Josef Rieck

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Josef Rieck (* 1911 in Stuttgart , † 1970 in Aulendorf ) was a German bookseller and active in the resistance against National Socialism . He founded the Rieck bookstore in Aulendorf and was a founding member of the Oberschwaben Society .

Life

Rieck grew up in Stuttgart and spent some time as a novice in the Beuron Abbey before he trained as a bookseller. In 1938 he came as an avowed Catholic with his wife Erika, a Berlin communist , to Aulendorf in Upper Swabia , where he opened his own bookshop . Through this bookstore, Rieck had contact with prominent resistance fighters during the Nazi era , which is why he was briefly arrested in the course of the arrest of members of the White Rose resistance group . After 1945, Rieck mainly served customers from the field of theology with his bookstore and founded the Oberschwaben company . Rieck always wanted to advance spirit and culture with his work, as an extract from an information sheet for his customers from 1941 shows:

“The bookstore was founded with the aim of becoming the intellectually stimulating focal point for the country between the Danube and Lake Constance, a predominantly rural and uniquely cohesive cultural landscape. The company's highest principle was that of sorting, applied to all areas, from children's books to classic editions, which excludes any mediocrity. "

- Josef Rieck

Bookstore Rieck

The Rieck bookstore (also: Rieck'sche Buchhandlung ) opened by Josef Rieck in Aulendorf in 1938 is primarily a mail-order bookstore for theology and the humanities . The first customer of the new bookstore was its later first employee: Erwin Glonnegger , who would become famous as a game inventor a few years later . Rieck wanted himself to always have the best books pre-sorted for his customers in his bookstore and thus "to educate buyers to an intellectual quality feeling through offers and advice". Linked to this claim was a fundamental aversion to the goals and methods of the Nazi regime. This was clearly expressed when Rieck ordered 500 copies from Alfred von Martins Nietzsche and Burckhardt , in which the author directed everything against Nietzsche that one could not dare to say against the regime at the time and this via an advertisement in the Frankfurter Newspaper advertised. All 500 copies were sold, the customers were among others Claus Schenk Graf von Stauffenberg , Werner Bergengruen and the Scholl siblings , but also Hitler's chief ideologist Alfred Rosenberg . The Rieck couple and the Scholl siblings established direct contact through their mutual acquaintance Wilhelm Geyer . White Rose leaflets were regularly sent to the Rieck bookstore and distributed from there to trustworthy people. Otl Aicher , one of Rieck's customers, wrote about the importance of the Rieck bookstore during National Socialism :

“In Aulendorf, the traffic junction in Upper Swabia, you get off the train, interrupt your journey until the next one and go to the Rieck bookstore. A red-haired communist from Berlin, a bookseller, has teamed up with an intellectual who wanted to join the Benedictine order, but gave up because of illness, they say. The decisive means to survive in the Third Reich was the book. And the Rieck bookstore had books to survive. The Communist-Catholic Alliance was just tracking down the books that were food. "

- Otl Aicher

It was above all in the area of ​​Christian and theological literature that the Rieck bookstore secured a global customer base after the Second World War. The Holy See is the Aulendorfer's most important customer, the most prominent names in the customer database today are certainly Pope Benedict XVI. and Hans Küng . After Rieck's death in 1970, the bookstore was continued by his wife Erika and later by his sister Eleonore. Franziska Rist, who has worked for many years, has been managing director since 1994.

Society of Upper Swabia

Shortly after the end of the Second World War , Rieck founded the Upper Swabian Society with the aim of becoming an intellectual exchange center. Society should promote “the maintenance of local culture, the development of scientific institutions and the fruitful meeting of people from science and everyday life”. At the inaugural meeting, Carlo Schmid spoke on the subject of “Praise Upper Swabia”. In economically difficult times, however, after the long hardship of the war, the focus was so much on material needs that art and culture had to take a back seat at times, so that from 1949 onwards, the Upper Swabian society became silent. In 1996, a successor company was established, the so-called Upper Swabian Society for History and Culture.

Honors

In 2007 the city of Aulendorf named a street after Josef Rieck.

literature

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. a b c History of the Rieck bookstore , accessed on September 17, 2012
  2. a b c Dirk Grupe: Pope Benedict buys his books in Aulendorf. In: Schwäbische Zeitung, October 20, 2007
  3. Report of the Südwestrundfunk
  4. Upper Swabian Society for History and Culture ( Memento of the original from June 17, 2007 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. @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / www.gesellschaft-oberschwaben.de