Kurt Bergel

This article also covers Alice Bergel

Kurt Bergel (born August 22, 1911 in Frankfurt am Main ; † March 19, 2001 in Orange, California ) was a teacher who emigrated from the German Reich and who, after an interim stay in England and further studies in the USA, worked as a professor at the private Chapman University in Orange, California . He was an expert on the work and life of Albert Schweitzer and long-time director of The Albert Schweitzer Institute at Chapman University .

Origin and education

parents house

Kurt Bergel's father Leopold came to Frankfurt from Zurich as a boy and, after attending the eagle fly school, worked his way up to become the owner of a leather goods store in Offenbach . He was very far removed from the Jews, but then married Hedwig Lehmann, daughter of the Orthodox head of the Jewish community on Börneplatz , Emanuel Lehmann. She was also not very close to Judaism, but certain Jewish rites were observed in the family, so that his son Kurt also celebrated his bar mitzvah celebration in the synagogue on Börneplatz.

Kurt Bergel was born at Ulmenstraße 6, in the upper class Frankfurt Westend . After the father had to severely restrict his business activities during the Nazi era and give up operations in Offenbach, he carried out his increasingly sparse business from his apartment.

school

Kurt Bergel started his school career at the Wöhlerschule at Easter 1918 . This grammar school, which was preceded by an elementary level, was also located in Frankfurt's Westend at the time and was only a few minutes away from the family's apartment. Bergel spent his entire school days at this school until he graduated from high school.

One of Bergel's earliest memories of his school days is related to the end of the First World War. He reports that he was caught by an air raid on his way to school. It was probably the attack on August 12, 1918: “Shortly after nine o'clock in the morning, 30 bombs fell almost simultaneously on the western city. To the right of Opernplatz and Goethestrasse to Reuterweg, to the left of Feuerbachstrasse to Wiesenau, 25 houses were more or less badly damaged: ›Screaming, seized with horror, people ran around, trying to reach the next house entrances, which are not all open were cursing the homeowners. The impacting bombs found enough victims: 12 were killed immediately, 5 seriously injured, four of whom are still deceased. 25 got away with minor injuries. ‹“ Kurt Bergel was uninjured, although an acquaintance of the family was also one of the victims.

Bergel also remembered an event that occurred at the Wöhlerschule in 1921: “On Saturday, July 16, 1921, 500 operational rifles were found in the basement of the Wöhler school - disguised as rock samples.” One of the masterminds of this action, Bergel also remembered the teacher, Dr. Jung, who held exercises similar to military sports in the schoolyard in the afternoons. He fled first, but then turned himself in to the Frankfurt police and probably got away unscathed: “He frankly admitted that he had brought the weapons from the left to Frankfurt to protect against an impending coup. The City of Frankfurt's magistrate did not want to respond to such 'courageous' and patriotic behavior by initiating disciplinary proceedings against Jung. The city council made the decision to leave a decision to the district president. And with that, the affair disappeared from the public eye. It is not known whether disciplinary proceedings have been initiated against Jung. "

Despite these incidents and his retrospective assessment that a right-wing trend at school was somewhat more pronounced than other political currents, for Bergel “on the whole it was a good education that we received there at school. I've learned a lot, which means I could have learned more if I'd been more diligent in science. I was never interested in them. [..] In contrast, I was very, very good at German [..]. So, it was very clear to me that I would go into German literature professionally. [..] In addition, I was very interested in music and worked very seriously as a pianist, and it wasn't until the year I graduated from high school that I actually decided [..] that I should postpone my serious work in music. "

Kurt Bergel graduated from high school in 1930.

Education

In a contribution to Lucie Schachne's book about the Jüdische Landschulheim Herrlingen , he summarized his studies very briefly: [1933] “Suddenly prevented from getting my doctorate at Frankfurt University , I quickly passed my secondary school teacher examination in order to get a teaching permit. “In the interview from 1991 he presents it in a more differentiated way.

First of all, he had to ignore the father's wish, who wanted his son to become a businessman and take over his father's business. Kurt, who was determined early on by the desire to do his habilitation in Frankfurt, instead began to study philosophy and German and English literature. He studied five semesters in Frankfurt and one semester in Berlin. The list of those he counted among his teachers is considerable: Paul Tillich , Theodor W. Adorno , Max Horkheimer , Hans Naumann (one of the main actors and speakers at the National Socialist book burning on May 10, 1933 in Frankfurt), Max Kommerell (the had kept still by the Nazis in 1933 to join them but in the late 1930s also joined) and Martin Sommerfeld from (he was in 1933 for racist reasons due to the law for the restoration of the Professional Civil the teaching license revoked).

