Peter Franz (Author)

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Peter Franz (2014)

Peter Franz (born May 10, 1941 in Apolda ) is a suspended German Protestant pastor , author and long-time unofficial employee (IM) of the Ministry for State Security (MfS).

Life

His mother was a single textile worker. Franz grew up with his grandparents, from whom he received the first impetus for socialist life and thinking. He attended high school in Apolda from 1955 to 1958 . He was expelled from school because of unauthorized playing of western dance music in a school group, but was able to take his Abitur in Weimar in 1959 .

From 1959 to 1961 he served voluntarily a. a. as a parachutist and tank soldier in the National People's Army and then wanted to study in Jena . In an unofficial literature and discussion group, he received initial incentives to study the Bible . This led to the fact that he was dishonorably dismissed from the NVA as a “follower of church ideology ”. Because his admission to study had been withdrawn, he worked for a year as an apparatus operator in a chemical company in Apolda. During this time he joined a Protestant parish and was baptized in 1962 . In the autumn of the same year he began studying Protestant theology in Jena. His teachers included Erich Hertzsch , Rudolf Meyer and Hans-Georg Fritzsche .

He married in 1965 and had four children in the following years. After his first theological exam in 1967 he became vicar in Kapellendorf and after the second exam in 1969 he was ordained a pastor by Regional Bishop Mitzenheim and employed in Kapellendorf.

Under his guidance, seminar rooms, an overnight house and a cellar for the young community were built .

Thomas Müntzer's sculptural ideas by Eberhard Heiland

Franz was a member of the district council under the mandate of the GDR CDU , which he joined in 1973. This included processing and forwarding submissions and complaints about social grievances and personal and family needs. In 1975 he founded the "Thomas Müntzer" Evangelical Community Center. On his initiative, on June 29, 1989, a sculpture of ideas on Thomas Müntzer was set up in front of the Kapellendorfer Church , created by the Weimar ceramist Eberhard Heiland .

Franz became a member of the Christian Peace Conference , in which he subsequently worked as a corporation with a community group. This included cross-border seminars and meetings with church and peace groups from other European countries. He was the co-initiator of a " Way of the Cross for Peace", which CFK Thuringia carried out for several years in the Buchenwald National Memorial and Memorial , whereby the memorial stone for the "Action Jews" of 1938 was regularly visited. Since the mid-1970s he has been visiting the synagogue of the Jewish community in Erfurt with children and adolescents and subscribed to the Jewish community's news bulletin so that it can be displayed in his community center. A lecture by Herbert Ringer, the chairman of the Erfurt Jewish Community, in the EGZ "Thomas Müntzer" laid the foundation for a trusting relationship with the Jewish State Community of Thuringia. In 1987 he organized and led a section of the church Olof Palme Peace March for the Thuringia region, which led from the Buchenwald memorial to Kapellendorf.

Franz worked as an IM from 1977 out of conviction. In the recruitment phase, an MfS employee noted: "A negative feature must be assessed that the candidate is always guided in his actions by the interests of the church ..." A little later, Franz signed up with a handshake under the code name "Johannes" as in. He willingly provided information about members of his community, colleagues and domestic and foreign guests of his house. Because of his loyalty to the line, Franz was also known in Thuringia as the “red pastor” or the “red Franz” of Kapellendorf.

From the mid-1980s he began researching the fate of Jewish families in his hometown Apolda and was involved in a “Jewish life” working group of the GDR cultural association. In 1988 he initiated the installation of a memorial plaque on the office building of the Jewish fur dealer Bernhard Prager on the occasion of his 100th birthday. As chairman of the “Christian Circles” working group of the National Front, he led a major public honor for the Prager family murdered in the Theresienstadt ghetto or Auschwitz concentration camp in a joint event organized by the SED district leadership , the Evangelical Lutheran parish and the Apolda Cultural Association.

When the SED openly expressed solidarity with the mass murder on Tian'anmen Square , the CFK group Kapellendorf, headed by Franz, distanced itself from this position in a letter to the GDR Council of Ministers.

After the reunification and peaceful revolution in the GDR in 1990 he resigned from the CDU. In April 1990 he revealed and explained his contacts with the MfS to the CFK employees and church representatives. His cooperation with the State Security became known among parishioners and pastor colleagues. In 1992, when the television journalist Detlef Urban and a team were working on behalf of ARD for Pastor Franz and broadcast documents from the Stasi archive in the film Kumpanei mit der Stasi , the church leadership suspended him from duty. Because he refused the Rectory resign, the national church opened against him an office breeding process, which went through two instances and before a chamber of the EKD 1997 all rights and the loss ended all entitlements with its final removal from office of a minister and withdrawing. Franz is no longer allowed to call himself a pastor.

