Karl Wilker

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Memorial plaque , Hauptstrasse 8, in Berlin-Rummelsburg

Karl Hermann Wilker (born November 6, 1885 in Osnabrück ; † May 23, 1980 in Bad Camberg ) was a German reform pedagogue .

Life

In 1905 Karl Hermann Wilker passed his Abitur at the municipal high school in Osnabrück and then studied natural sciences and education in Jena and Göttingen . In 1908 he received his doctorate under Wilhelm Rein in Jena ; In 1909 he passed the state examination for higher teaching qualifications with a teaching qualification in botany, zoology, mineralogy, geology and pedagogy. In 1909 he taught at the Royal High School in Chemnitz for two months .

Wilker already had connections to the abstinence movement as a schoolboy . He was a member of the Guttempler and in the student association Germania - Bund abstinent students . In 1906 he joined the Wandervogel . In Jena, Wilker met Eugen Diederichs and made contact with the district around Diederichs, which later became the Serakreis Jena . There perverse and Gustav Wynecken , a former employee of Hermann Lietz . Lietzen's contributions to school reform from the rural education centers shaped Wilker's own ideas.

Journalistic and scientific work followed in Berlin in 1910 , especially for Johannes Trüpers "Zeitschrift für Kinderforschung", of which he was co-editor from 1912 to 1922. A year later he decided to study medicine and psychology, which he completed in 1914. Wilker played a key role in the preparation of the Youth Day on the Hoher Meissner in 1913, to whose ideals he felt committed throughout his life. He applied to head the Berlin-Lichtenberg Compulsory Education Institute as early as 1913. For the time being, however, from 1914 the First World War was in the foreground. He volunteered for the Red Cross and was assigned to work as a doctor in a field hospital.

On April 4, 1917, Wilker took over the management of the Berlin-Lichtenberg Forced Education Institute , which he developed into a model of a new, more humane welfare education . It went down in the history of reform pedagogy under the name Lindenhof . In 1920, after conflicts with superiors and some of the employees, he gave up the model experiment amid protest and great public sympathy.

He trained as a silversmith in Hellerau and stayed temporarily in Switzerland for lectures and visits to the Jean-Jacques Rousseau Institute in Geneva . Another activity as a teacher was working in the adult education centers in Thuringia and Saxony.

In 1922, together with Elisabeth Rotten, he founded the German-speaking section of the World Association for the Renewal of Education , which at the same time jointly published the magazine Das Werdende Zeitalter . Together with Elisabeth Rotten, he entered into a community of the Wilker family in the jointly founded arts and crafts settlement on Gut Kohlgraben near Vacha in the Rhön . Alongside this work, he published. Further educational work followed from 1929 to 1930 as head of the Ottendorf youth home in Saxony. From 1931 to 1933 he was active in educational work with young adults and prisoners in Frankfurt am Main .

In 1932 he took part in the second Hessian labor camp for young farmers, workers and students at Ludwigstein Castle .

After the so-called seizure of power by the National Socialists in April 1933, Wilker emigrated to Switzerland. Here he worked until 1935 as an employee of the Schweizer Erziehungs-Rundschau and from the end of 1934 to May 1937 he was co-director of the Hof Oberkirch educational home. In June / July 1937 he moved to South Africa to build a country education home , but it did not materialize.

From 1937 to 1939 he worked as a teacher at the Native High School in Phokeng near Rustenberg in the Transvaal. In June 1939 he got a job as a Latin and geography teacher at Adams College, which trained Bantu teachers, then he was headmaster of Adam College until 1955 . From 1956, after the college closed, he worked as a psychologist and psychotherapist at the Meyrick Bennett Children's Center at the University of Natal, Durban.

In 1909 he married Johanna Queck, née Landmann (* 1878), the widow of the painter Walter Queck . In 1931 this marriage was divorced and he married Hanno Gruss.

In 1964 Wilker returned to the Federal Republic of Germany and in 1975 was awarded an honorary doctorate from the Johann Wolfgang Goethe University in Frankfurt am Main.

