Johann Kruse (witch researcher)

Johann Kruse (born December 30, 1889 in Brickeln , † October 13, 1983 in Bargfeld-Stegen ) was a German teacher and witch researcher.

Live and act

Johann Kruse was a son of the farmer Benjamin Kruse (born December 11, 1864 in Brickeln; † December 19, 1927 there) and his wife Wiebke, née Kruse (born March 25, 1865 in Süderhastedt ; † October 28, 1921 in Brickeln), whose father was a farmer. The Kruse family had lived in Dithmarschen for a long time ; the father owned one of the largest farms in Brickeln.

Kruse devoted himself to literature at a young age, supported by his mother. He attended a two-class elementary school in Quickborn and then began training as a teacher, but as the eldest son would have had the right to take over his father's farm. From 1905 to 1911 he studied at the Tonderner preparatory institute and the local seminar for school teachers. Until 1917 he worked as a teacher in Toftlund . In 1914/15 he fought during the First World War .

Kruse continued his autodidactic training and developed into an advocate of Darwinism and the monist Ernst Haeckel . Because of this attitude, he quickly came into conflict with the school board, which was controlled by the spiritual consistory. In 1917, Kruse moved to Burg as a primary school teacher and, as he himself said, took up the "fight against four big" K ", Kaiser, War, Church, Capital". Based on his own experiences during the war, during which two of his brothers and a brother-in-law were killed, he developed into a determined pacifist. From childhood on, Kruse was shaped by social democracy. In 1926 he became a member of the SPD . In 1928 he left the party for a short time due to its armaments policy and switched to the German League for Human Rights . In Burg he took over the writing of the Reichsbanner Schwarz-Rot-Gold for some time . Conflicts with the reactionary pastor von Burg shaped his complete assessment of the church, which he left in 1928. His cousin Hans Fülster, who belonged to the peace movement, played a decisive role in the fact that he saw the church as an inevitable opponent of pacifism due to the experiences of war.

He wanted to take action against the beliefs of the rural population, especially against theories about people who supposedly performed harmful magic, especially against popular beliefs about witches . In 1923 he published for the first time comprehensively on the witch craze in the present . In it he wrote that magical Bible content and clergymen who invoked the theory of a devil in their sermons were responsible for this. From his point of view, an ethic based on a scientific monistic nature should solve this problem.

Due to his publication, Kruse was transferred to a non-denominational school in Altona in 1926 . Here he was more concerned with left-liberal and socialist developments in the Weimar Republic . In the course of his literary work he got to know leading socialist writers, but did not adopt the Marxist theory of class struggle they pursued . He collected Low German folk narratives that dealt with socially critical topics. Under the title De stark Baas. In 1927 he published stories about the strong Klaas Andrees, the keeneen smieten kunn , about a peasant hero who is reminiscent of Till Eulenspiegel . His novel Shame of Our Time , which thematized the construction of dykes in Sönke-Nissen-Koog , was supposed to go to print in the International Workers' Publishing House, but was thwarted after the seizure of power .

During the time of National Socialism , Kruse behaved ambivalent. After being advertised by the NSDAP, he initially became a member of the Evangelical Lutheran Church again. Anti-clerical and scientifically enlightened National Socialists asked him a short time later to take part in the church struggle, which he did not. Because of his "leftist attitude" he was attacked in the school environment. After the non-denominational collective school in Altona was closed, Kruse had to change jobs repeatedly, probably also due to the lack of National Socialist commitment. At the end of 1942 he took early retirement due to pulmonary tuberculosis . His witch articles sparked a controversy with the Heimat and Nordelbingen , because of which the publishers sued him for defamation and the Gestapo interrogated him in the summer of 1943. Kruse then sought proximity to the Black Corps , which took action against homeland researchers who valued popular belief. In the same year he moved to his daughter near Rendsburg and lived there until the end of the war.

In the first few years after the Second World War, Kruse only appeared politically because of his commitment against anti-Semitism and former National Socialists who tried to get into important positions. In anti-Semitism he saw a parallel to the “witch madness”. During these years he concentrated completely on the fight against the "modern witch madness" and published the book Witches Among Us in 1951 . In it he no longer criticized the church, but rather the “culturally advanced circles and the responsible authorities” who, in his view, did not act against “the spiritual plague of the witchcraft madness”, but promoted it.

