Karl Hüllweck

Karl Hüllweck (born May 13, 1905 in Dessau , † March 30, 1994 in Neustadt in Holstein ) was a German Protestant pastor and writer . From 1945 to 1970 he was pastor in Köthen .

Life

Karl Hüllweck was a son of the sculptor Friedrich Hüllweck and his wife Barbara. From his father's diary it can be seen that he developed into an open-minded and talented boy. He showed particular talent in drawing, poetry and acting.

He spent his best youth in Warmbrunn in the Giant Mountains , where his father became the director of the wood carving school . Due to the consequences of the First World War and the inflation , the father failed and accepted a call to Flensburg as director of the arts and crafts school . Here Karl Hüllweck graduated from high school .

After a few “zigzag paths”, so the critical comment of his father, z. B. attempted an officer career, acting lessons, studying philology and medicine, after careful consideration he decided to study theology in Jena - not exactly to the great joy of his father. Later, however, he wrote in his diary that his son's sermons had content and style and that it was an aesthetic pleasure to listen to them.

In 1929 Karl Hüllweck took his exams and started his vicariate in Bernburg . In 1930 he married Lisbeth Herrmann, the daughter of the district pastor in Köthen , a clever and musical woman. The marriage resulted in four daughters.

From 1932 he was pastor in Anhalt , just at a time when the church struggle was beginning with the era of National Socialism . Hüllweck joined the Confessing Church .

From 1945 to 1970 he was pastor at St. Jakob in Köthen , for many years also a student pastor . It was here that his literary work began - initially with amateur plays , which he performed with them as part of a seminar for students he initiated. This group of young people, to which Professor Manfred Wekwerth also belonged at the time , was close to his heart because he hoped to be able to build a spiritual bridge for them over the first post-war years. Particularly impressive then the managed Totentanz The fatally weary death .

Gradually, Karl Hüllweck felt the need to grapple with the experiences of war, the question of guilt and human suffering and entanglements. Through his pastoral work, he had many opportunities to meet people and to gain insight into their life's fate. He wrote down the most impressive and shocking experiences and combined them with memories of people who had impressed themselves on him in the course of his own life.

The stories Hüllwecks have one thing in common: their invisible center is God . We experience the apparent futility of cruel events. So he draws people who despair of God, who question him, who rebel against him. But in the depths, at the moment when they give up God themselves, he meets them. So in 1950 Die Suffering an Gott was published and in 1952 Das Selbstbildnis .

When it comes to the problem of our relationship with our neighbors, Hüllweck asks how often we have passed those who encountered us in their need, joy, hatred, love or silent pleading. All of this is the tenor of the prose volume Ein Mensch im Tür , which appeared in 1960.

After Karl Hüllweck was allowed to travel to Capri as a preacher in 1958 , he wrote the Italian Impressions in 1962 . In it he described the culture, the landscape and the people of Italy, without ignoring the need and misery of the poor. Lovingly and critically, he drew the most varied of characters, from the cheerful to the melancholy.

In 1968 the colorful cupboard appeared , a family history of over a hundred years and an autobiography - an examination of his time, whose bourgeois era is coming to an end and in which new perspectives are opening up.

A total of 14 prose volumes were published between 1950 and 1981 in the Evangelische Verlagsanstalt alone, including two cheerful works that made many people happy. In 1957 Fridolin appeared . Hüllweck wrote that he wrote this little book during one of his happiest summers. They are stories about an old, original brother in office.

1963 came my alter ego , memoirs of a gown. In addition, the author reported that he cut up the colorful picture sheet of his stories as well as the list of the characters involved with funny scissors and put them back together at will - in the style of the collages that became famous in 20th century painting .

It should also be noted that the painter Hans Dieter Schwarz, Karl Hüllweck's friend from Köthen , who died early, illustrated some books in a fine way. Hüllweck's lecturing should also be emphasized. He knew how to read his stories wonderfully. He was often invited to church conventions, parishes and to meetings of the Evangelical Academy .

But Karl Hüllweck failed to make the big breakthrough. In this respect he took part in the ghettoization of the church, its journalism and its publishing system in the 44 years of the GDR . Among the authors of the EVA , he was the one who protested most clearly against the expectation that too quick, superficial Christian solutions would be found. It was an abomination to him to be called “pastor of poets”. He saw that “ literature can at best be an indication and testimony that it can only take the despondent, the stranded and the broken by the hand to guide them to that place where God reigns in the majesty of his judgment and grace. "

The honest, upright attitude of Karl Hüllweck and his committed student community work naturally caught the attention of the Ministry for State Security . State security services infiltrated the community work and defamation in public led to early retirement. Resigned and injured, he withdrew to the vicinity of Dessau . This led to profound isolation and an early termination of his literary work. However, he worked on lectures on Ernst Barlach , Käthe Kollwitz and Picasso , gave readings from Andersen fairy tales and continued to work at the Evangelical Academy. Karl Hüllweck even began again to write pieces, including one about the Barlach monument in Magdeburg Cathedral . They are safely stored, but unpublished, in the "colorful cupboard". His strength was the stories .