Kurt Bergel made no statements about his university lecturers, but confessed: "Frankfurt University was beautiful." He still felt more comfortable there in his memory than 15 years later at the University of California, Berkeley , where he felt that he had far fewer suggestions received than in Frankfurt. Elsewhere he said: “I never had the intention of leaving Frankfurt. I didn't want to become a professor somewhere, but in Frankfurt because I liked the university. ”Bergel, who was friends with Wilhelm Emrich , took up political disputes at the university during his studies, although he was aware of their often anti-Semitic character, and less so in the university The context of racist threats was, rather than against the background of a left-right scheme: “Of course there were constant clashes between right and left in the early 1930s, and of course the left, if they were anything at all, were often Jews. I mean, there were a lot of them who were non-Jews, the Jews who were involved were just on the left. That was such an a priori statement. "

In 1933, as a Jewish student, Kurt Bergel had to leave the university after his sixth semester. “Yes, it was 1933. The turning point is immeasurable in my personal life. It couldn't be bigger. The fact that my already indicated life plan, career plan, became completely impossible, is of course the main thing. I immediately saw that completely and also immediately saw that I should stay in the educational work in a different way. "

Kurt Bergel passed the above-mentioned high school teacher examination in Kassel , which enabled him to teach as a teacher in Jewish schools.

Teacher at Jewish institutions

In the interview, Kurt Bergel leaves open what triggered his turn to Jewish educational work, which resulted in his sudden departure from an academic career dream and his turn to practical pedagogy. Judaism was relatively alien to him until 1933, and he does not report anything about contacts with the Jewish youth movement that would have made such a step understandable. For him it seems to have been more of a matter of reason, which resulted from the direct experience of 1933.

“I saw very clearly in 1933 that there was now an enormous task for Jewish education in Germany. That a large number of children would sooner or later be thrown out of German schools or disgusted, and that it was now the task of young teachers to take care of these children, to empower them, to teach them, to empower them humanly, since they kept saying yes got that they were inferior people. "

In August 1933, Der Morgen. Monthly of the Jews in Germany Kurt Bergel's essay Our rational educational task published. “This essay was a kind of creed, a rejection of the irrational Nazi ideology and counter-position that I had in mind for a Jewish upbringing. Under the impression of this work and because of his personal acquaintance with me, Martin Buber recommended me to Hugo Rosenthal , who was looking for suitable teachers for the new Herrlingen country school home at the time. ”In this publication, Kurt Bergel assumes the redeployment caused by the National Socialist System of forced abandonment of Jewish young people from an education focused on academic education and the associated turn to artisanal and agricultural training. According to Bergel, however, this should in no way be accompanied by a "sudden break with a rational tradition", because this would mean leaving the interpretative sovereignty to those who serve human longings with incorrect interpretative patterns:

“We experience, for example, that serious researchers who have penetrated deeply into the prehistory of the Germanic peoples become speakers of a semi-conscious longing of many people, find their way back to a popular myth that overcomes the brokenness of our 'enlightened' existence. If one considers the cultural rebirth to be possible only through the forces of an unmixed race, then that means a derivation of all spirit, reason, all emotional life and thus every cultural achievement from mere natural conditions. "

He countered this as a postulate that the task of Jewish education was to “reveal the leap from a rationally largely dominated world into an immediacy of being as incomprehensible. [..] Today, when people everywhere warn against scientific objectivity as a deviation in education and devalue spirit in general, Judaism has a rational educational task which, however, has to become aware of its part in the education as a whole. "For Bergel, this does not require any A return to an obsolete scholarly education, but a turn towards a “rational disposition” that is not tied to the activity of a scientist but has to prove itself in every statement about reality, “whether it is from a chaluz, a Jewish merchant or a Rabbi is pronounced ”.

For Kurt Bergel's concept of rational disposition it is constitutive to deal with the concept of objectivity and to ask “whether and how there can be objectivity in the consideration of historical facts”. This demands a mistrust of allegedly unprejudiced statements, and every student must be raised to mistrust. With the beautiful sentence “There is an objectivity that is too soft a pillow”, he opposes dismissing this as a program of uncertainty, because only “this criticism of objectivity from the knowledge that one is on one's own in every statement Ultimately, the student's own foundation remains bound, only gives the student the feeling of security once they have seen through their own requirements. [..] Only when he has learned to ask questions from his individual and social position, especially as a Jew, does a lively objectivity open up to him. "

Against this background, the concept of "rational disposition" experiences its full development:

"So I mean an attitude which - always becoming aware of its own location - aims at a humane objectivity , at a critical understanding of all circumstances."

