Wöhlerschule

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Wöhlerschule
Wöhlerschule Gymnasium entrance and stairwell.jpg
type of school high school
founding 1870
address

Mierendorffstrasse 6

place Frankfurt am Main
country Hesse
Country Germany
Coordinates 50 ° 8 ′ 28 "  N , 8 ° 40 ′ 29"  E Coordinates: 50 ° 8 ′ 28 "  N , 8 ° 40 ′ 29"  E
carrier town Frankfurt am Main
student around 1500
Teachers about 115
management Headmistress: Renate Bleise
Deputy. Headmaster: Wolfgang H. Clößner
Website www.woehlerschule.de

The Wöhlerschule is a grammar school in the Dornbusch district of Frankfurt am Main . It was founded in 1870 by the Polytechnische Gesellschaft , a Frankfurt community foundation, and named after August Anton Wöhler (1771–1850). For many years he was the president of the Polytechnic Society, the founder of the Frankfurt vocational school system and the father of the chemist Friedrich Wöhler .

history

The old Wöhlerschule in the Westend

The original Wöhlerschule was founded in 1870 as a school for boys. The school building was then in Lessingstrasse in the Westend-Süd district of Frankfurt .

In 1991, the American literary scholar and former Wöhler student Kurt Bergel paid a visit to Frankfurt. During this visit, Angelika Rieber from the working group Traces of Jewish Life in Frankfurt , which is now the association Project Jewish Life in Frankfurt am Main, conducted a lengthy interview with him. Kurt Bergel, who from 1918 first attended the elementary level of the Wöhlerschule and then the grammar school, remembered some incidents from his school days during this interview.

One of his earliest memories concerned a bomb attack in World War I, which led to impacts in the immediate vicinity of the school building and surprised him on the way to school after the all-clear after an initial attack:

“I left the house in the morning after the signal that the danger was over was given after an attack. Then on the way to the school from Ulmenstrasse to the old Wöhlerschule [..] I was surprised by a second attack. I still remember vividly how my classmates got themselves to safety in the first, on the ground floor of the school and in the cellars, and [...] the teachers waved to me that I should stop quickly. And shortly after I entered the building, a bomb fell nearby, on Feuerbachstrasse, that hit and killed a friend of our family. [..] We experienced that as a tremendous shock. Not only because an acquaintance of the family was killed here, [..] but also because we simply thought that a civilian population was shot at. We couldn't get used to that. "

The air raid described by Kurt Bergel was probably the one on August 12, 1918: “Shortly after nine o'clock in the morning, 30 bombs fell almost simultaneously on the western city. To the right of Opernplatz and Goethestrasse to Reuterweg, to the left of Feuerbachstrasse to Wiesenau, 25 houses were more or less badly damaged: ›Screaming, seized with horror, people ran around, trying to reach the next house entrances, which are not all open were cursing the homeowners. The impacting bombs found enough victims: 12 were killed immediately, 5 seriously injured, four of whom are still deceased. 25 got away with minor injuries. ‹“ The Wöhlerschule remained unharmed.

Another event that Kurt Bergel remembered happened in 1921: “One day it became known that a pile of weapons, rifles and ammunition had been found in the cellar of the Wöhlerschule. What it turned out was that a teacher named Jung was preparing a coup, one of the many coups that existed at the time, and he was transferred to a sentence. That was all that happened. As far as I can remember, I have to say. ”The Institute for Urban History of the City of Frankfurt knows more about the case :“ On Saturday, July 16, 1921, 500 operational rifles were found in the basement of the Wöhler School - disguised as rock samples . “One of the masterminds of this action, which Bergel still remembers, was the school teacher Jung, who had already appeared before that he held exercises similar to military sports in the schoolyard in the afternoons. He fled first, but then turned himself in to the Frankfurt police and probably got away unscathed: “He frankly admitted that he had brought the weapons from the left to Frankfurt to protect against an impending coup. The City of Frankfurt's magistrate did not want to respond to such 'courageous' and patriotic behavior by initiating disciplinary proceedings against Jung. The city council made the decision to leave a decision to the district president. And with that, the affair disappeared from the public eye. It is not known whether disciplinary proceedings were initiated against Jung. ”Kurt Bergel reported a rumor that Jung had become director of the Wöhlerschule during the Nazi era. Exact clues about this are not yet known.

