Paul Reiner

Paul Reiner (born February 3, 1886 in Bleiweishof near Nuremberg ; † November 2, 1932 in Zurich ) was a German reform pedagogue . He came from the youth movement , was a co-founder of the first German abstinent youth association and the South German Wandervogels as well as the reform pedagogical school by the sea on the North Sea island of Juist .

School and study

Reiner was briefly a pupil of the Free School Community of Wickersdorf (Thuringia) around 1909 in order to pass his school- leaving examination.

From 1910 to 1913 he studied with the aim to teaching the subjects chemistry , mineralogy , physics , sociology and philosophy at the Ludwig-Maximilians University in Munich and at the Ruprecht-Karls University in Heidelberg. In Heidelberg he was assistant to the economist and sociologist Alfred Weber . His dissertation in the field of chemistry, which he also wrote in Heidelberg, dealt with the tourmaline group ( mixed series in the trigonal crystal system of crystallizing ring silicates ).

As an assistant at the Mineralogical Institute in Heidelberg, he met the poets Friedrich Gundolf and Edgar Salin and was introduced to the poet Stefan George . As a result, he was briefly a member of the George circle .

family

He married the nurse Anni (1891–1972), née Hochschild , who worked at the Free School Community of Wickersdorf . From this marriage there were four daughters.

activities

After receiving his doctorate in 1913, he was initially a teacher at the reform pedagogical Odenwald School . During the November Revolution of 1918 he was motivated by Hedda Korsch to become politically active in the spirit of the youth movement . In 1919 he was a member of the board of the Decided Youth of Germany (EJD), Germany's first revolutionary school and student movement, which operated until 1921. This was a protest movement by schoolchildren and students from the bourgeoisie who sought to contribute to the proletarian rebellion at the beginning of the Weimar Republic with radical positions . In the Thuringian cabinet, a coalition of the SPD and KPD , Reiner worked for the ultra-left Leninist Karl Korsch .

In 1919 he became a teacher at the Free School Community of Wickersdorf . In the same year there was a change in the school management from Martin Luserke to Gustav Wyneken . Paul Reiner built up a George fellowship at the rural education home , which he led. George's poem The Guardians of the Forecourt became the guideline for his actions. He held a weekly state political seminar.

Together with the school's founder and director Wyneken, he represented FSG Wickersdorf at the Reichsschulkonferenz in Berlin, which was scheduled for 1920 . This was about a systematic reorganization of the school system after the end of the German Empire and the First World War . The results of the Reichsschulkonferenz appeared to him unsatisfactory, not revolutionary enough to shake off the stiff encrustation of the Wilhelmine era .

The relationship with the headmaster Wyneken clouded over to such an extent that Paul Reiner became his staunch opponent. Since he was not the only teacher who was extremely critical of Wyneken's educational ideas and his administration, a real opposition to Wyneken developed in the course of time. It was the so-called triumvirate , which, in addition to Reiner, was composed of the educators Martin Luserke and Rudolf Aeschlimann . A major reason for the opposition movement against Wyneken and his allegiance were allegations that he had homoerotic contact and sexual intercourse with students. In the opinion of the triumvirate, such relationships between teachers and their students were forbidden. To make matters worse, this was not only to be interpreted as a personal or private preference, but was explicitly presented by Wyneken and other members of his circle of sympathizers within the school as part of their fundamental educational reform ideas and convictions. This led to the so-called Eros trial and a judicial conviction of Wyneken.

Fernand Petitpierre (1879–1972), who came from Switzerland and had been teaching French in Wickersdorf since 1915 and was one of Wyneken's followers, left the FSG Wickersdorf at the end of March 1922 (but came back after the subsequent secession of the triumvirate in 1926). In a letter to Wyneken, he made Luserke, Reiner and Aeschlimann responsible for his forced withdrawal. The triumvirate had after Eros scandal want to clean up the teachers from all Wyneken supporters against Wyneken:

“ God, how glad I am not to sit in the middle of this Senate [faculty]! D. f. [For], as a spectator with pleasure. It's wonderful that W.dorf [Wickersdorf] can't get out of the fighting. In any case, Reiner, who has shown you how dashingly he knows how to swing the broom, will have swept the rubbish from the staff room and everything undesirable from the estate here too! Would you have dreamed that your W.dorf would later become a kind of three-family house [Luserke, Reiner, Aeschlimann with wives and children]? That women [not a specific, but the female influence on everyday school life] should become so important? Pathetic. And from the former flame in the coat of arms they have now made a breeding rod for insubordinate teachers. You shouldn't have any other ... "

- Fernand Petitpierre

Petit-Pierre published volumes of homoerotic poetry under the pseudonym René Lermite in the 1930s and 1940s . He was one of the teachers in the Free School Community of Wickersdorf , who lived out their pedophile inclinations there.

On the one hand, the dispute resulted in Wyneken and his supporters perceiving the resolute opposition of the triumvirate as a betrayal of the common cause, the educational reform school project FSG Wickersdorf, and of them as colleagues. On the other hand, Wyneken had to hand over the school management to Martin Luserke, who had previously held this management position. However, since Wyneken remained in the immediate vicinity and, as the school founder, tried to intervene in everyday school life almost every day, his dismissal did not bring any lasting solution.

