Michael Brink

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Michael Brink (born January 17, 1914 in Schneidemühl , † August 9, 1947 in Agra ) was a Catholic publicist and member of the resistance movement against the Nazi regime . His original name was Emil Piepke .

Live and act

Brink was initially a youth leader in the Catholic Federation of New Germany . He studied for four semesters in the seminary in Braunsberg / East Prussia , but then decided to become a freelance writer. He belonged to a group of Catholics who were critical of the church around Johannes Maaßen and the weekly newspaper Junge Front , renamed Michael after a ban .

Brink was drafted into the Reich Labor Service and then joined the Wehrmacht without a transition . After he was seriously wounded in September 1941, he came back to Germany in the winter of 41/42, only fit for garrison service. At that time he was already in contact with resistance groups. He was transferred to the OKW , to a department that distributed literature for soldiers. Its conspiratorial function was evidently to keep in contact with friends in the Abwehr and to speak in small groups about questions of power and its use, about the oath and its binding nature, and about dealing with the Nazi worldview.

After a friend who had died at the beginning of the war, Emil Piepke had renamed himself Michael Brink . The writer's name was legalized after 1945.

He had already contacted the Berlin publisher Lambert Schneider in early summer, and in the spring of 1942 his book 'Don Quichotte - Bild und Reality' was published there, in which he described Don Quixote's struggle against the windmills of evil, which was almost hopeless but based on Christian faith related to the situation of resistance against the Nazi regime. According to his publisher, the book was out of print just a few weeks after its publication and was reprinted in autumn 1942. It was banned, but transcripts were circulated. Brink has now prepared anthologies of German romantic and post-romantic poems for the Lambert Schneider publishing house.

He described himself to Schneider as the "orderly" of the various resistance groups. Discussions also took place in connection with his book 'Don Quixote', which was significant at least for the White Rose circle . There is also evidence of contacts with the Kreisau Circle , General Friedrich Olbricht and the Solf Circle (especially Isa Vermehren and Gisela Countess Plettenberg-Lenhausen ) as well as people of the Catholic resistance such as Adalbert Probst , Ludwig Wolker and Georg Smolka . Brink was close friends with Father Alfred Delp SJ.

In the spring of 1944 Michael Brink was arrested because of a denunciation by the Gestapo spy Paul Reckzeh . He was initially in Gestapo pre-trial detention in the Ravensbrück concentration camp , and later in the Sachsenhausen concentration camp . Brink escaped during the Sachsenhausen death march in April 1945.

All Saints' Day 1945 married Brink and the Christian painter Roswitha Bitterlich . He was sick with tuberculosis and was fighting for his life in a lung sanatorium. In December 1946 his daughter Mechthild Maria was born.

In 1946, Brink's main work, 'Revolutio humana', appeared, a theological discussion of the crimes in Nazi Germany. The proximity to the Renouveau catholique becomes clear ; moreover, the work anticipates the intentions of the later ecumenical movement .

Michael Brink died on August 9, 1947.

Works

  • The German Order of Knights (Recklinghausen undated [1937, 2nd edition 1940]).
  • Don Quichotte - Image and Reality (Berlin 1942, 2nd extended edition Heidelberg 1946; new edition Berlin 2013) pdf ISBN 978-3-923211-17-3 .
  • (Ed.): The way of the soldier Johannes (Düsseldorf undated).
  • The path of poverty , in: Der Brenner, XVI. Episode (1946), pp. 15-31.
  • Revolutio humana (Heidelberg 1946; new edition: Berlin 2013) PDF ISBN 978-3-923211-25-8 .
  • (Ed.): Poems of German Romanticism (Heidelberg 1946).
  • and Lambert Schneider (Hrsg.): Poems of Post-Romanticism and Young Germany (Heidelberg 1957).

literature

  • Lambert Schneider: Accountability 1925-1965. An almanac (Heidelberg undated [1965]).
  • Felix Raabe: Berlin - Lubichow and back. Pictures of a threatened youth 1939–1949 (Munich 1986).
  • Klaus Gotto: The weekly newspaper JUNGE FRONT / MICHAEL (publications of the commission for contemporary history, series B: research - volume 8. Mainz 1970 passim).
  • Mondrian Graf von Lüttichau : Poverty, wholeness, freedom - becoming a human after Auschwitz? Michael Brink (1914-1947) , in: Friedhelm Köhler , Friederike Migneco , Benedikt Maria Trappen (Hg): Freedom, Awareness, Responsibility: Festschrift for Volker Zotz on his 60th birthday (Munich 2016, p. 311–334)

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Felix Raabe: Berlin - Lubichow and back. Pictures of a threatened youth 1939–1949 (Munich 1986, pp. 78–80).
  2. ^ Anneliese Knoop-Graf / Inge Jens: Willi Graf: Letters and records (Frankfurt / M. 1984, p. 291).
  3. ↑ Wolfgang Huber: The importance of literature for the resistance of the White Rose , in: Insights and perspectives. Bavarian magazine for politics and history No. 04/2010.
  4. ^ Günter Weisenborn: The silent uprising (Reinbek 1962, p. 102).
  5. ^ House of Bavarian History (ed.): Zeitzeugen-Projekt: Wortprotokoll Karl Kunkel (Augsburg 1999).
  6. ↑ Winfried Meyer (Ed.): Conspirators in the concentration camp: Hans von Dohnanyi and the prisoners of July 20, 1944 in the Sachsenhausen concentration camp (Berlin 1999).
personal data
SURNAME Brink, Michael
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Piepke, Emil
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German publicist and resistance fighter
DATE OF BIRTH January 17, 1914
PLACE OF BIRTH Schneidemühl
DATE OF DEATH August 9, 1947
Place of death Agra near Lugano