Musisches Gymnasium (Frankfurt am Main)

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The Musische Gymnasium Frankfurt was an educational institution leading to the university entrance qualification within the framework of the National Socialist education system . It was founded in 1939 as the first music school of the then Greater German Reich at the request of Adolf Hitler and closed in 1945 after the end of the Second World War . The school was under the direct service and technical supervision of the Reich Ministry of Education , the school authority was the city of Frankfurt am Main . It became known under its director Kurt Thomas . In terms of its internal constitution, the Musisches Gymnasium retained a special position within the National Socialist elite schools, for example through the performance of otherwise suppressed church music or the inclusion of denominational religious instruction in the timetable.

Plans and goals

As early as 1921, Leo Kestenberg , a pianist, music teacher and cultural politician of Jewish descent, had developed the plan for a music high school . It should have six levels, i.e. only cover the 8th to 13th grade, and be set up as a branch of a normal secondary school for an initial transition period. Kestenberg did not think of creating his own type of school with a boarding school . However, the implementation of his plans was not yet possible at the time, because Kestenberg did not work in a leading position until 1929, as Ministerialrat, in the Prussian Ministry of Science, Art and Education . Although he implemented the first fundamental reform of the German school music system, a little later, in January 1933, the National Socialists came to power and put an abrupt end to his work. Kestenberg left Germany and emigrated.

Another idea developed after the National Socialist seizure of power by SS-Sturmbannführer Martin Miederer, who was appointed to the Reich Ministry of Education (REM) as senior government councilor and head of the music department in 1937 . Miederer succeeded in winning Hitler over for his idea of ​​setting up a music school. According to Miederer's ideas, the Musisches Gymnasium should give music priority over other artistic subjects, because music requires extensive and, above all, early training. Music lessons should be based on making music together in choir and orchestra, accompanied by intensive individual training. This corresponded to the Nazi maxim of a comprehensive education of body, soul and spirit. The aim was to train musically gifted people. Perhaps it was also considered to counter the preponderance of party special schools, because while the National Political Educational Institutes emphasized the physical, the Adolf Hitler schools the political and the normal secondary schools the scientific education, a school type should be created with the Musisches Gymnasium, who put the arts education in the foreground. To Jung Gifted find and Winning should already boys of primary school classes 3 and 4, can be so taken up was eight years in the in arts high school. Those who did not meet the expectations placed on them could and had to leave this musical training facility.

The aim of this training was to pass the school leaving certificate for every degree. All students were grouped together in a boarding school. The structure and capacity of this boarding school was ten classes with a total of 300 students. Girls were not allowed, not even day students. For the design and implementation of the lessons, the headmaster, who was supposed to be a prominent specialist musician, was assisted by a senior studies director as a "teaching director".

Musisches Gymnasium in Frankfurt

The first music school was founded in 1939. The city of Frankfurt am Main took over the sponsorship. The Musisches Gymnasium Frankfurt started school on September 1, 1939. The school was located in the Buchenrode house in the Niederrad district , the former villa of the Frankfurt industrialist and honorary citizen Arthur von Weinberg . In November 1938 he was forced to sell the property to the city for a fraction of its value and also to cede the proceeds of the sale to the city treasury in order to partially cover the property levies that were incurred on the basis of the ordinance on an atonement of the Jews of November 12, 1938 . According to witness reports, the then Lord Mayor Friedrich Krebs and other National Socialist functionaries forced admission and sent the almost eighty-year-old owner into the park with the sentence “The Jew must get out” to prepare for the forced sale of his house. Weinberg was on June 2, 1942 in the Theresienstadt concentration camp deported , where he died on March 20 1943rd

The technical supervision lay with the Reich Ministry of Education in Berlin. The overall management of the school was entrusted to the experienced music teacher, choir director and composer Kurt Thomas , who, however, was neither involved in the conception nor in the preparation of the school operation. So Thomas had to take over a fully structured facility.

The Musisches Gymnasium started operations on November 6, 1939 with 115 pupils, who came from all parts of the then German Reich and all of them lived in the boarding school. Girls and day school students were not allowed. Since the premises of the Buchenrode house were too small, the grammar school took over other neighboring properties at the end of 1939, including the aryanized residential building at Niederräder Landstrasse 26 .

The Buchenrode house was badly damaged by aerial bombs in a heavy air raid on December 20, 1943 . Another air raid on January 29, 1944 destroyed the house and the neighboring buildings so extensively that the school had to be stopped. The students in the lower grammar school classes were then sent home to their families, while classes 3 to 7 received lessons from April 11, 1944 to May 26, 1944 in the Reichelsheim military training camp in the Odenwald .

From May 1944 until the end of the war, the school in the Untermarchtal monastery of the Sisters of Mercy of Saint Vincent de Paul was outsourced. The school was finally closed on May 25, 1945.

Known students

Further musical high schools

In 1941 a second music grammar school was opened in Leipzig . This existed next to the Thomas School and was directed by the Thomaskantor Günther Ramin . From 1942 there was another music school, outside the German state borders, but based on the German model, at the Hungarian National Conservatory in Budapest . A total of six musical high schools were planned in Germany. The events of the war and finally, in 1945, the total collapse of the German Reich, destroyed these plans.

swell

literature

  • Ulrich Günther: School music education from the Kestenberg reform to the end of the Third Reich . Luchterhand 1967
  • Neithard Bethke: Kurt Thomas. Studies of life and work . Merseburger, Kassel 1989, ISBN 3-87537-232-8
  • Werner Heldmann: Musisches Gymnasium Frankfurt am Main 1939-1945. A school in the field of tension between educational responsibility, artistic freedom and political doctrine . Peter Lang, Frankfurt 2004, ISBN 3-631-51987-7

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Ordinance on the atonement of Jews of German nationality . ( Wikisource )
  2. ↑ The purchase price was 400,000 Reichsmarks. Weinberg had paid the city of Frankfurt 42.85 Reichsmarks per m² for the 41,000 square meter property in 1910 and invested over 2 million Reichsmarks in the building and the ancillary facilities.
  3. ^ Arthur von Weinberg: Herr im Poelzig-Bau, prisoner in Theresienstadt. In: Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung . February 5, 2007, archived from the original ; accessed on October 30, 2019 .
  4. ↑ Dieter Wesp: The “Miersch List”: “Aryanization” of Jewish properties by the city of Frankfurt am Main. In: Frankfurt am Main 1933–1945. Institute for Urban History , June 8, 2018, accessed on October 29, 2019 .