It is certainly no coincidence that this essay by Kurt Bergel, a student who was forced to drop out after six semesters, is in the estate of Max Horkheimer . Its only four pages read like a condensed anticipation of the book by Jürgen Habermas from 1968: Knowledge and Interest . Here Bergel's humane objectivity experiences a return as an emancipatory interest in knowledge : “In self-reflection, knowledge for the sake of knowledge comes to coincide with interest in maturity; because the implementation of reflection knows itself as a movement of emancipation. "

Bergel's work was about the “rational illumination of the present situation, especially of scientific and unscientific anti-Semitism”. It aims to sensitize the Jewish students to an impartial adoption of current terms and goals, which in the current situation should be ascribed to them as their own. In doing so, he aims not only at criticizing Jews from the outside, but also at criticizing interpretation patterns that are widespread in internal Jewish discourse. This primarily refers to the so-called “positive Jews” by Bergel, who “ justify their Judaism in a folk-racial, down-to-earth way and only in this way . This is a passive reaction, which is related to the assimilation (sociology) of certain Jewish groups to national German thoughts, despite apparently opposing will. We must not allow ourselves to be seduced into looking back as quickly as possible from the unsecured nature of our present life with the help of foreign spiritual assets into the irretrievable old calm. Rational upbringing warns against this seduction. ”His credo, which also turns against a self-sufficient intellectualism, is:

“What is meant, however, is the courage to achieve intellectual autonomy for the whole person, which aims at action. Only by penetrating today's events through thinking can we break through our fate of being an object. If we are defeated in being, then we are free people in consciousness. - Rationalism, understood in this way, is our task as a defense and self-affirmation for our sake; maybe even in this way we save the truth into a future - for the sake of 'infinite reconciliation'. "

The first practical test for these considerations followed in Herrlingen.

Jewish country school home in Herrlingen

→ Main article : Jewish country school home in Herrlingen

Bergel taught at the Jüdisches Landschulheim from 1933 to 1934. He characterized his work there as a contribution to the "Jewish reconstruction", the education of children to be proud of Judaism. This happened against the background that many teachers and students came from families "in which the Jewish was insignificant" and "was not an organic element in our life". For himself, too, he confesses in the interview from 1991, the transition from a Jew who was quite uninterested in the Jewish to a conscious Jew took place. That was also necessary in order to be able to teach the students the value of the Jewish.

In addition to his lessons as a German and English teacher, Hebrew, the Bible and history became central building blocks for the rebuilding of a Jewish consciousness, and the task was to develop suitable educational methods for them. "From my ideas and experiments with the redesign of religious festivals, some articles emerged that I published at the time."

At the same time, Bergel emphasizes the difficult, but also satisfactory, double role that the teachers at the Landschulheim played: They were teachers and in many cases also had to replace the parents with the students. Against the background, his summary is:

“Herrlingen was a training center that demanded a lot from a young teacher, but also offered him more opportunities than just completing a teaching stint. Here an enterprising teacher was encouraged to try new ideas. The country school home was far more receptive to new teaching methods than the older and more conventional Jewish schools, which could not or would not adapt so well to the changed circumstances. And it was - as the word Landschulheim so correctly promised - a school and a home for all of us. "

At that time he had the opportunity to go to America, but did not take it because he was committed to his task. Nevertheless, he left Herrlingen in 1934 - for private reasons that were not explained in detail.

About religious youth education

In February 1935 Kurt Bergel published his essay Religious Youth Education . This six-page publication is divided into two parts: “I. The problem "and" II. The way". In part “The Way”, Bergel notes that this “is based on experience from serious attempts at religious design in the Herrlingen Landschulheim”.

The problem identified by Bergel moves between two poles: a spreading atheism , especially among Jewish youth, and a kind of religious overreaction with which “certain circles of the assimilated middle and petty bourgeoisie react to their economic and cultural outsourcing”. In particular, he counters this religiosity born of necessity:

“Religious life can only and exclusively be the expression of a religious experience. It is true religious content when the sudden experience of political-social insecurity becomes the direct experience of human insecurity par excellence, of being exposed to God. But religiosity must never serve to cover up social, economic and political reality. We want to welcome the fact that those people are treading the path back to Judaism; that they seek protection in the Jewish community is understandable enough; but the fact that they slide into the religious, 'because it just belongs to Judaism', can only undermine the religious power of Judaism even more. "