Despite these incidents and his retrospective assessment that a right-wing trend at school was somewhat more pronounced than other political currents, for Bergel “on the whole it was a good education that we received there at school. I've learned a lot, which means I could have learned more if I'd been more diligent in science. I was never interested in them. [..] In contrast, I was very, very good at German [..]. So, it was very clear to me that I would go into German literature professionally. [..] In addition, I was very interested in music and worked very seriously as a pianist, and it wasn't until the year I graduated from high school that I actually decided [..] that I should postpone my serious work in music. "When asked whether he had experienced discrimination during his school days, he replied:" You see, there were quite a few Jews in the Wöhler School at that time because so many Jews lived in the Westend. And in this way Jews made up quite a sizeable contingent in terms of percentage [...]. I've heard and felt anti-Semitic things occasionally, but mostly not until I graduated from high school. The teachers were correct. Even those who were politically on the right. [..] They were less Nazis than German Nationals, perhaps even some monarchists. And these people were correct towards the Jewish students. "

Kurt Bergel graduated from the Wöhlerschule in 1930.

The Wöhlerschule after 1945

During the Second World War , the old school rooms were destroyed in the air raids on Frankfurt am Main , and after the war, lessons first took place in common rooms with a neighboring Frankfurt girls' high school , the Bettinaschule . Until the move in 1957, shift lessons were later given at the Liebig School in Sophienstrasse in Frankfurt-Bockenheim .

It was not until May 1957 that the Wöhlerschule moved to its current school premises in the Dornbusch district of Frankfurt . The Wöhlerschule was still a school for boys until the 1970s . The first girls came to the Wöhlerschule in 1972.

In the late 1990s, the Wöhlerschule became known for the construction of an “eco house”, which was financed by parents' donations. In 2001, a student group investigated the life stories of Jewish Wöhler students who were murdered in the Holocaust during the Nazi era and erected 27 granite memorial stones with the names of these former students.

The school grounds

The school grounds consist of the main building, three wings and the auditorium, which the Wöhlerschule shares with the adjacent Heinrich-Seliger-Schule (primary level). The building ensemble is a listed building. On the site there are two provisional ("IPI -") buildings erected in the 1970s, a large sports hall that was added in the 1980s, the "Ökohaus" created in the 1990s from a student initiative, the cafeteria built in 2007 and the Sports hall built in 2012.

Panorama picture from the bicycle yard

Others

The school has been located in the Dornbusch district since 1957 and can be easily reached by the underground lines U1 to U3 and U8 via the Dornbusch and Fritz-Tarnow-Straße stops and also by bus line 34. 95 teachers and 12 trainee teachers currently teach grades 5 to 12 at the Wöhlerschule.

The main focuses of the school today are

  • science education,
  • ecological education,
  • Languages ​​and intercultural understanding,
    Wöhlerschule Gymnasium entrance
  • artistic and musical education,
  • new information and communication technologies.

Since July 2005 the Wöhlerschule has been one of four schools in the Interactive Schools project , which is financed by the Deutsche Telekom Foundation . In addition, the Wöhlerschule is a school in the network for sustainable development (BLK 21) and is involved as a UNESCO project school .

In the German School Prize 2010 , the Wöhlerschule was shortlisted among the top 20 of 162 participating schools from all over Germany.

The homepage of the Wöhlerschule was awarded 2nd place at the School Homepage Award 2010 out of 560 participating schools from Germany, Austria and Switzerland.

On November 8, 2014, an ARISS school contact was carried out with the International Space Station (ISS). Several students were able to ask their questions via amateur radio and received answers from the astronaut Alexander Gerst .

