Life Corps

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Life corps is a name for a certain form of corps , the oldest form of student associations that exist today . Life corps were associations that formed a covenant for life as early as the beginning of the 19th century , i.e. beyond the student days, while the majority of the corps at this time still believed that they were primarily a protective alliance for the time of study ( Arms Corps ).

Emergence

The life corps presumably adopted this concept from the student orders prevailing in the 18th century , which cultivated Masonic ideas but were ousted after the first corps were founded. Life corps were and are mainly in the Bavarian region at the universities of Munich (previously Ingolstadt and Landshut ), Erlangen and Würzburg , but also in Tübingen .

When later all corps, as well as all other connections, took over the life covenant principle from around 1840 , the principle of the life corps was condensed to the effect that these corps excluded a second membership in another corps and also did not enter into friendships or cartels with other corps, the so-called Life principle .

When in the second half of the 19th century the Kösener Seniors Convents Association formed around the existing Kösener cartels , which became more and more important for the implementation of association-political ideas, many life corps feared an association-political isolation. The Bavarian Life Corps met for a congress in Nuremberg in 1863. Many life corps decided in the course of the next few decades to distance themselves from their principle and also to become weapons corps. These corps then made friends with important corps from a certain circle in order to integrate themselves in this way, which also largely succeeded.

Today there are only a few pure life corps left. This principle (no proportional corps , no double memberships) in the KSCV is only implemented very strictly by the Corps Bavaria Munich , Corps Arminia Munich and Corps Onoldia .

The life principle , colloquially also the one-band principle , was and is also cultivated in other types of student associations .

literature

  • Robert Paschke : On the development of the life corps idea . Einst und Jetzt , Vol. 2 (1957), pp. 19-23.
  • Robert Paschke: Corpsstudentisches Wörterbuch , in: Verband Alter Corpsstudenten: Handbuch des Kösener Corpsstudenten , 6th edition, Bd. I. Würzburg 1985, p. 328.
  • Walter Upmeyer: Multi-band people in life corps . Einst und Jetzt, Vol. 3 (1958), pp. 139-141.