This religiosity, which is false from Bergel's point of view, justifies a religious obligation to educate, as does the atheism, which is widespread in the Jewish youth movement and can best be based there on a congruence between reality and ideology. Bergel assumes that there are also final questions in their life situations that make religious education indispensable: “But perhaps the deepest human experience of being thrown into this world out of the unknown and for an unknown purpose: that also forces the non-religious to face the questions of religion. "

Bergel does not ask himself whether his affirmation of religion does justice to the claim of his earlier essay, according to which a rational mind always has to be aware of its own location (see above); Religion is set for him (and also for those who are not aware of it or who knowingly reject it). Instead, he turns to the form in which religion is experienced and practiced, because the form of religious practice connects “man with God and his community at the same time. The milah is at the same time the covenant (berith) of the individual Jew with God as a sign of separation of the “property people” from all other peoples. The keeping of the Sabbath is at the same time imitation of God and community celebration. ”But preservation of the form, the practice of rites only for the purpose of maintaining an earthly community, thus“ practicing religion for the sake of a non-religious person is absolutely sinful ”. In doing so, Bergel turns against parts of liberal Judaism, to whom he assumes that they only practiced rites for their mood and solemnity and for the sake of the community: “As a substitute for the lost community, there was a vague, ideologically supported feeling of the religious Solidarity of the Jews through the form, for example: 'Now Jews all over the world are lighting the Sabbath candles'. "

For Bergel, the problem is described sufficiently so that he can turn to the question of how the problem he named can itself become a guide for religious education. In his initial thesis, which is likely to be strongly influenced by the composition of the Herrlinger student body (see above), he states: “Children from religiously indifferent homes rarely find real access to church services. The main fault of the usual youth worship service is that it is spoken towards the youth, but not from the youth. ”What follows is the transfer of the reform pedagogical postulate “ from the child ”to religious education, with only a few concrete examples . This is all the more astonishing as the Jewish rural school home in Herrlingen itself was in the tradition of the reform-pedagogical rural school home movement and there the principle claimed by Bergel was not only observed in religious instruction, but was also the guiding principle for everyday school life. His essay was therefore above all an appeal to other Jewish institutions to break new ground in religious education: “We need lively religious group formations again [...]. I mean small groups of people who are looking for deepening, who suffer from God. Her conclusion: self-protection. Your effort: perhaps a blessing for the larger community, if they still understand seriously. In the leagues there are people who are capable of such new deepening; for outside of it today there are almost only the completely indifferent and individual serious struggling people. And the leagues offer a number of important, if not the only requirements for such a community. "

Bergel's plea for a religious education based on the interaction of meaning and action, which has recognized that meaning mostly arises from action and remains effective, culminates in the call to “preserve the responsible autonomy of religious practice, but with a historical power, as has long been lacking in the traditional autonomy of Jewish liberalism. Then a new religious Judaism would emerge, which would overcome the alternative of a consistently rational view of history and the belief in the constantly updatable 'eternal' truths from the Torah to the Shulchan as well as the ominous either / or of liberalism and orthodoxy. "

As Kurt Bergel himself noted: His time in Herrlingen was the transition from a Jew who was quite uninterested in the Jewish to a conscious Jew (see above). In this sense, his essay was also a self-reassurance, in which thoroughly rational considerations on pedagogy had far more religious connotations than in his two years older essay on our rational educational task . Many teachers at the Jüdisches Landschulheim went through this development and described it. And they also wrote who directed them: Hugo Rosenthal , the head of the country school home, whom Kurt Bergel also remembers. Rosenthal was the first real Zionist he met and he was a "fine teacher and he had a deep knowledge of Jewish".

Jewish teaching house and Jewish elementary school

Kurt Bergel returned to Frankfurt and worked for a year with Martin Buber in the Jüdisches Lehrhaus .

In autumn 1935 he went to the Jewish elementary school in Düsseldorf as a teacher . He taught English, history and Hebrew here. Bergel mainly reports on his collaboration with the headmaster Kurt Herz . Herz attended the Karl Marx School (Berlin-Neukölln) from 1929 until his discharge from civil service in 1933 and then at the Theodor Herzl School in Berlin. According to him, the pedagogical ideas between Herz and Bergel must have been very close together. "Under his direction and close cooperation, I did a particularly good job for three years, that is, interesting work there."

