Wreath
The Kränzchen were country associations of students at old German universities. The corps developed from the little wreaths in the 19th century . There were also many wreaths in Freemasonry .
history
Towards the end of the 18th century the student body was organized in country associations. The student orders , whose ideals were cosmopolitanism and humanism, were banned, persecuted and disbanded as their alleged adherents after the French Revolution . The corps that emerged at the beginning of the 19th century were not affected by this development, because their organizational form sought to represent the student youth and thus fit in with the corporate state of the time.
Not every “compatriot” was accepted into the rather small circle; they were "friendships". The little wreaths took over a lot of good things from the order and obliged their members to respect the academic authorities, which led to their at least partial recognition by them. The newer Landsmannschaften, the name was initially accepted again, gave themselves written constitutions , developed a strong sense of honor with the obligation to unconditional satisfaction and advocated a strict selection principle. The seniors regulated common affairs in the Seniors Convent (SC).
Although the corps met with considerable resistance from the student body due to their above-mentioned classification into the social forms, many of the newer country teams or wreaths gradually adopted the name "Corps" based on the Heidelberg Senior Citizens' Convention from 1810. This is due to the fact that the regional principle for admission has been abandoned. The name “Landsmannschaft” disappeared from German universities for a while. One example is the Silesia wreath in Frankfurt an der Oder, which can be traced back to the student “Urkränzchen” in Frankfurt an der Oder on July 3, 1786 and which moved to Breslau in 1811, where it was called Landsmannschaft Silesia, later Landsmannschaft Teutonia which emerged in 1819 as the Corps Borussia in Breslau .
See also: Development of Corps Studentism
literature
- Rainer Assmann : Kränzchen - Landsmannschaften - Corps, on the early history of the Corps . Einst und Jetzt , Vol. 41 (1996), pp. 155-178.
- Heinrich Bonnenberg , Hermann Sternagel-Haase, Alfred Methner, Georg Lustig: History of the Corps Borussia in Breslau. The first 100 years 1819–1919 , 2nd revised and expanded edition, Druck- und Verlagshaus Wienand, Cologne, 1984.