Since then he has worked as a freelance speaker at birth greetings, marriages and funerals. Since 1992 he has been the author of books on Jewish life, persecution and resistance in the Nazi regime, on war memorials and on his own contemporary history. In his place of residence he runs a "GDR bookstore" on a voluntary basis, in which he borrows thousands of books free of charge, which should be disposed of after public libraries have been closed and downsized. Since 2007 he has been the spiritus rector of the Prager-Haus Apolda e. V. , who rescued a former Jewish shop and made it a place of encounter, memory and historical learning.

Peter Franz rejects military operations and criticized statements made by Federal President Gauck . When he received the Obermayer German Jewish History Award in 2016 , Hildigund Neubert , the former state commissioner for the Stasi documents in Thuringia , criticized the Obermayer Foundation's decision, because Franz had served the communist dictatorship in the GDR.

Franz is a member of the Thuringian Association of German Writers , the Rosa Luxemburg Foundation and the ver.di trade union , and he is also a member of the Association of those persecuted by the Nazi regime - Bund der Antifaschistinnen und Antifaschisten e. V. , in the Rotfuchs -Förderverein e. V. and in the Society for the Protection of Civil Rights and Human Dignity eV

Publications

Children's books

  • The clever ones. Elfriede and her son trick the Nazis. No. 1 in the series Apoldaer Judengeschichten , Apolda 2015, ISBN 3-935-275-37-4
  • The woman in the closet. Greetings from the beyond. No. 2 from the series Apoldaer Judengeschichten , Apolda 2015, ISBN 978-3-935275-38-5
  • The messenger of bad luck. The order to drive to death. No. 3 from the series Apoldaer Judengeschichten , Apolda 2015, ISBN 3-935275-39-0
  • War companionship. Friendship against hatred of Jews. No. 4 from the series Apoldaer Judengeschichten , Apolda 2015, ISBN 3-935275-42-0
  • The radiologist. A Jewish doctor is disgusted out of Apolda. No. 5 from the series of Apoldaer Judengeschichten , Apolda 2015, ISBN 3-935275-41-2
  • The violinist. Music as an over-food. No. 6 from the series of Apoldaer Judengeschichten , Apolda 2016, ISBN 3-935275-45-5
  • The secret door. The Nazis can do me ... No. 7 from the series of Apoldaer Judengeschichten , Apolda 2016, ISBN 3-935275-47-1
  • The confectioner. Half a Jew - but a whole person. No. 8 from the series of Apoldaer Judengeschichten , Apolda 2017, ISBN 3-935275-48-X
  • Silent heroes. Harry, Käthe, Marie, Albert, Paul and Hilde. No. 9 from the series of Apoldaer Judengeschichten , Apolda 2017, ISBN 3-935275-55-2
  • The mysterious tailor. Blown in by the wind of history. No. 10 from the series of Apoldaer Judengeschichten , Apolda 2018, ISBN 3-935275-72-2
  • The Jewish house. A cattle shop became the "Judenhaus". No. 11 from the series of Apoldaer Judengeschichten , Apolda 2019, ISBN 3-935275-74-9
  • The ghetto boy. Locked up and survived. No. 12 from the series of Apoldaer Judengeschichten , Apolda 2019, ISBN 3-935275-81-1
  • The denounced. Hatred leads to inhumanity. The number 13 from the series of Apoldaer Judengeschichten , Apolda 2020, ISBN 3-935275-84-6
  • The "racial molester". From the path of life to the stairs of death. The number 14 from the series of Apoldaer Judengeschichten , Apolda 2020, ISBN 978-3-9822110-7