Gisela Miller-Kipp reports a feeling of togetherness and community that existed within the Düsseldorf Jewish school and about which Bergel told her that occasional stays of several days with the students in an external accommodation were possible, and he remembered it that they laughed a lot together at school. In retrospect, humor, he says, was a particularly necessary medicine for the mental health of children, which was so endangered. Müller-Kipp also cites many reports from former students, from which it can be seen that Kurt Bergel enjoyed a great reputation as a young and modern teacher.

Bergel himself once compared his work in Herrlingen with that at the Jewish school in Düsseldorf. The starting point for this comparison was the educational function of the teacher, which in Herrlingen often culminated in being a substitute for parents, because the absence from home or difficult circumstances in the home caused problems for many children. “If I compare the Jewish school in Düsseldorf with the Landschulheim in this respect, I would say that the children in Herrlingen had more family problems, but probably also that there was a better chance of these problems in their emotional impact in the close community life there to mitigate. "

Lucie Schachne had already reported that during his years in Düsseldorf, Kurt Bergel had also worked in adult education in parallel to his teaching activities at school. Bergel specifies this in his 1991 interview: “During this time in Düsseldorf, I [...] gave lectures and other courses in many other places in the area, in Essen, Grevenbroich, Krefeld, because so much There was, of course, also a hunger for Jewish education and general education at that time. English had to be learned. And I was lucky enough to be able to speak English quite well even then. And taught it too. So, I was immensely involved in Düsseldorf and in the surrounding Jewish communities. ”The reference to the English lessons should be understood to mean that Bergel was involved in preparing people for emigration for whom he had still not made up his mind .

Two events outside of everyday school life were important to Kurt Bergel during his years in Düsseldorf. He traveled to Palestine in 1936 . He says nothing about the reasons for this trip, but about its consequences. They stopped him from becoming a Zionist . On the one hand, it was made clear to him that people with his background, his not so deeply rooted Jewish education, were not needed there, and on the other hand, the world seemed very strange to him: "After I [..] was in Palestine, 36, Something stopped me from going there myself. Somehow I found a world where there were only Jews, a somewhat narrow world and I believe that something also played a role that I didn't really want to live there. I was still eager to teach literature and things like that, and that was my life, and I saw this opportunity to do something like that in America as better than in Israel. "

The second decisive event in these Düsseldorf years was of a private nature. In 1938 he married Alice Berger.

Excursus: Alice Bergel

Alice Bergel (born June 15, 1911 in Berlin; † January 22, 1998 in the USA) was the daughter of the Jewish couple Bruno and Else Berger, who were murdered by the Nazis. From 1917 to 1929 she attended the Auguste Viktoria School in Berlin, where she graduated from high school. She completed her subsequent studies in Romance philology (French, Spanish), Latin and philosophy - with the exception of one semester in Freiburg in the summer semester of 1931 - in Berlin. She completed her studies in 1933 with a dissertation from Ernst Gamillscheg , which was entitled The Expression of the Passive Idea in Old French .

Alice Berger was forcibly de-registered during the doctoral process for racist reasons and because of her membership in socialist associations; Gamillscheg, who was later very close to the National Socialists, made it possible for her to complete the doctoral process. She then taught at the “Romanistic Society” in Berlin, as she herself explained, but also at two Jewish schools. In May 1935 she went to the Caputh Jewish children's and rural school home as a teacher , where she stayed until 1938.

Alice Berger was fascinated by the modern educational attitude that she found in Caputh, by the wonderful location of the facility and above all by the personality of Gertrud Urlaub ("Aunt Trude"). She describes her own debut there as follows:

“I did my doctorate in Romance philology at the University of Berlin and applied to be a French teacher in Caputh. If I remember correctly, the French teachers changed there every few weeks and the children hated the subject and everyone who taught it, even everyone who wanted to teach it. It went so far that when I was giving my trial lessons on employment, a young girl appeared with her mouth full of cherry pits to spit on the new French teacher. The kernels remained unspitted. Aunt Trude gave me a loving kiss and I was hired. "

Alice Berger emphasized the importance of community life, which she got to know in Caputh, and which gave children and teachers a feeling of security. The music and theater evenings also occupy a prominent place in their memories, which were often related to Jewish festivals, but were just as open to non-Jewish literature and music. Above all, however, was her enthusiasm for Gertrud Urlaub, “whom we all loved and adored, and from whom I learned a great deal that made me an educator; I will always be grateful to her for this, but even more for the fact that she has understood how to create an atmosphere that has made Caputh what it is entitled to be mentioned in the history of the German Jews for; to an island of love, humanity and spiritual effort in the midst of despair ”.

