Hermann Schlingensiepen

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Wilhelm Ferdinand Hermann Schlingensiepen (born August 13, 1896 in Barmen , † February 4, 1980 in Bonn ) was a German Protestant theologian and professor .

life and work

After graduating from high school in 1914, Schlingensiepen volunteered for military service and was seriously wounded on the dead man in the Battle of Verdun in 1916 . From the military hospital in Bonn in 1917 he began to study theology, which he had already decided to do in the Barmer student Bible group. He received decisive impressions from Adolf Schlatter in Tübingen , followed by a stay in Münster , again interrupted by the treatment of a lung disease. From 1923 he was pastor in Bad Saarow (Mark Brandenburg) and secretary of the German Christian Student Association . In the capacity of secretary, he took part in international student meetings in Switzerland , France and the Netherlands .

In early 1927 he received his doctorate as a licentiate in theology at the University of Bonn with a study of the interpretation of the Sermon on the Mount with Johannes Calvin . At the end of the summer semester he received the Venia legendi for practical theology and exegesis there on the basis of a habilitation thesis on Erasmus von Rotterdam as an exegete, which was published in two issues of the Zeitschrift für Kirchengeschichte . After taking up the chair for practical theology in Kiel in 1932 , he was appointed head of the church seminar abroad in Ilsenburg (Harz) in 1933. Since the seminary, in which pastors were trained for service in the German congregations in South America, submitted to the Confessing Church , Schlingensiepen became involved in violent disputes. Several times interrogated by the Gestapo and temporarily imprisoned, the University of Bonn withdrew his venia legendi. The old Prussian Evangelical Upper Church Council closed the seminar in 1936. It was continued illegally until 1938 under the Prussian Brother Council .

From 1938 to 1945 Schlingensiepen was pastor in the old town parish in Siegen . In 1945 he was appointed professor for practical theology in Bonn. The Theological Faculty of Kiel University awarded Schlingensiepen an honorary doctorate in 1947 . In 1952 he became an Ephorus at the church college in Wuppertal . Since a failed operation in 1957, he was partially paralyzed and had to retire from active service. The Eichmann trial in 1961 made a lasting impression on him. Through correspondence with the accused in various Nazi - war crimes trials , especially the Auschwitz trials , he was the pastoral care of there condemned special task. In addition, there was the complex of questions about guilt and atonement of the Germans as a whole and of the Confessing Church in particular. The suffering of the war criminals who were in prison was particularly close to his heart. So he tried to be temporarily admitted to a penitentiary , but failed. His 1965 in Hamburg Sunday newspaper Article published peace to men of ill will in Hamburg Sunday paper caused a sensation. In it, Schlingensiepen u. a. against the background of the viewers' own failure in the crimes of the Nazi regime to "sincerely lament" the suffering of the imprisoned and convicted war criminals. That would enable the Nazi perpetrators to admit what they did. Schlingensiepen stood up especially for the war criminals who had contact with him. So he achieved, among other things, that Otto Bradfisch - s. u. - Released early in 1969, convicted of assisting in the murder of 15,000 people.

family

Schlingensiepen's parents were the manufacturer Hermann Schlingensiepen († 1922) and his wife Maria geb. Stein († 1920). He had an older sister Maria (married Tappenbeck) and a brother Johannes Schlingensiepen (1898–1980), who later became the Protestant senior church councilor .

In 1927 he married Eva Michaelis (* 1903), a daughter of Georg Michaelis (1857–1936; German Chancellor from July 14, 1917 to October 31, 1917) and Margarete geb. Schmidt (1869-1958). The Schlingensiepen couple had six children; Georg Hermann (* February 8, 1928; † 1997, PhD historian , in the Foreign Service ), Ferdinand (* July 18, 1929, theologian), Irmela (* September 22, 1931), Helmut (* May 4, 1934; † 1957 ), Wilhelm (born September 1, 1937; † 1973, medical doctor) and Andreas (born February 23, 1942, medical professional).

estate

Schlingensiepen left behind an extensive fund of around 10,000 individual pieces of correspondence, consisting of copies and hectographs , which Schlingensiepen's son Ferdinand handed over to the archives of the Evangelical Church in the Rhineland in 1999. This collection is of great value for contemporary historical research in several ways.

