Jakob Künzler

Brother Jacob is a redirect to this article. For the children's song Brother Jakob, see Brother Jacques .

Jakob Künzler

Jakob Künzler (born March 8, 1871 in Hundwil , Switzerland; † January 15, 1949 in Ghazir , Lebanon ) was a Swiss carpenter , Protestant deacon and missionary , nurse, lay doctor, doctor, rescuer and carer for thousands of Armenian orphans and widows during and after the genocide of the Armenians , Aramaeans and Assyrians in the Ottoman Empire and Lebanon.

Life

Early Life, 1871-1899

Künzler grew up in a poor and pious family of nine as the second child of a master bricklayer and an embroiderer in the canton of Appenzell Ausserrhoden . His childhood was marked by the death of his parents. He was still able to care for his mother, although he was only nine years old when she died. Then he came to an aunt and had to work in a textile factory in Wolfhalden . He was later taken on by his godfather, with whom he was able to do an apprenticeship as a carpenter after leaving school, which he completed in 1891. He went on the roll to Basel . After a short stay in hospital, he trained as a Protestant deacon in nursing in 1893 in the deacon house of the Basel Mission , because he understood deaconry as a practical succession to Jesus . He worked as a nurse in the Basel Citizens Hospital until 1899.

Life in Urfa, 1899–1921

In 1899 he traveled to Urfa in the southeast of the Ottoman Empire with the Christian Orient Mission , an Armenian aid organization that was co-founded by Johannes Lepsius . In the magazine Der Christliche Orient he reported from the mission clinic in Urfa and its surroundings. Here Turks, Armenians, Kurds, Greeks and Syrians lived mostly peacefully together. The helpful, sociable and linguistically gifted nurse Künzler learned Turkish, Armenian, Kurdish, Arabic and later also French there. In the Swiss hospital, where people of all religions and ethnicities were treated, he found his place of work as a nurse under the Swiss doctors Hermann Christ and Andreas Vischer. As a result of the lack of doctors, he continued his medical training to become an independent surgeon, expanded the initially simple clinic and founded a boys' school. During a vacation in Switzerland in 1919, he passed the medical proficiency test at the University of Basel with distinction. In 1905 he married Elisabeth Bender, a daughter of a German Chrischona missionary and granddaughter of an Ethiopian princess, with whom he had five children of his own.

In 1914 Künzler heard the young Turkish leader Näfis Bey say: “We Turks must either exterminate the Armenians all together, or we must force them to emigrate; living together with them within the borders of our empire is completely out of the question. " From 1915–1917 Künzler was an eyewitness to the genocide of the Armenians by the Young Turks in Urfa, about which he wrote notes that were published in 1919 in a book entitled In the Land of Blood and Tears . At risk of death, he, his wife and the Dane Karen Jeppe helped wherever they could. They looked after the hungry and the naked, hid refugees, cared for thousands of Armenian orphans and ran the hospital in the city of Urfa on a makeshift basis. Thanks to good relations with Muslims, his wife was able to bring women to Aleppo with the help of friends . In this way they were able to save around 2,700 Armenians from death.

From 1919 Urfa came under English rule, the American organization Near East Relief took over the German Orient Mission and cared for a total of 130,000 Armenian orphans, 700 of them at the mission station that Künzler directed. In 1922 he had to close the hospital in Urfa under Turkish pressure, and he moved with his family and around 8,000 Armenian orphans on foot, in carriages and on trucks to the territory of the French League of Nations mandate to Djerablus in Syria and later to Ghazir near Beirut .

Life in Ghazir, 1922–1949

Ghazir carpet; Thanksgiving to President Calvin Coolidge in 1925

In Ghazir, he and his wife opened a center for more than 1,400 orphan girls, and they enabled many of them to train as carpet weavers in the established carpet weaving workshop. For this he received an Order of Lebanon in 1929 for building up and promoting the textile industry. In 1932 he built a settlement with 377 apartments for Armenian widows in Bourj Hammoud near Beirut, which was later converted into a home for the handicapped, a school and a clinic. He fought malaria mosquitoes with Gambuzia fish that he farmed at the University of Beirut, which he released and had released in Lebanese waters . In 1935, he founded a lung sanatorium in Azounieh , in the Lebanese mountains.

Despite an infectious disease in his right hand and the subsequent arm amputation in the American hospital in Beirut in 1923, he continued to work and write tirelessly because the plight of the Armenian refugees could not go away. For the sake of his selfless commitment, Künzler was also called Brother Jacob .

