Jakob Neumann

Jakob Neumann (born April 24, 1920 in Perkos , Kingdom of Romania ; † October 15, 2009 in Schwabhausen ) was a German-Romanian educator. He was director of the German School in Bucharest (DAS) and general school inspector in the Romanian Ministry of Education and Culture.

Life

Jakob Neumann attended the German Realgymnasium in Timișoara and then the German Roman Catholic Teacher Training Institute there. Here he received his teaching diploma in 1938. After two years in the business in Dudeştii Noi (German Neubeschenowa ), Anina ( Steierdorf ) and Oravița ( Orawitz ) served in the Romanian army during the Second World War . From 1946 he continued his activity as a teacher at the denominational elementary school in Timișoara- Iosefin ( Josefstadt ).

In 1948 Neumann was taken over as a training school teacher at the German teacher training institute there. After he had worked as a principal teacher in Timișoara- Fabric ( factory town ) and in Biled , he held the position of director of the German School in Bucharest from 1950 to 1956 . There Neumann married the language teacher Erika Weber from Hermannstadt ( Romanian Sibiu ) and lived in the school's official apartment next to the Evangelical Church in Strada Luterană . Neumann's parents came from the Banat Swabian ethnic group and lived from 1951 to 1956 during their deportation to the Bărăgan steppe near Slobozia in the Ialomița district . Visits were prohibited by the authorities, but Jakob and Erika Neumann waded through the Ialomiala river at night for a visit in the summer of 1953 , where they were picked up by the militia.

In the autumn of 1948 the communist party leadership had schools set up for the minorities in Romania with a view to the planned industrialization, including the Romanian-German minority. In late 1956, the Ministry of Education established a Directorate-General for Ethnic Minority Education, and Neumann was appointed its general inspector. Here he was primarily responsible for teaching German. Neumann was the first representative of the German minority in this ministry since Michael Pfaff's dismissal in 1950. The ministry controlled the textbook publisher and the branch for German textbooks founded in Timișoara in 1956. Neumann recruited the authors Arnold Pankratz, Georg Scherg , Anne Röhrich, Edda Horedt, Eva Pătrășcanu, Maja Breckner and Paula Dorner-Kramer for the publishing house . Through the expansion of the system of German classes and the establishment of German schools, the number of German-born students doubled under Neumann's leadership from a total of 23,480 in the 1955/1956 school year to 46,260 (excluding specialist lyceum classes) in the 1976/1977 school year. During Neumann's term of office, the establishment of the German Teacher Training Institute in Sibiu, the establishment of additional German schools in the area of Satu Mare and the establishment of a German school in Cluj-Napoca all fall .

After two difficult operations within two years, Neumann left the ministry in 1973, his successor being Heinrich Schubkegel . Neumann returned to the German School in Bucharest, where he worked as a teacher of geography and history as well as deputy headmaster until his retirement in 1981. His family left for Germany in 1991, two years after the Romanian Revolution , where Neumann and his wife, with whom he had two sons - Udo and Wolfgang - settled in Schwabhausen. Neumann died in 2009 after a long illness.

Publications

• Education for the national minorities in the Romanian People's Republic. In: Neuer Weg , Bucharest, April 24, 1957

Web links

• Hans Fink : Seventeen years of general school inspector: Jakob Neumann (1920-2009) , November 13, 2009

Individual evidence

1. ^ Institute for Danube Swabian History and Regional Studies , Roxana Nubert , Horst Fassel (Ed.): Fifty Years of Temeswarer German Studies , Ebner Verlag, 2008, ISBN 3-93472-640-2 , 442S., P. 298