As a co-author and employee

  • The Rosewitz, Prager, Lichtenstein ; Author and editor: Thomas Bahr; conceptual collaboration; Apolda 1992
  • The city of Apolda and the surrounding concentration camps ; caught in the net. The concentration camps in Thuringia ; Edited by the history workshop Weimar-Apolda e. V. Together with Udo Wohlfeld, in the series "Wanted 3. Save the past for the future!" Weimar 2001, ISBN 3-935275-02-1
  • Local history guide to sites of resistance and persecution 1933–1945 , Volume 8 Thuringia; Edited by TVVdN-BdA and the German Resistance Study Group 1933–1945 ; Hamburg undated In it, together with Udo Wohlfeld, the chapter: Kreis Weimarer Land , Hamburg undated, ISBN 3-88864-343-0
  • Securing evidence VI. Traces from the GDR into the future ; Ed .: Independent community of authors “This is how I experienced it”. Therein essay : Traces in the future , Berlin 2004, ISBN 3-89819-180-X
  • Traces of truth. GDR heritage worth preserving. Experiences, considerations, findings, documents ; Ed .: Independent community of authors “Experienced as contemporary witnesses”. Therein essay: Far from power - far from powerlessness. What Christians and Churches Should Build On ; Schkeuditz 2005, ISBN 3-89819-208-3
  • Small lexicon of historical keywords ; ed. by Kurt Pätzold , Manfred Weißbecker ; Leipzig 2005. In it the essays: The German Michel , The God who let the iron grow , God with us , Leipzig 2002, 2005, Cologne undated, ISBN 3-86189-618-4
  • Lived ideas. Socialists in Thuringia. Biographical sketches ; ed. by Mario Hesselbarth, Eberhart Schultz, Manfred Weißbecker; Jena 2006; ISBN 3-935850-37-9 . In it essay: A socialist grassroots worker: August Baudert
  • Jewish families in Apolda. Defamation, exclusion, disenfranchisement, expulsion, deportation, annihilation, disobedience. The Apolda Jewry during Fascism . Together with Udo Wohlfeld = "wanted 6. Save the past for the future!" Ed. By the Geschichtswerkstatt Weimar / Apolda e. V., Weimar 2006, ISBN 3-935275-04-8
  • A new fascism? Edited by Wolfgang Richter. In it: essay Christian-religious roots of fascism ; Schkeuditz 2007, ISBN 978-3-89819-242-2
  • Thomas Müntzer in the culture of remembrance. The example of fine arts ; ed. by Günter Vogler. In it: Our little town got a new inhabitant today. The handover of the Müntzer statue in Kapellendorf in 1989 ; Thomas-Müntzer-Gesellschaft Mühlhausen 2008, ISBN 3-935547-24-2
  • Peter Franz, Tina Unglaube, Udo Wohlfeld: The Pragers. A Jewish family in Apolda ; History workshop Weimar-Apolda e. V., Apolda 2008, ISBN 3-935275-07-2
  • Karl Berger, Peter Franz, Udo Wohlfeld: August Berger. Social Democrat in Apolda . History workshop Weimar-Apolda e. V., Apolda 2008, ISBN 3-935275-08-0
  • Wolfgang Peller, Peter Franz, Udo Wohlfeld: The Pellers. A Jewish family in Apolda . History workshop Weimar-Apolda e. V., Apolda 2008, ISBN 3-935275-10-2
  • Peter Franz, Udo Wohlfeld: Deadly Resistance. Apolda workers 1933–1945 . History workshop Weimar-Apolda e. V., Apolda 2009, ISBN 3-935275-10-2
  • Peter Franz, Udo Wohlfeld: The Fleischmanns. A Jewish family in Apolda . History workshop Weimar-Apolda e. V., Apolda 2009, ISBN 3-935275-11-0
  • Ulrike Kaiser, Justus H.Ulbricht (ed.): Bulky pasts. Aspects of regional culture of remembrance in the 20th century. Proceedings for the scientific conference of the same name from November 23 to 25, 2007 at the Leuchtenburg; therein: The war memorial in Kleinbucha - a lecture. Leuchtenburg near Kahla 2009
  • Klaus Schmidt (Hrsg.): Agriculture in the GDR. VEG, LPG and cooperations - how they became, what they were, what became of them. In it: The LPG, the church and the pastor ; Agrimedia GmbH & Co. KG, Clenze 2009, ISBN 978-3-86037-977-6
  • Europe before the abyss. The year 1935 ; ed. by Kurt Pätzold and Erika Schwarz . In it: Apolda - Nazi leader, public and clergy and their interaction ; Papyrossa Verlag Cologne 2005, ISBN 3-89438-327-5
  • Wilhelm Koch and Hildegard Koch: "... but the bees sting at the back!" Wilhelm Koch in Sulzbach, a pastor on the Confessional Front in Thuringia 1933-1945 , = wanted 8, Weimar-Apolda history workshop in Prager-Haus Apolda e. V., Apolda 2013, ISBN 3-935275-23-4
  • Peter Franz, Hartwig Mähler, Udo Wohlfeld: Against highest orders. A courageous decision for the life of a city , = found 13, ed. History workshop Weimar-Apolda / Working group of the Prager-Haus Apolda e. V., Apolda 2013, ISBN 3-935275-30-7
  • Käthe Raphael, Zeev Raphael, Peter Franz, Udo Wohlfeld: A Jewish family in Thuringia. The unprecedented struggle of a mother for the lives of her three children , = wanted 9, ed. History workshop Weimar-Apolda / Working group of the Prager-Haus Apolda e. V., Apolda 2014, ISBN 3-935275-32-3
  • Prague House Apolda e. V .: Eight years of the Prager Haus Verein Apolda 2007-2014. Our work and collaboration in results. An interim balance sheet , Apolda 2015, ISBN 3-935275-34-X
  • Prague House Apolda e. V .: Ten years of the Prague House Association Apolda January 26, 2007 to January 26, 2017. Our work and collaboration in results. Second interim balance , Apolda 2017, ISBN 3-935275-49-8
  • Peter Franz, Udo Wohlfeld: The course of memory. Oppression and resistance 1933-1935 in the Apolda region . History workshop Weimar-Apolda e. V., Apolda 2018, ISBN 3-935275-69-2
  • Peter Franz, Tina Unglaube, Udo Wohlfeld: The Pragers. A Jewish Family in Apolda (improved and greatly expanded edition of the booklet of the same name from 2008), Geschichtswerkstatt Weimar-Apolda e. V., Apolda 2018, ISBN 3-935275-73-0
  • Dr. Wolfgang Peller, Peter Franz, Udo Wohlfeld: The Pellers. A Jewish family in Apolda (improved and greatly expanded edition of the 2008 issue of the same name); History workshop Weimar-Apolda e. V., Apolda 2020, ISBN 3-935275-78-1