In 1982 the Hüllweck couple moved to one of their daughters in Neustadt in Holstein because of an insoluble housing problem . In December 1993 his wife Lisbeth died. Already a quarter of a year after her death, his will to live left him, and on March 30, 1994, it was Maundy Thursday , Karl Hüllweck also died. Both were buried at their own request in the soil of Saxony-Anhalt in the cemetery of the Pfeiffer Foundations in Magdeburg .

Works

published by the Evangelische Verlagsanstalt Berlin (EVA):

• 1948 Death tired to death. A dance of death .
• 1950 Those who suffer from God. Narratives . 4th edition 1958
• 1951 Wonderful change. Stories and legends . 4th edition 1969
• 1952 The self-portrait. A novella . 4th ed. 1966
• 1957 Fridolin. A cheerful wreath of anecdotes . 8th edition 1960
• 1960 A person in the door. Narratives . 3rd edition 1969
• 1961 Odyssey through Death . 2nd edition 1962
• 1962 Italian impressions . 4th edition 1970
• 1963 My alter ego. Entertaining memories of a gown . 2nd edition 1963
• 1965 Front building, back building and the real background. Annunciation games of the congregation .
• 1966 The call. Unusual Christmas stories . 2nd edition 1969
• 1968 The colorful cupboard . 4th ed. 1981
• 1970 Brother Jacinto. Narratives .
• 1976 Diversity of Life. A selection . 2nd edition 1978
• 1977 light and shadow. Encounters with old people
• 1979 And joy breaks out of every darkness .

Further works and contributions

• Eckehart as a herald of the religion of blood? On Rosenberg's " Myth of the 20th Century " . In: Die Christliche Welt , 46, 1932, pp. 732–735.
• Otherwise they had no room in the hostel. A nativity play (Bärenreiter-Laienspiele 77). Bärenreiter, Kassel 1949.
• Poet saves a city . In: morning hour. A Christian book of life . Edited by Karl Hüllweck in collaboration with Martha Hintze and Maria Rathmann. EVA, Berlin 1958, pp. 17-25.
• Got well with God . Anker, Frankfurt 1965.
• The argument about the little lamb. Christmas legends . EVA, Berlin 1969 (together with by Kurt Arnold Findeisen , Ruth Schaumann and Robert Farelly).
• The lost god . In: Fanny Herklotz (ed.): The crystal. Christian stories of our time . 2nd Edition. EVA, Berlin 1972, pp. 257-297.
• The hunt for the elixir of life and other stories. Encounters with old people . Friedrich Bahn, Neukirchen-Vluyn 1984.

literature

• Günter Wirth : Landscapes of the bourgeoisie . Selected treatises. Edited by Frank-Lothar Kroll . Duncker & Humblot, Berlin 2008, p. 246.
• Dorothee Musil: Karl Hüllweck - life and work . Lecture on May 20, 2005 in the Great Sacristy in Magdeburg Cathedral . Double CD "Homage for Karl Hüllweck on his 100th birthday", Classic CD Live Fels Produktion, Magdeburg.

Web links

• Literature by and about Karl Hüllweck in the catalog of the German National Library
• Portrait of Karl Hüllweck

Individual evidence

1. ↑ In 1938 the cemetery chapel in Kleinpaschleben was given to him. berendt-info.de
2. ↑ From an interview with Manfred Wekwerth: “… After the war you fell into nothing. You couldn't hold on to anything. So you had no choice but to think for yourself. In Koethen we had a pastor Karl Hüllweck, officially a preacher in Sankt Jacob , a secret existentialist . You could come to him on Thursday afternoon, get hot tea and good words and have a 'place in the hostel' for two hours. With him we read Sören Kierkegaard , Meister Eckart and the Ackermann from Bohemia , but also Sartre's Die Flies . Here I discovered the huge white spots in my brain: the ignorance that the Nazis had left us. … “ Linksnet.de
3. ↑ Karl Hüllweck: The memorial. A dramatic legend in nine pictures . (PDF; 93 kB) posthumously 2009.