In 1938 Alice Berger became Alice Bergel. Where and when the two met is not known, but at the very beginning of his interview from 1991 Kurt Bergel very emphatically mentions the “unusually good marriage” of his parents as perhaps the “most positive thing I have ever seen from my early youth can say. One had the picture that marriage can be a good thing. And that's why it should be. Which may have been expressed in the fact that I have been married to the same woman for 53 years. And maybe even stay married to her beyond 53 years. ”As will be shown below, the private and professional paths of Alice and Kurt Bergel have always been very closely linked since the marriage.

Emigration to England

The second big break in Bergel's life came with the November pogrom in 1938 , during which the Jewish school in Düsseldorf was also destroyed. His father was taken to the Buchenwald concentration camp (from which he was released shortly before Christmas 1938); Kurt and Alice Bergel were able to avoid arrest by temporarily hiding in Cologne. “Now I knew that there was no longer any possibility of serious educational work. So we immediately decided to prepare for our emigration. "

The Bergels actually wanted to emigrate to the USA, but this failed because of the restrictive US quota system . With the support of an uncle, however, they managed to enter England in February 1939. They stayed here for about 14 months.

Alice Bergel first taught at synagogues in England before she too came to the Rowden Hall School , which was headed by Kurt Bergel. According to a document in the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum , this school in Margate (Kent) was an overflow hostel for Jewish refugee children who had come to England in the course of the Kindertransport . A photograph from this school shows the two Bergels at a Hanukkah celebration in Rowden Hall in 1939. Kurt Bergel is introduced in the notes to the photography as a teacher who was recruited from the Kitchener Camp . He was therefore considered an enemy alien .

Emigration to the USA

Teacher at Deep Springs College

The Bergel couple moved to the USA in 1940 with the help of relatives. Alice Bergel is said to have given private lessons first and then, like her husband, taught at a training facility for gifted students in the California desert, Deep Springs College . Kurt and Alice Bergel worked in Deep Springs from 1941 to 1947. In 1944 their son Peter was born here.

It remains unclear whether Kurt Bergel's position in Deep Springs was a full-time job. However, there are indications of parallel actuations. Schachne writes that from 1943 to 1944 at Stanford University he was involved in the preparation of American officers for their deployment in Germany, while an obituary for him says: “He taught at Deep Springs College and did his doctorate in German at UC Berkeley . ”Schachne reports that he studied comparative literature at Berkeley and did his doctorate there, which fits in with his entry in the German National Library , where he is presented as a professor of comparative literature.

In the interview from 1991, Kurt Bergel does not go into further detail about his beginnings in the USA, only speaks of "different, sometimes quite unusual jobs", and dates the start of their American careers to 1941, in which both were employed at college. His dissertation was rated "very good" in 1948.

Professor at Chapman University

After completing his studies, Kurt Bergel briefly taught at the University of California, Los Angeles , before moving to the private Chapman College , which later became Chapman University , in 1949 . During his first years there, after Schachne since 1951, he organized the Chapman College Tours , which made it possible for students and others to enjoy inexpensive summer study trips to Europe for 10 years. Bergel and his wife led these tours. In 1980 he retired from teaching, but remained associated with the university as a professor emeritus. In 1980 he retired. From 1954 until his death, Bergel lived in Orange, California.

After her time in Deep Springs, Alice Bergel taught at East Los Angeles College until 1976 and then also came to Chapman University . Together, the Bergels founded The Albert Schweitzer Institute of Chapman University . The Bergels built on a long-term preoccupation with the life and work of Albert Schweitzer . The book Albert Schweitzer's Life and Thinking , which had been reissued several times, was published as early as 1949 , a selection edited by Kurt Bergel from Schweitzer's autobiographical writings. Whether the book is a joint publication of the two, as is claimed on the website Galerie der Frauen in der Romanceistik , cannot be verified, but it is certain that the two worked together on other publications about Albert Schweitzer, as was the case when the institute was founded have, for example in the book "Liebes Cembalinchen--" published in 1997 : Albert Schweitzer, Alice Ehlers. A friendship in letters .

Alice Bergel died in 1998. Kurt Bergel married again in 1999. He died in his hometown of Orange on March 19, 2001. According to his wishes, his body was donated for medicine. He was not buried and there is no tombstone with his name on it.