Essays

  • in the magazines Weißenseer Blätter , RotFuchs (permanent author) and Ossietzky and ICARUS (occasional collaboration)
  • Walter Schilling and the MfS: An overgrown church history and an ignored contemporary history. Reply to Walter Schilling: "The 'processing' of the regional church of Thuringia by the MfS", at the same time a contribution to the "Stasi processing" in the Evangelical Lutheran Church in Thuringia. In: ICARUS - Journal for Social Theory and Human Rights. Tenth issue, third year 1997/4, pages 18–29
  • The Thuringian Apolda. A place of learning and remembrance for Jewish life in the 20th century , in: Kultur Report. Mitteldeutscher Kulturrat Foundation , Issue 3, 2016, p. 28, ISSN 0948-2288

As editor

Honors

literature

  • Ernst Uhl : The case of Peter Franz. A review on the subject of the Protestant Church and GDR state security. Bremen 2003
  • Michael Ploenus: The case of the "red Franz" von Kapellendorf. Or: the continuity of enemy images . In: Gerbergasse 18 , 4/2006, pp. 15-18.

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Peter Franz, The Red Pastor of Kapellendorf, 2017, p. 21
  2. ↑ Ralf Pawelzik, Journal of History 7-1996, p. 669 ff.
  3. ↑ Peter Franz: The red pastor of Kapellendorf, 2017, p. 100
  4. ↑ Peter Franz: The red pastor of Kapellendorf. As a Christian and a socialist in this world. A book of memory and a diary of interference. 2017, p. 91
  5. ^ Letter from CFK Thuringia dated June 24, 1989 to the GDR government, = archive of CFK Thuringia, Behind the Wall and yet free. A read-up book by GDR Christians. Schkeuditz 1997, ISBN 3-929994-96-8 , p. 118.
  6. ↑ Peter Franz: The red pastor of Kapellendorf. As a Christian and a socialist in this world. A book of memory and a diary of interference. 2017, pp. 253 and 265.
  7. ↑ Processing price for ex-Stasi informers ( memento of December 24, 2016 in the Internet Archive ), mdr.de, January 26, 2016
  8. ^ Klaus Blessing, Manfred Manteuffel: Joachim Gauck. The right man? Critical comments on the basis of speeches, documents and testimonies from contemporary witnesses. 7th edition. Berlin 2014, p. 145.
  9. ↑ Refurbishment price for ex-stasis spy . In: Thuringian General . 3rd February 2016.
  10. ↑ Reason for the award
  11. ↑ http://www.gbmev.de/die-gbm/
  12. ↑ Laudation (p. 22)
personal data
SURNAME Franz, Peter
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German author, unofficial employee of the GDR State Security
DATE OF BIRTH May 10, 1941
PLACE OF BIRTH Apolda