Hermann Raschke (theologian)

Hermann Raschke

Hermann Raschke (born October 20, 1887 in Altona , Schleswig-Holstein province , † September 3, 1970 in Bremen ) was a German Protestant theologian. For 40 years he was pastor at the Great Church in Bremerhaven.

Life

Raschke's father was a blacksmith and died of tuberculosis when the son was six years old. The mother then married the tailor Friedrich Kriemelmeyer . After secondary school, Hermann Raschke did an apprenticeship with a lawyer. He always spent the evenings with the youth group of the Altona pastor Clemens Schultz . Schultz recognized Raschke's talents and enabled him to attend the Wilhelm-Gymnasium in Hamburg . He passed the Abitur exam at the age of 23. He would have loved to study philosophy; but the scholarship provided by Pastor Schultz only provided for the path to Protestant theology . While studying at the Philipps University in Marburg , he met his first wife, Auguste. He went to World War I and was wounded in Galicia. He was then released.

In 1917 Raschke was appointed pastor of the United Protestant Congregation in Bremerhaven . The sons Hartmann (1918) and Klaus (1920) joined the one-year-old daughter Marlott. The mother died in 1923, the worst year of the Weimar Republic . The housekeeper Hanni Meyer looked after the children. The second marriage with Else Madrian from Bremerhaven failed in the third year. The third marriage with Nora - "Nora et labora!" - was happy. Her son Eckehard was born in 1931. At Raschke's suggestion, the Great Church was named after Johann Smidt in 1927 .

In Bremerhaven, Raschke had a large, politically minded circle of friends. Politically, he was closer to the Social Democrats than to any other party. For a while he was a member of the party. In the era of National Socialism , he soon had problems. In April 1933, he was the conformist leave shortly Church Committee of the Bremen church. Unlike 34 pastors from Bremen, he had not signed an address of allegiance to the National Socialist rulers. His son Hartmann, who had been in league with the communists from a young age, was imprisoned for three years because he had written criticism of the government on an old printing press. When the united congregation was to be forcibly incorporated into the Evangelical Lutheran Church in Hanover in 1940 , he and Ernst Walter Schmidt enforced their stay with the Bremen Evangelical Church . The heaviest of the many air raids on Wesermünde on September 18, 1944 left little of Bremerhaven and only the tower of the church. Raschke's stepfather was killed in the rectory. For the second time in his life, left with nothing, Raschke set about rebuilding. Together with his colleague Schmidt, he gathered the members of the community who had fled to the surrounding villages or found shelter in the few undamaged houses in Bremerhaven. He issued Persil bills for deserving men from the community . In 1952 he moved into the new pastors' and parish house for the Mayor Smidt Memorial Church . Three years after his retirement, he saw the Great Church reopen in October 1960. To the delight of the Bremerhaven population, he gave the inauguration sermon.

Between philology and theology

As a decidedly liberal Christian, Raschke was attracted to Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling , Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel and Eduard von Hartmann .

“Since 1910 my theological and scientific development has been under the influence of the historical-critical school, which, beyond Adolf Harnack , followed the religions of antiquity, especially the Orient, to the development of Christianity down to the details of the Gospels. Here I was particularly fascinated by the question of the language behind the Gospels, especially Julius Wellhausen's request , Göttingen, that Aramaic should be taken into account as the “language of Jesus” for the explanation of the Gospels.
My penchant for metaphysics made it natural to me that Jesus Christ is a figure who belongs to the metaphysical sphere of the eternal and not to the physical sphere of the historical here and there. Above all my thinking and research stand the words of Fichte and Lessing: The metaphysical, not the historical, makes us happy, 'the historical only makes understanding. And Christianity would not be a religion at all and would never have triumphed over high ancient metaphysics if it were what Harnack and historical positivism presented it to us as: There was once a man named Jesus. "

- Hermann Raschke

Retirement in Bremen

After 40 years emeritus , Raschke moved to Bremen. There he was a common parishioner of St. Remberti . When he died at the age of 83 and was buried, Remberti's pastor Heinz Nölle and the communist Folkert Potrykus held eulogies:

“Pastor Raschke loved the free speech. He said it when the night lay over Germany. The pulpit became a tribune for those persecuted by National Socialism. He was an advocate against war and inhumanity. He and his family had to suffer for it. "

- Folkert Potrykus

Fonts

• The letter to the Romans of Marcion after Epiphanius . Bremen 1926.
• Places and ways of Jesus according to the Gospel of Mark . Lecture at the Congress for the History of Christianity, Paris 1927.
• Revolution about God: Theses of a New Reformation . 1933.
• The inner logos in ancient and German idealism . Bremen 1949.
• The Christ mystery: rebirth of Christianity from the spirit of Gnosis . 1954.
• From cantata to cantata, 1917–1957: two sermons by Pastor Hermann Raschke ... at the United Protestant Congregation for the Mayor Smidt Memorial Church in Bremerhaven . 1957.

literature

• Frank Mühring: A fiery commitment to peace - Pastor Hermann Raschke and the resistance in the Nazi era , in: Church council of the United Protestant Congregation (ed.): 150 Years of the Great Church - Mayor Smidt Memorial Church (2005), p. 24 -26.

Web links

• radikalkritik.de

Individual evidence

1. ↑ ^{a b c d e} Frank Mühring: Searching for traces after Pastor Hermann Raschke , part 2. Bremerhaven, August 31, 2004.