Emigration and Home

The Bergels not only organized the already mentioned student excursions to Europe, but Kurt Bergel was also repeatedly on lecture tours in Germany and also appeared as a contemporary witness in front of students, including at his old Frankfurt school, just a few days before the 1991 one Interview. He categorically ruled out a return to Germany, not because of German history and not because of close family ties (the son and a grandson living there) in the USA, but because he now felt very at home in America. But this "feeling at home" was not without ambivalence for him:

“I mean, feeling at home is a weird thing. I think in the end an emigrant is never at home. Ultimately, I don't think an emigrant is really at home. In many ways, I'm not even home in America. When people talk about baseball, I look foolish because I don't know anything about it and I don't want to know anything about it. [..] In many other ways I feel that I am a European, a European who in America is helping Americans understand Europe. I say Europe, I don't say Germany. It also applied in part to Germany. As everyone complained about Germany, the Jewish and the non-Jewish Americans, in World War II, in the Second War, I was always on the side of those who wanted to establish a conciliatory, binding position between the West and Germany. "

Kurt Bergel saw himself as a bridge builder and as an avowed lover of the German language, in which he still gave lectures or published despite certain uncertainties: “Today I speak better English than German. I know that. But I love the German language very, very much. "

instigator

Hildegard Feidel-Mertz was one of the most important researchers on the history of schools in exile and the expulsion of Jewish educators from the German Reich from 1933. In this context, she wrote a book about the Jewish rural school in Caputh , written together with Andreas Paetz Alice Bergel had been a teacher (see above). In her foreword to the book, Feidel-Mertz makes it clear that without her encounter with Kurt and Alice Bergel this book would hardly have been possible, since they first learned about the home in Caputh through them:

“I first found out about its existence - and thus also exemplarily about the Jewish schools in National Socialist Germany - during an interview with Kurt and Alice Bergel in Orange, Southern California, which I did in October 1981 while searching for traces of emigrated educators and those they founded in exile Run homes and schools. While Kurt Bergel reported on the Jewish country school home in Herrlingen near Ulm, where he worked for a short time after 1933, Alice Bergel familiarized me with her experiences in Caputh and also showed me the way to other informants. These included u. a. In addition to the gymnastics teacher Eva Bruch and her husband, whom I then met in Los Angeles, above all Sophie Friedländer and Hilde Jarecki, who first met in Caputh and later mastered exile in Great Britain in a living and working community that continues to this day . "

swell

• In the early summer of 1991 Kurt Bergel visited his hometown Frankfurt with his wife Alice. On the occasion of this visit, Angelika Rieber from what was then the Traces of Jewish Life working group in Frankfurt , today's association Project Jewish Life in Frankfurt am Main , conducted a detailed interview with Kurt and Alice Bergel, which was mainly about the story of Kurt Bergel. Thanks to this interview, the years before Kurt Bergel's emigration can be easily reconstructed:
  • Interview by Angelika Rieber with Professor Dr. Kurt Bergel on June 30, 1991 in Frankfurt am Main, Angelika Rieber Collection / Project Jewish Life in Frankfurt (transcript).
• Alice R. Bergel in the database tracking and emigration of German-speaking linguists 1933–1945 by Utz Maas .
• Life and work of the romance scholar Alice R. Bergel

Works

• Our rational educational task , in: The morning. Monthly journal of Jews in Germany , Vol. 9 (1933–1934), Issue 3 (August 1933), pp. 208–211
• Religious youth education , in: The morning. Monthly journal of Jews in Germany , vol. 10 (1934–1935), issue 11 (February 1935), pp. 502–507
  • Both essays are in Max Horkheimer's estate and can be accessed there as pdf documents.
• Martin Buber: The dialogical principle in philosophy, theology, translation, education, politics and human relationships , in: Kurt Bergel, Wolfgang Keim: Contributions to Jewish pedagogy , Verlag Klemm & Oelschläger, Ulm, 1999, ISBN 3-932577-18-3 , Pp. 7-21.
• Georg Brandes and Arthur Schnitzler . An exchange of letters. Edited by Kurt Bergel. Bern: Francke 1956. ( online )
• Schnitzler, Arthur: The Word. Tragic comedy in five acts . Fragment. Edited from the estate and introduced by Kurt Bergel. Frankfurt am Main: S. Fischer, 1966.