Awards and honors

• 1929: Order of the Pour la Mérite des Lebanons
• 1947: Awarded an honorary doctorate from the University of Basel

posthumously

• 1959: Memorial stone in Hundwil
• 1971: Order of Merit of the Lebanese Government
• 1971: Memorial stone in Walzenhausen
• 2008: Memorial plaque in the Armenian memorial site Zizernakaberd in Yerevan
• 2015: Year of commemoration in the Evangelical Reformed Church in Hundwil

Fonts

• Reports from Urfa. Part 1: from the years 1900-1906. The Christian Orient, years 2–7 (new edition: Evangelical Reformed Parish Hundwil 2015)
• Reports from Urfa. Part 2: from the years 1907-1914. The Christian Orient, years 8–15 (new edition: Evangelical Reformed Parish Hundwil 2015)
• In the land of blood and tears. Experiences in Mesopotamia during the World War (1914–1918). Tempel, Potsdam 1921 and 1929. (New editor: Hans-Lukas Kieser , Chronos-Verlag , Zurich 1999, 2nd edition 2004, ISBN 978-3-905313-06-2 )
• Between the Nile and the Caucasus. A religious-political travelogue. Munich 1930 (2 editions).
• 30 years of service in the Orient. Association of Swiss Friends of the Armenians (BSA), 1931.
• with Paul Schütz: Köbi the stopgap in the service of life. Johannes-Stauda-Verlag 1935, 1951 and 1959.
• with Paul Schütz: Köbi, father of the Armenians. Autobiography of Dr. med. hc Jakob Künzler. Johannes-Stauda-Verlag, 3rd edition 1967

literature

• Thomas Fuchs: Künzler, Jakob. In: Historical Lexicon of Switzerland . 2007
• Rosemarie Künzler-Behncke: Jakob and the stick man. Gerstenberg Verlag, 1987. ISBN 978-3-8067-4102-5
• Emanuel La Roche: Doctor, look at me! The Basel doctor Hermann Christ on a medical mission in Eastern Turkey (1898–1903). Chronos-Verlag, Zurich 2013. ISBN 978-3-0340-1190-7 (with a chapter on Jakob Künzler)
• Uwe Wolf: The secret is mine. Walter Nigg . A biography. Theological Verlag, Zurich, 2nd edition 2012. ISBN 978-3-2901-7617-4 (Nigg was a pastor in the Appenzellian stone; pages 164-165)

Web links

Commons : Jakob Künzler  - Collection of images, videos and audio files

• Thomas Fuchs: Künzler, Jakob. In: Historical Lexicon of Switzerland .
• Literature by and about Jakob Künzler in the catalog of the German National Library
• Memorial event dedicated to Swiss Missionary Jacob Kunzler. Article on the Zizernakaberd memorial website
• Max Akermann: Jakob Künzler, Hundwil, saved Armenians. Radio SRF 1 , Rendez-vous , April 24, 2015 (4:34 min.)
• The experiences of Appenzeller Jakob Künzler in the Orient. Radio SRF 1, colon , August 25, 2015 (54 min.)

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Jakob Künzler: Reports from Urfa. Part 1: from the years 1900-1906. Part 2: from the years 1907-1914. Evangelical Reformed Parish Hundwil 2015
2. ↑ Eyewitness from Appenzell. In: nzz.ch. December 23, 2006, accessed October 14, 2018 . 
3. ↑ Paul Bernhard Rothen : It should start here tomorrow. Idea Spektrum , Belp March 18, 2015, pages 8-11
4. ↑ E. Buff: Dr. med. hc Jakob Künzler. In: Appenzell Yearbooks No. 76, 1948.
5. ↑ Heini Gut: Chronicle of the Swiss Diakonie Association. Langnau a. A. 1993, without ISBN.
6. ↑ Brief information from Walter Frei: Österlicher Friedensweg 2010 at the Walzenhausen church ( Memento of the original from April 10, 2015 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was automatically inserted and not yet checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. 
7. ↑ Ralph Hug: Eyewitness from Appenzell. The Appenzell lay doctor Jakob Künzler (1871–1949) witnessed the genocide of the Armenians in 1915 first hand. With “plan and will” a people had been led to the slaughter, he later wrote in his report. Künzler alarmed the diplomacy - but nobody wanted to hear him. NZZ , December 24, 2006.
8. ^ Paul Bernhard Rothen: Genocide, on the Armenians 1915-2015. Jakob Künzler as a witness of Jesus Christ among the Armenians. In: Kirche und Volk , Schaffhausen Easter / Whitsun 2015, pages 13-14.
9. ↑ Felix Ziegler Arslanian: Jakob Künzler. Genoa March 14th 2015.
10. ↑ Archive link ( Memento of the original from April 2, 2015 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. Jakob Künzler: Witness and helper in the horrors of the first genocide (1915). A year of remembrance in his Appenzell homeland. Room installation and lectures in Hundwil (2015)  
11. ↑ Michael Genova: The "Armenian father" from Hundwil. The Hundwil Church commemorates the lay doctor Jakob Künzler with an installation and events. 100 years ago, the native Hundwiler saved 8,000 Armenian orphans from Turkey from death. In: St. Galler Tagblatt . March 7, 2015, accessed May 29, 2016 .