Horst Symanowski

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Horst Symanowski (born September 8, 1911 in Nikolaiken , East Prussia ; † March 13, 2009 in Mainz ) was a German Protestant pastor , member of the Confessing Church (BK) and resistance fighter against the Nazi regime .

Life

Symanowski came from an educated middle-class family of pastors and teachers . After obtaining his university entrance qualification , he studied Protestant theology in Königsberg from 1932 . Shortly after the transfer of power to the NSDAP in 1933, he got in touch with the Confessing Church and became a member. As a pastor, he took part in intercession services for arrested BK members. In 1937 he was imprisoned by the Gestapo for the first time for eight weeks for distributing such lists of names . Two more arrests followed. After his third arrest, the management of the BK advised him to report for a military exercise. Through this military exercise he was able to camouflage his activity in the resistance as a " borderland inhabitant". But then he was sent on to the front. In 1941 he suffered a serious wound in the Soviet Union , and after his recovery he was discharged from the Wehrmacht in 1942 as “not fit for use in the war” . These war experiences had turned him into a staunch opponent . As the “illegal pastor” of the BK, he was used by the Gossner Mission to look after evacuated Berlin children who were to be protected from the bombing war in East Prussia . So he became the liaison between places in East Prussia and the capital of the Reich . In this way he also succeeded in smuggling several bombed-out Jews from their hiding places to East Prussia and secretly accommodating them here. The Symanowski family placed a Jewish family in their own apartment at risk of death.

In 1945, Symanowski and his family were expelled from the community and home . In 1948 the Gossner Mission sent him to Mainz, where he was to set up a branch in collaboration with the Department of Mission Studies at the university. But Symanowski saw his missionary task less in distant continents than in the workers who were alienated from the churches. He worked even for six months in a cement factory as a laborer and worker priest and sat there for the participation of the workers in its operation a. That earned him the dismissal by the entrepreneur. He also opened the student residence in Mainz-Kastel , which he ran, to apprentices and turned it into a meeting place for the church and the world of work. After he was able to present his concept at the EKD Synod in Espelkamp in 1955 , the "Seminar for Church Service in Industrial Society" was founded in Kastel, in which theologians and pastors should be familiarized with the world of work. Symanowski was taken over as its leader in the pastoral service of the Evangelical Church in Hesse and Nassau and worked there after moving to Mainz on the right bank of the Rhine in 1970 until his retirement in 1974.

Symanowski was one of the most important theologians in church industrial and social work and was also politically active beyond the church area. When the KPD was banned in 1956 , the pastor visited communist councilors in prison and campaigned for their party to be re-admitted. He organized the first Easter march against nuclear weapons in Mainz and became a co-founder of the committee for the defense of fundamental rights - against professional bans . The pastor was monitored by the Office for the Protection of the Constitution . According to information from the Rhineland-Palatinate interior minister , his data was stored until at least 2003. He was one of the founders of the Christian Peace Conference (CFK), at its third preparatory meeting in 1960 and at its 1st All-Christian Peace Assembly (ACFV) in 1961 in Prague .

From 1975 to 1989 Symanowski worked in the editorial team of the critical church magazine The Voice of the Congregation .

Symanowski's commitment to persecuted Jews was made known by the Bremen historian Maria von Borries when she tracked down a persecuted Jewish family in the United States who were among the Jews who were rescued by Symanowski.

Honors

At a ceremony in Mainz City Hall on July 3, 2003 , Horst Symanowski (and his wife Isolde, who died post mortem, who died in 1999 ) were named “ Righteous Among the Nations ” for their work in the Yad Vashem Holocaust memorial .

Publications

  • God loves the worldly. Bechauf, Bielefeld 1956.
  • Against the unfamiliarity. Kaiser, Munich 1960.
    • The Christian Witness in an industrial society. Westminster Press, Philadelphia 1964.
  • What do we actually produce for? Together with Karl Paul Hensel Press Office of Hessian Chambers and Associations, Frankfurt a. M. 1961.
  • The world of the worker. Voice publ., Frankfurt a. M. 1963; 4th edition 1964.
  • (as ed.) Post Bultmann locutum / vol. 1. A discussion between Helmut Gollwitzer and Herbert Braun on February 13, 1964 in the Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz on the Rhine , 1965, 2nd ed.
  • Participation in the workplace. Pahl-Rugenstein, Cologne 1966.
  • Church and Working Life: Separate Worlds? Impulse texts from 1950–2000 and their lasting challenge . LIT, Münster 2005.

literature

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ http://www.gewinn-portrait.de/portraits/horst-symanowski.html Retrieved March 21, 2012
  2. ↑ See Horst Krockert: Das Arbeitszentrum West der Gossner Mission 1949-1970 ( online resource ).
  3. ↑ “Our lives stood on a knife edge”. Accessed March 21, 2012
personal data
SURNAME Symanowski, Horst
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German Protestant theologian and member of the Confessing Church
DATE OF BIRTH September 8, 1911
PLACE OF BIRTH Nikolaiken , East Prussia
DATE OF DEATH March 2009
Place of death Mainz