Julius Rieger

Julius Rieger (born August 23, 1901 in Berlin ; † January 1, 1984 ibid) was a German Evangelical Lutheran theologian and writer . As a pastor of a German congregation in London he became a friend of Dietrich Bonhoeffer and supported him in the resistance against the Nazi dictatorship.

Life

He studied theology and specialized in the Old Testament under Professor Otto Eißfeldt . After his theological studies, he was with a thesis on importance of the history of the preaching of Amos and Hosea Dr. phil. PhD. From 1927 to 1928 Julius Rieger was assistant preacher in Berlin-Adlershof. He was then employed as the director of studies at the Silesian Preacher's Seminary in Naumburg am Queis until 1931. He leaned a fixed Rectory at first, but declined in 1931 after the death of Father Mätzold to the German Lutheran St. George's Church in the East London district Aldgate (now London Borough of Tower Hamlets ). On October 14, 1933, Julius Rieger had his first personal encounter with Dietrich Bonhoeffer in Berlin. He received from Hans von Dohnanyi an admission card for the Lubbe process for 20 October 1,933th

St. George in the church fight

St. George (2010)

Initially still enthusiastic about the "national uprising" and like almost all German pastors in Great Britain, Rieger experienced a kind of conversion experience in his acquaintance with Bonhoeffer.

At the end of November 1933, Rieger received the official but confidential “special order” from the Reich Church Government. a. obliged to report regularly on the reaction of English churches and newspapers to the events in Germany. However, after these reports got Bonhoeffer into trouble, Rieger almost stopped reporting in February 1934.

Since the clashes of the London parishes with the Reich Church and the Ecclesiastical Foreign Office under Theodor Heckel in 1934, Rieger was an advocate of the hard line propagated by Bonhoeffer and the actions he proposed, which culminated in November 1934 with the decision of the London church councils to detach from the Reich Church.

He wrote a documentary about a joint trip with Bonhoeffer to British monasteries. The destination of this trip was the Anglican monasteries and communities in Kelham , Mirfield and Oxford . Bonhoeffer and Rieger viewed the monasteries as models of common life; They wanted to get to know Catholic and non-Catholic forms of communal life and a meditative piety bound to fixed orders. Bonhoeffer used the impulses of this trip to shape life together in Finkenwalde .

Since Bonhoeffer's return to Germany in 1935, Rieger was the only one of the London pastors who remained connected to the strict fraternal council position of Dahlem's Church Emergency Law and was therefore considered a "Dahlemite"; for Franz Hildebrandt , Rieger was the only representative of the Confessing Church in England until the arrival of the pastors who had fled Germany .

Rieger gave several clergymen who had fled Germany shelter in his community. These included Wolfgang Büsing (1910–1994), Franz Hildebrandt and Adolf Freudenberg . They supported him in dealing with the many requests for help for refugees from Germany. The majority of those seeking help were people who had been baptized as a Christian , but were considered non-Aryan under the Nuremberg Laws . Because of the refugee welfare of Rieger and his co-workers, St. George was dubbed the "Jewish Church" by certain members of the "German Colony".

As Bishop George Bell noted shortly after the start of the war, Rieger developed into the principal source of all information to the churches in this country about the church struggle for the English ecumenical movement . At Pentecost 1940, Rieger and his wife were interned like all enemy aliens in Great Britain . On November 21, 1940, his daughter, who later became musicologist Eva Rieger , was born in Port Erin on the Isle of Man during his internment .

From 1944 to 1953 he lived in Dietrich Bonhoeffer's rectory in Forest Hill.

After 1945

After the Second World War, Rieger was commissioned by the EKD Council to oversee the pastoral care of German prisoners of war in British camps. In 1947 he stayed in Stockholm . He returned to Berlin with his family in 1953, where he became superintendent of the Berlin-Schöneberg parish of the Evangelical Church in Berlin-Brandenburg .

He was married to the librarian Johanna Rieger, b. Kruger.

Honors

• 1953: Great Cross of Merit of the Federal Republic of Germany

Works

• The meaning of history for the preaching of Amos and Hosea , 1929
• The German Protestant communities in England after the war Munich: Chr. Kaiser Verlag 1933 (special print from Auslandsdeutschtum and Protestant Church yearbook 1933)
• The Silent Church. The Problem of the German Confessional Witness. London 1944.
• German Evangelical Congregations in England. London n.d. [1944].
• The ecumenical problem in the Church of captivity. Stuttgart: Quell-Verlag 1951 (from: For Work and Reflection No. 20. 1951)
• The Cross: Reflections on the 7 Words of Jesus. 1955, 2nd edition: 1967
• Dietrich Bonhoeffer in England. Berlin: Lettner-Verlag 1966.
• Berlin Reformation. Berlin: Lettner-Verlag 1967
• Bonhoeffer's friend. In: Berliner Sonntagsblatt, February 17, 1974, p. 2.

estate

The parish archive of the Georgskirche with documents from Rieger's time in office is today as a deposit in the Tower Hamlets Local History Library and Archives in the London Borough of Tower Hamlets . Part of Rieger's estate is kept in the Evangelical Central Archive in Berlin.

literature

• Eberhard Bethge / Ulrich Weingärtner: The German Reformed St. Pauls Congregation, the German Protestant Congregation Sydenham, the German Lutheran St. Georgs Congregation in the years 1939-1960. London 1960.
• Franz Hildebrandt: Julius Rieger for his 60th birthday. In: Kirche in der Zeit 16 (1961), p. 329f. Reprinted in: Der Londoner Bote 13 (1961), pp. 181-183.
• Holger Roggelin: Franz Hildebrandt. A Lutheran dissenter in the church struggle and in exile. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht 1999, ISBN 3-52555731-0 , esp.p. 128 ff
• Hannelore Braun, Gertraud Grünzinger: Personal Lexicon on German Protestantism 1919-1949. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht 2006 ISBN 3525557612 , p. 207

Individual evidence

1. ^ According to Bishop Bell, see Roggelin (Lit), p. 128.
2. ↑ See Roggelin (Lit), p. 128.
3. ↑ Bethger / Weingärtner (lit.), p. 20
4. ↑ Memo by Bishop Bells of October 19, 1939, see Roggelin (Lit), p. 129.
5. ^ Estate 620

Web links

• Literature by and about Julius Rieger in the catalog of the German National Library