At first, the alphabetical correspondence series (No. 1–122) reads like a who's who of German Protestantism in the first two decades of the Federal Republic of Germany : Gerhard Bergmann , Eberhard Bethge , Peter Beyerhaus , Helmut Gollwitzer (with 164 pieces of correspondence alone), Hans Joachim Iwand , Heinz Kloppenburg , Lothar Kreyssig , Martin and Wilhelm Niemöller , Kurt Scharf , Wolf-Udo Smidt , Hans Stempel and Richard von Weizsäcker . Well-known lawyers such as Ernst Friesenhahn or Barbara Just-Dahlmann can be found as well as the Adenauer family , Eugen Gerstenmaier , Gustav Heinemann and Herbert Rauschning from the fields of politics and contemporary history . A lifelong friendship linked Schlingensiepen with mission inspector Hans Brandenburg ( Korntal ) and pastor Friedrich Wolf of the Bethel Church University . Another chapter is the intensive correspondence with convicted Nazi war criminals and the staff in the extermination camps . Relevant names here are Albert Speer , Wilhelm Boger , Otto Bradfisch , Wilhelm Greiffenberger , Werner Scheu , Gustav Sorge , Hans-Joachim Stolze , Martin Gottfried Weiß , Wolfgang Wetzling and Artur Wilke .

Correspondence and biographical material of her father and German Chancellor Georg Michaelis also came into the inventory through Schlingensiepen's wife Eva (No. 238-255). This group of holdings, which is to be understood as part of Michaeli's estate, is all the more valuable as there is otherwise only a partial estate of around 1.25 m in size in the Federal Archives in Berlin ; the whereabouts of the main estate is unknown.

Finally, reference should be made to the written material produced in the Ilsenburg Church Foreign Seminar from 1933 to 1938, which impressively reflects the internal church disputes and the conflict with the regime (No. 314–333). The ecumenical employed Schlingensiepen since his experience in the Student World Federation in the Weimar Republic . From the management of the Ilsenburg a bow spans intensive contacts to England in the post-war period to the great South American trip in 1956 (No. 296–298). Correspondence within the family also takes up a substantial part of the collection.

Fonts

  • with Hans Walter Wolff and Hans-Joachim Kraus : Old Testament sermons. NF Old Testament sermons with hermeneutical considerations , Verlag der Buchhandlung des Erziehungsverein 1956

literature

  • Arnold Falkenroth: Contributions to the political speeches of the church. Hermann Schlingensiepen on his 70th birthday. Publications of the Church University of Wuppertal, 2nd issue, Neukircher Verlag des Erziehungsverein, Neukirchen 1966
  • Ferdinand Schlingensiepen (Ed.): Theological study in the Third Reich. The church seminar abroad in Ilsenburg / Harz . Düsseldorf 1998 (publications of the EKiR archive no.17)
  • Katharina von Kellenbach: Theological speech of guilt and forgiveness as protection of perpetrators . In this. ua (Ed.): Talking about God in the land of perpetrators: Theological voices of the third generation since the Shoah , Darmstadt 2001
  • Heiner Süselbeck: Never give anyone lost: Correspondence between Helmut Gollwitzer and Hermann Schlingensiepen 1951-1979. Lit Verlag, Berlin 2014, ISBN 978-3-64312-673-3 .

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Heiner Süselbeck: Never give anyone lost: Correspondence between Helmut Gollwitzer and Hermann Schlingensiepen 1951-1979 . LIT Verlag, Münster 2014, ISBN 978-3-643-12673-3 , p. 158.
  2. ^ Justice and NS crimes - Wilhelm Greiffenberger ( memento from October 13, 2013 on WebCite ), Universiteit van Amsterdam - Faculteit der Rechtsgeleerdheid (FdR), accessed May 2008
  3. ^ Justice and NS crimes - Werner Scheu ( Memento from August 15, 2017 in the Internet Archive ), Universiteit van Amsterdam - Faculteit der Rechtsgeleerdheid (FdR), accessed May 2008
  4. ^ Justice and NS crimes - Wolfgang Wetzling ( Memento from March 4, 2016 in the Internet Archive ), Universiteit van Amsterdam - Faculteit der Rechtsgeleerdheid (FdR), accessed May 2008
  5. ^ Justice and NS crimes - Artur Wilke ( Memento from April 6, 2008 in the Internet Archive ), Universiteit van Amsterdam - Faculteit der Rechtsgeleerdheid (FdR), accessed May 2008
personal data
SURNAME Schlingensiepen, Hermann
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Schlingensiepen, Wilhelm Ferdinand Hermann (full name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German Protestant theologian and university professor
DATE OF BIRTH August 13, 1896
PLACE OF BIRTH Barmen
DATE OF DEATH 4th February 1980
Place of death Bonn