In the spring of 1924, Reiner and the others joined the Luserkes project to found a new reform school. At Pentecost 1924, Reiner, Luserke and Aeschlimann traveled to the sea with their comrades , the bears , penguins and wolves from FSG Wickersdorf. There, on the “edge of the habitable world”, they wanted to locate a suitable location for a new school. A friendly to almost family-like comradeship consisted of a group of about ten students and a teacher. They found what they were looking for on the North Sea island of Juist . Together with Luserke, Aeschlimann and Fritz Hafner , their wives and other employees of the FSG Wickersdorf and their eleven children in total, the secession took place in the spring of 1925 . They left FSG Wickersdorf on March 30, 1925 and moved with their families to Juist. There they opened the school by the sea at Easter 1925 after the structural, conceptual and organizational activities that had already been initiated the previous year . This should include the sexta up to the upper level and lead to the secondary school leaving certificate . Sixteen previous students from FSG Wickersdorf followed them as the first new students from the Schule am Meer , including Herbert von Borch .

Reiner led the so-called seminar there , which dealt with political and cultural topics. He was a member of the board of trustees of the School by the Sea Foundation . He was also the editor of the periodical Blätter der Außengemeinde der Schule am Meer , which was aimed at the parents of the students, sponsors, former students, shop stewards and other groups of people who were counted as part of the school community . Paul Reiner temporarily took over from Luserke in the school administration at Juist, but then fell seriously ill and ultimately had to leave school in order to receive appropriate medical treatment on the mainland, which was better served by medicine. This was not successful in the medium term, so that Paul Reiner died in Switzerland at the age of only 46 after years of illness.

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Peter Dudek : Experimental field for a new youth - The Free School Community Wickersdorf 1906-1945 . Klinkhardt, Bad Heilbrunn 2009, ISBN 978-3-7815-1681-6 , p. 82
2. ^ Paul Reiner: Contributions to the knowledge of the tourmaline group . Dissertation Ruprecht-Karls-Universität, Winter, Heidelberg 1913
3. ↑ ^{a b c d} Peter Dudek : "Experimental field for a new youth". The Free School Community of Wickersdorf 1906–1945 . Verlag Julius Klinkhardt, Bad Heilbrunn 2009. ISBN 978-3-7815-1681-6 , p. 82.
4. ↑ ^{a b} Carola Groppe : Stefan George, the George Circle and Reform Education between the turn of the century and the Weimar Republic . In: Bernhard Böschenstein , Wolfgang Graf Vitzthum , Bertram Schefold , Jürgen Egyptien (eds.): Scientists in the George Circle. The world of the poet and the profession of science . Walter de Gruyter, Berlin 2005. ISBN 978-3-1101-8304-7 , pp. 311–328. (Quotation p. 320)
5. ^ Ulrich Linse : The Decided Youth 1919–1921. Germany's first revolutionary school and student movement (= sources and contributions to the history of the youth movement, volume 23). dipa, Frankfurt am Main 1981, ISBN 3-7638-0223-1
6. ↑ Reinhard Preuss: Lost Sons of the Bourgeoisie. Left currents in the German youth movement 1913–1919 . Verlag Wissenschaft und Politik, Cologne 1991, ISBN 3-8046-8774-1
7. ↑ Barbara Stambolis : Youth Moves: Essays on autobiographical texts by Werner Heisenberg, Robert Jungk and many others . Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht 2013, ISBN 978-3-8470-0004-4 , p. 767
8. ↑ Stefan Helbing et al. (Ed.): Stefan George. Documents of its effect. From the Friedrich Gundolf Archive of the University of London (= Publications of the Institute of Germanic Studies, University of London, Vol. 18). Castrum Peregrini Presse, Amsterdam 1974, p. 210.
9. ↑ Peter Dudek: "The Oedipus from Kurfürstendamm". A Wickersdorf student and his matricide in 1930 . Verlag Julius Klinkhardt, Bad Heilbrunn 2015, ISBN 978-3-7815-2026-4 , p. 58.
10. ↑ Gudrun Fiedler, Susanne Rappe-Weber, Detlef Siegfried: Collecting - opening up - networking: youth culture and social movements in the archive . Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, Göttingen 2014, ISBN 978-3-8470-0340-3 , p. 174.
11. ↑ Peter Dudek: The Oedipus from Kurfürstendamm: A Wickersdorfer student and his mother murder 1930 . Klinkhardt, Bad Heilbrunn 2015, ISBN 978-3-7815-2026-4 , p. 59
12. ↑ Peter Dudek: Experimental field for a new youth - The Free School Community Wickersdorf 1906-1945 . Klinkhardt, Bad Heilbrunn 2009, ISBN 978-3-7815-1681-6 , p. 197
13. ^ Ulrich Schwerdt: Martin Luserke (1880–1968). Reform pedagogy in the field of tension between pedagogical innovation and culture-critical ideology. A biographical reconstruction . Lang, Frankfurt am Main et al. 1993, ISBN 3-631-46119-4 , p. 388 f.