Fonts (selection)

  • Care education as life training. A call to action (= The School of Life - Series of writings from the Federal Decision-Making School Reformers , Volume 3). Berlin 1921. - Again in: Karl Wilker: The Lindenhof - Welfare Education as Life Training . New ed. and supplementary with a biographical foreword by Hildegard Feidel-Mertz and Christiane Pape-Balling (= educational examples. Institutional history in individual presentations, 5). Frankfurt 1989, pp. 179-210.
  • The Lindenhof. Becoming and wanting . Heilbronn am Neckar 1921. - Again in: Karl Wilker: The Lindenhof - Welfare education as life training . New ed. and supplementary with a biographical foreword by Hildegard Feidel-Mertz and Christiane Pape-Balling (= educational examples. Institutional history in individual presentations, 5). Frankfurt 1989, pp. 11-172.
  • The Lindenhof - welfare education as life training . New ed. and supplementary with a biographical foreword by Hildegard Feidel-Mertz and Christiane Pape-Balling (= educational examples. Institutional history in individual presentations, 5). Frankfurt 1989.
  • in: Claus Bernet : Quakers from politics, science and art , 2. Auf. 2008, pp. 212-213.

literature

  • Dietmar Haubfleisch: Elisabeth Rotten (1882 - 1964) - an (almost) forgotten reform pedagogue . In: Inge Hansen-Schaberg (Ed.): “Tell something”. The biographical dimension in education. Bruno Schonig for his 60th birthday . Baltmannsweiler 1997, pp. 114-131. - revised Edition omitting the illustration: Marburg 1997:
    http://archiv.ub.uni-marburg.de/sonst/1996/0010.html - revision. and act. Version: Elisabeth Rotten (1882–1964) - networker for reform pedagogy. In: Development, Education, Upbringing. Contributions to a contemporary reform pedagogy (= undKinder. Ed. By the Marie Meierhofer Institute for the Child, No. 81), Zurich 2008, pp. 47–61.
  • Dietmar Haubfleisch: Elisabeth Rotten (1882 - 1964) - a list of sources and references . Marburg 1997.
    http://archiv.ub.uni-marburg.de/sonst/1997/0010.html
  • Gertrud Herrmann: The socio-educational movement of the twenties. Weinheim / Berlin: Julius Beltz 1956 (source books for social education)
  • Bernhard Simonsohn (ed.): Welfare education and juvenile prison system. Bad Heilbronn / Obb. 1969 (Klinkhardt's educational source texts)
  • The Age of Development (Internationale Erziehungs-Rundschau). Register of all articles and reviews of a reform pedagogical journal in the Weimar Republic. Compiled and introduced by Dietmar Haubfleisch and Jörg-W. Link (= archive help, 8), Oer-Erkenschwick 1994; Excerpt from the introduction (pp. 5–16) again in: Mitteilungen & Material. Working group of the Pedagogical Museum eV, Berlin, issue No. 42/1994, pp. 97–99; Introduction to slightly corr. Version udT: 'Dietmar Haubfleisch and Jörg-W. Link: Introduction to the register of the educational reform magazine 'Das Werdende Zeitalter' ('Internationale Erziehungs-Rundschau') 'again: Marburg 1996:
    http://archiv.ub.uni-marburg.de/sonst/1996/0012.html
  • Hildegard Feidel-Mertz : Wilker, Karl , in: Hugo Maier (Ed.): Who is who of social work . Freiburg: Lambertus, 1998 ISBN 3-7841-1036-3 , pp. 632f.

Web links

Commons : Karl Wilker  - Collection of images, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Herrmann: The Social Pedagogical Movement, p. 13 ff.
personal data
SURNAME Wilker, Karl
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Wilker, Karl Hermann (full name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German reform pedagogue
DATE OF BIRTH November 6, 1885
PLACE OF BIRTH Osnabrück
DATE OF DEATH May 23, 1980
Place of death Bad Camberg in the Taunus