hands. Conversely, many students were deeply disappointed in the lack of revolutionary awareness among home youth.

The fact that the home campaign did not remain ineffective was largely due to the enormous public response that the campaigns received from the start. In the heated media climate of the late sixties, a flood of press reports, radio and television broadcasts took up the topic and also critically examined the conditions in the nurseries.

Historical consequences

In 2006, the book documentation Beats in the Name of the Lord documented the large-scale abuse of children in homes in West Germany between 1945 and 1970. According to the author Peter Wensierski , the education began with the “home campaign”, which led to an end to these conditions in the long term. His documentation was in turn a consequence of this campaign and is in its tradition.

See also

literature

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Katriina Lehto-Bleckert: Ulrike Meinhof 1934-1976. Your path to becoming a terrorist. Tectum, 2010, ISBN 978-3-8288-2538-3 , pp. 243-263
  2. ↑ Marita Schölzel-Klamp, Thomas Köhler-Saretzki: The blind eye of the state , p. 57 f.
  3. ↑ Documentation, round table with former welfare pupils from the Glückstadt state welfare home. Ministry of Social Affairs, Health, Family, Youth and Seniors of the State of Schleswig-Holstein, Kiel 2008, p. 29.
  4. ↑ L. Gothe, R. Kippe: Protocols and reports from the work with escaped welfare pupils. Committee, Cologne / Berlin 1970, p. 72.
  5. ↑ The Sorrows of the Early Years. Zeit Online, pp. 8/8 , accessed on July 19, 2012 .
  6. ↑ Jutta Ditfurth: Ulrike Meinhof. The biography. Ullstein, 2007, ISBN 978-3-548-37249-5 , pp. 236-240 and 263-266
  7. ↑ Jutta Ditfurth: Ulrike Meinhof , 2007, p. 278
  8. ^ Susanne Karstedt , Social marginalized groups and sociological theory . In: Manfred Brusten and Jürgen Hohmeier (Eds.), Stigmatization 1. On the production of marginalized groups . Luchterhand, Neuwied / Darmstadt 1975, ISBN 978-3-472-58026-3 , pp. 169–196 online version , there under student movement and fringe group work .
  9. ↑ Marita Schölzel-Klamp, Thomas Köhler-Saretzki: The blind eye of the state , 2010, p. 8, pp. 130 and 152