During the 1950s Kruse pursued several "witch trials". It mostly concerned people who had been called witches and filed libel suits, or negotiations against “witch banners”, “wise women” or lay healers. Kruse developed into a contact person for marginalized people, for whom he wrote many petitions to church, state and scientific institutions in order to take action against the belief in witches. The people affected were mainly women from rural areas. Official bodies rarely supported Kruse. The press, on the other hand, used the materials he had collected in countless, sometimes sensational, articles. Kruse brought a lawsuit against two publishers of the 6th and 7th books of Moses , which were negotiated in Braunschweig from 1953 to 1961 . It was a popular compilation of evocations of the devil and magical-medicinal recipes, which sometimes had direct references to ideas of witches. Especially because of this process, Kruse got into tough arguments with academic folklorists. As a defense expert, Will-Erich Peuckert argued that the belief in witches had an "innate validity". The Book of Moses is a folk book based on older learned medical ideas. During the trial, Kruse's expert Otto Prokop accepted a call from East Berlin University, so that the Cold War also had an impact on the trial.

Older experts rejected Kruse for many years; some thought he was a monomaniac . This changed at the beginning of the 1970s when a new generation of folklorists, who pursued socially critical approaches, took up his theses and dealt with the subject of witches. In 1978 his book from 1951 appeared again. In 1979, part of his archive material was shown in the “Witches” exhibition in Hamburg.

Witch archive

In 1978 Kruse donated his extensive collection to the Hamburg Museum of Ethnology as the Johann Kruse Archive for research into the modern belief in witches . After it had developed into a pagan center with witchcraft consultation hours , lectures on annual festivals, magic practices and lectures on questions of natural religious spirituality , it is not accessible today until further notice . Extensive restructuring of the portfolio is currently being planned.

On Kruse's 100th birthday, the Museum of Ethnology organized a “witch commemoration week” in January / February 1990. This included an exhibition based on his collection.

family

On May 15, 1914, Kruse married Marie Hanssen in Süderhastedt (born January 19, 1893 in Großenrade ; † July 7, 1981 in Hamburg ). She was a daughter of Johann Hanssen (1861-1947) and his wife Margarethe, née Hennings (1867-1951) from Großenrade.

The Kruse couple had a daughter and son Hinrich Kruse (born December 27, 1916 in Toftlund , † July 17, 1994), who worked as a Low German writer.

Individual evidence

1. ^ ^{A b} Joachim Friedrich Baumhauer: Kruse, Johann . in: Biographical Lexicon for Schleswig-Holstein and Lübeck . Vol. 9, page 196.
2. ^ Joachim Friedrich Baumhauer: Kruse, Johann . in: Biographical Lexicon for Schleswig-Holstein and Lübeck . Vol. 9, pages 196-197.
3. ↑ ^{a b c d} Joachim Friedrich Baumhauer: Kruse, Johann . in: Biographical Lexicon for Schleswig-Holstein and Lübeck . Vol. 9, page 197.
4. ^ Joachim Friedrich Baumhauer: Kruse, Johann . in: Biographical Lexicon for Schleswig-Holstein and Lübeck . Wachholtz, Neumünster 1982–2011. Vol. 9 - 1991. ISBN 3-529-02649-2 , pages 197-198
5. ↑ ^{a b c} Joachim Friedrich Baumhauer: Kruse, Johann . in: Biographical Lexicon for Schleswig-Holstein and Lübeck . Vol. 9, page 198.
6. ↑ ^{a b} Hexenarchiv ( Memento of the original from March 30, 2018 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. , accessed on March 28, 2018 
7. ↑ Where are you going, broom? - Magical Places in the North , NDR from April 27, 2016, accessed on March 28, 2018
8. ^ Joachim Friedrich Baumhauer: Kruse, Johann . in: Biographical Lexicon for Schleswig-Holstein and Lübeck . Wachholtz, Neumünster 1982–2011. Vol. 9 - 1991. ISBN 3-529-02649-2 , page 199.

literature

• Joachim Friedrich Baumhauer: Kruse, Johann . in: Biographical Lexicon for Schleswig-Holstein and Lübeck . Wachholtz, Neumünster 1982–2011. Vol. 9 - 1991. ISBN 3-529-02649-2 , pages 196-199.