In addition to the books cited, Kurt Bergel has also emerged as an author and translator of books and articles about Ferdinand von Saar and Martin Buber .

literature

• Lucie Schachne: Education for intellectual resistance: The Jewish country school home in Herrlingen 1933-1939 , dipa-Verlag, Frankfurt am Main 1986, ISBN 3-7638-0509-5 .
• Gisela Miller-Kipp: Between the image of the emperor and the Palestine map. The Jewish elementary school in the Düsseldorf administrative region (1815–1945). Archives, documents and history. Böhlau Verlag, Cologne Weimar Vienna, 2010, ISBN 978-3-412-20527-0
• Peter Burke : Exiles and Expatriates in the History of Knowledge, 1500-2000 . Waltham, Massachusetts: Brandeis University Press, 2017 ISBN 9781512600384 [to Alice Bergel]

Web links

• Literature by and about Kurt Bergel in the catalog of the German National Library
• The Albert Schweitzer Institute of Chapman University

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Unless other sources are given below, the basis for all biographical details of the Bergel family is the 1991 interview given by Angelika Rieber with Kurt Bergel in the “Sources” section.
2. ↑ JULIA SÖHNGEN: First Air War: When the bombs fell on Frankfurt ( Memento of the original from February 16, 2018 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and not yet checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. , Frankfurter Neue Presse, August 11, 2014 
3. ↑ ^{a b} A school cellar as a secret weapon depot - the weapon found in the Wöhlerschule in 1921
4. ↑ ^{a b c d e f g h i j k l m n o} Interview by Angelika Rieber with Professor Dr. Kurt Bergel on June 30, 1991 (see above: Sources section)
5. ↑ ^{a b c d e f} Kurt Bergel: A daring and significant contribution to the Jewish reconstruction , in: Lucie Schachne: Education for spiritual resistance , pp. 100-102
6. ↑ ^{a b c d e f g} Kurt Bergel: Our rational educational task
7. ^ Essays by Kurt Bergel in the estate of Max Horkheimer
8. ↑ Jürgen Habermas: Knowledge and Interest , Suhrkamp Taschenbuch Wissenschaft 1, Frankfurt am Main, 1973, ISBN 3-518-07601-9 , p. 244
9. ↑ ^{a b c d e f g h} Kurt Bergel: Religious youth education
10. ↑ For an overview of this school see: Jüdische Volksschule Düsseldorf & Childhood and School Time in Düsseldorf: The Jewish Elementary School .
11. ↑ Gisela Miller-Kipp: Between Kaiserbild and Palestinian Map , p. 84.
12. ↑ Kurt Herz, born in Offenbach in 1903, had been the headmaster of the Jewish school in Düsseldorf since April 1935. In February 1939 he emigrated to Great Britain with his wife Ellen, who had also taught at the Düsseldorf Jewish School. Information on this can be found in the list of stumbling blocks in Düsseldorf (article on Kurt Schnook, who became headmaster after Herz) and in Gisela Miller-Kipp: Between Kaiserbild and Palestine map , p. 54, note 33, and p. 84.
13. ↑ Gisela Miller-Kipp: Between Kaiserbild and Palestine Map , p. 90
14. ↑ ^{a b c d} Lucie Schachne: Education for spiritual resistance , p. 259
15. ↑ ^{a b} Alice R. Bergel in the database tracking and emigration of German-speaking linguists 1933-1945 (see "Sources")
16. ↑ ^{a b c d} Life and work of the Romance writer Alice R. Bergel
17. ↑ Alice Berger: The expression of the passive idea in Old French in the catalog of the German National Library . Utz Maas, Persecution and Emigration of German-Speaking Linguists 1933–1945 (see "Sources") gives a brief outline of the work
18. ↑ ^{a b c} Alice Bergel: Memories of Caputh , in: Hildegard Feidel-Mertz and Andreas Paetz: A lost paradise , pp. 97-100
19. ↑ Leopold Bergel died shortly afterwards as a result of an operation. His wife was able to emigrate to England, where she had to stay until 1943 before she was also allowed to enter the USA. She died shortly before her 83rd birthday.
20. ↑ ^{a b c d} Short portrait of Alice Bergel, in: Hildegard Feidel-Mertz and Andreas Paetz: A lost paradise , p. 328
21. ^ Jewish children from the Rowden Hall School attend a Hannukah party in an overflow hostel on Harold Road
22. ↑ On the history of Kitchener Camp : Kitchener Camp Collection
23. ↑ Alice Bergel in the Deep Springs Archive (there the wrong statement that she was an employee until 1949).
24. ↑ ^{a b c d e f g} Obituary for Kurt Bergel in the Los Angeles Times of March 25, 2001
25. ^ Kurt Bergel in the catalog of the German National Library
26. ↑ Chapman University homepage
27. ^ The Albert Schweitzer Institute of Chapman University
28. ^ Albert Schweitzer's life and thinking: selections chosen from the autobiographical writings of the author in WorldCat
29. ↑ Dear harpsichord in the DNB catalog
30. ^ Project Jewish life in Frankfurt am Main