Heinrich Bornkamm

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Heinrich Bornkamm, 1936

Heinrich Bornkamm (born June 26, 1901 in Wuitz , Zeitz district , † January 21, 1977 in Heidelberg ) was a German Protestant theologian with a focus on Luther research . He taught church history as a professor at the Universities of Gießen, Leipzig and Heidelberg. He was a brother of the New Testament scholar Günther Bornkamm .

Life

Bornkamm studied theology in Jena, Tübingen and Berlin. He received his doctorate in Berlin in 1924 and completed his habilitation in Tübingen in 1925 for the subject of church history. In 1927 he was appointed full professor for church history at the University of Giessen . In 1932 he was elected rector of the University of Giessen from October 1933 to October 1934 by the last free general senate. After the " seizure of power " by the National Socialists in 1933, at the suggestion of the Hessian government, he was appointed Rector by the Reich Governor. At the same time Bornkamm was chairman of the university professors in the Nazi teachers' association . Bornkamm joined the nationalist , anti-Semitic religious movement of the German Christians , which he soon left after the infamous Sports Palace rally of the DC on November 13, 1933. In February 1934, under the impression of a faculty examination in Giessen, which he had chaired, the German-Christian regional bishop Ernst Ludwig Dietrich wrote to August Jäger , state commissioner and head of the church department in the Prussian church ministry, as well as the legal administrator of Reich bishop Ludwig Müller : “Unter the professors are Bornkamm, which should long since have been put aside, since it spoils all the theological youth for us. ”In the spring of 1934 Bornkamm joined the SA reserve, from which he left in December 1934.

In 1935 he was transferred to the University of Leipzig and worked there as a full professor . During the years of his activity in Leipzig he got into serious disputes with the Saxon Reichsstatthalter and Nazi Gauleiter Martin Mutschmann because of the closure of the theological faculty at the beginning of the autumn semester of 1939. Nevertheless, Bornkamm still described Adolf Hitler as a "gift to our family" in 1939 and spoke of the "statesmanlike greatness of the Führer". It should be noted, however, that Bornkamm clearly stood out from German-Christian ideas and church policy measures.

Bornkamm was President of the Evangelical Union from 1935 to 1963 . From an exchange of letters between Martin Bormann and the Foreign Office in 1942, it emerges that the Evangelical Union has since been considered highly unreliable because it would fight the National Socialist mentality.

After the end of the Second World War, Leipzig was in the Soviet occupation zone (SBZ). The university dismissed Bornkamm and he left the Soviet occupation zone. From 1948 to 1969 he taught as a professor of church history at Heidelberg University . In 1953 in the GDR , the Ministry for Popular Education put Bornkamm's work Vom Christian zum National Sozialismus (Diesterweg, Frankfurt am Main, 1935) on the list of literature to be sorted out . From 1958 to 1960 Bornkamm was chairman of the Heidelberg Academy of Sciences .

As a leading Luther researcher who understood church history as universal history, he was awarded an honorary doctorate by the theological faculties in Berlin, Debrecen / Hungary, Uppsala / Sweden and Montpellier / France . In 1973 he was also awarded the Great Cross of Merit of the Federal Republic of Germany. Heinrich Bornkamm was buried in the Heidelberg mountain cemetery.

Bornkamm's son became a pastor in Emmendingen and Lahr, and a granddaughter became a pastor in Ettlingen .

Fonts (selection)

  • People and race with Martin Luther. In: People. Country. Church. A course of the theological faculty in Giessen. Publishing house by Alfred Töpelmann, Giessen 1933.
  • The broadcast of the German university in the present. Speech at the beginning of the rectorate of the Ludwigs- Universität Gießen on November 8th, 1933. Armanen , series: Volk im Werden, Leipzig 1934.
  • From Christian to National Socialism. Diesterweg, Frankfurt 1935.
  • The Gospel claim to totality. Verlag des Evangelischen Bund, Berlin 1937.
  • Luther and the modern image of nature. (= Der Heliand. German Protestant books. Booklet No. 45.) Verlag des Evangelischen Bund, Berlin 1937.
  • The introduction of the Reformation in Leipzig. Lecture at the ceremony in the large hall of the Gewandhaus in Leipzig on May 25, 1939. Verlag des Evangelischen Bund, Berlin 1939.
  • Luther and the Old Testament . JCB Mohr (Paul Siebeck), Tübingen 1948.
  • The state idea in the Kulturkampf . Munich 1950.
  • Luther's spiritual world . Bertelsmann, Gütersloh 1959.
  • The century of the Reformation . Shape and powers. Goettingen 1961.
  • Luther in the mirror of German intellectual history . With selected texts from Lessing to the present. Göttingen 1970 - 2nd revised and exp. Edition.
  • Luther. Shape and effects. Collected Essays. Gütersloh publishing house, Gütersloh 1975.
  • Martin Luther in the middle of his life. The decade between the Worms and the Augsburg Reichstag From the estate ed. by Karin Bornkamm. Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht , Göttingen 1979.

literature

  • Giessen scholars in the first half of the 20th century, ed. by Hans Georg Gundel , Peter Moraw , Volker Press , Marburg 1982, pp. 87-98.
  • Michael Grüttner , Biographical Lexicon on National Socialist Science Policy , Heidelberg 2004, p. 26.
  • Dagmar Drüll: Heidelberger Gelehrtenlexikon 1803-1932 . (Ed.): Rectorate of the Ruprecht-Karls-Universität-Heidelberg. Springer Berlin Heidelberg Tokyo. 2012. 324 pp. ISBN 978-3642707612

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. a b Ernst Klee : The dictionary of persons on the Third Reich. Who was what before and after 1945 . Fischer Taschenbuch Verlag, Second updated edition, Frankfurt am Main 2005, p. 66.
  2. Kurt Meier: The theological faculties in the Third Reich , Berlin and New York, 1966, p. 153 and Walter Fleischmann-Bisten: Protestanten auf dem Weg , Bensheimer Hefte 65, Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, Göttingen 1986, p. 136f.
  3. Kurt Meier, Der evangelische Kirchenkampf , Vol. I, Halle-Göttingen 1976, note 723.
  4. Kurt Meier, Faculties, p. 449f.
  5. ^ Quotations from Ernst Klee: Das Personenlexikon zum Third Reich . Fischer Taschenbuch Verlag 2005, p. 66.
  6. ^ Heinrich Bornkamm: What do we expect from the German Protestant Church of the future? , Berlin 1939, p. 56.
  7. ^ Giessen scholars in the first half of the 20th century, ed. by Hans Georg Gundel u. a., Marburg 1982, p. 92.
  8. Fleischmann-Bisten, Protestanten auf dem Weg , 1986, p. 163.
  9. ^ Ministry of National Education of the German Democratic Republic: List of literature to be sorted out . Third supplement, Berlin: VEB Deutscher Zentralverlag, 1953, transcript letter B, pages 12–30. Retrieved November 6, 2010
  10. Announcement of awards of the Order of Merit of the Federal Republic of Germany. In: Federal Gazette . Vol. 25, No. 85, May 8, 1973.
  11. http://www.lahrer-zeitung.de/inhalt.lahr-das-ist-ein-wertvolles-angebote.045d22b2-a743-4ae2-884c-e7a3e82cbefe.html