Well-known students and teachers

  • Friedrich Kreyziger (1818–1879) was the director of the Wöhlerschule from 1871 to 1879.
  • Carl Friedrich Gustav Vogt (1839–1886), scientist, taught from Easter 1874.
  • Karl Bücher (1847–1930), was a teacher at the Wöhlerschule from 1873 to 1878.
  • Juliuszug (1864–1925) was the director of the Wöhlerschule from 1898 to 1901.
  • Walther Rathenau (1867–1922), industrialist and foreign minister in the Weimar Republic, was a student at the Wöhlerschule.
  • Julius Höxter (1873–1944), educator and writer , was a history teacher at the Wöhlerschule.
  • Hermann Abendroth (1883–1956), conductor, student.
  • Walther Davisson (1885–1973), violinist and conductor, pupil.
  • Hans Oppermann (1886–1946), district administrator, student.
  • Gustav Doetsch (1892–1977), well-known mathematician mainly because of his development of the theory of Laplace transformation , was a student at the Wöhlerschule from 1904 to 1911.
  • Felix Weil (1898–1975) was a co-founder of the Frankfurt Institute for Social Research in the 1920s .
  • Erich Fromm (1900–1980), German psychoanalyst, philosopher and social psychologist, graduated from the Wöhlerschule in 1918.
  • Elias Canetti (1905–1994), winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature (1981), graduated from the Wöhlerschule in 1924. Canetti lived in Frankfurt am Main from 1921 to 1924.
  • Kurt Bergel (1911–2001), literary scholar and expert on the work and life of Albert Schweitzer
  • Reno Nonsens (1919–2001), cabaret artist and actor, graduated from high school in 1939.
  • Peter Bloch (1921–2008), art historian, writer and journalist. In his work Meine Lehrer (Frankfurt, 2008) portrayed some teachers of the 1930s, including Franz Schramm and Julius Höxter .
  • Alfred Grosser (* 1925), publicist, sociologist and political scientist.
  • Gisela Eckhardt (1926–2020) physicist, inventor and entrepreneur.
  • Dieter Schnebel (1930–2018), composer and theologian, taught from 1963 to 1970 as a religion teacher at the Wöhlerschule.
  • Gabriele Britz (* 1968), judge of the Federal Constitutional Court and professor of law at the University of Giessen , student.

Web links

literature

  • Elias Canetti : The torch in your ear . Carl Hanser Verlag, Munich / Vienna 1980, ISBN 3-446-17023-5 .
  • Frank Braun: Demonstration against the "last Jew" from the Wöhlerschule . Peter Bloch talks about his youth under National Socialism. Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung of July 30, 1996.
  • A pile of stones in the garden marks the end of 27 life paths. Frankfurter Rundschau from May 5, 2001.
  • Traces of life . Jewish Wöhler students; Victims of terror 1938–1945; Booklet accompanying the exhibition of the tracing group of the Wöhlerschule Frankfurt a. M .; [the exhibition accompanies the inauguration of the memorial garden on May 4, 2001 for the former students of the Wöhlerschule Frankfurt am Main who were murdered during the Nazi dictatorship]. Compiled by Waltraud Giesen and others. Wöhlerschule, Frankfurt a. M. 2001 (2nd, improved and expanded edition 2007), ISBN 3-00-007677-8 .
  • Heike Litzinger: Elaborate search for traces of Jewish students . At the Wöhlerschule a working group is researching alumni. Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung from October 15, 2001.
  • Wöhler's wild gardens. 50 years of the Wöhlerschule am Dornbusch . Wöhlerschule, Frankfurt am Main 2007, ISBN 978-3-00-022848-3 .

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Project Jewish life in Frankfurt am Main
  2. a b c d e Interview by Angelika Rieber with Professor Dr. Kurt Bergel on June 30, 1991 in Frankfurt am Main, Angelika Rieber Collection / Project Jewish Life in Frankfurt (transcript).
  3. JULIA SÖHNGEN: First Air War: When the bombs fell on Frankfurt ( Memento from February 16, 2018 in the Internet Archive ), Frankfurter Neue Presse, August 11, 2014
  4. a b A school cellar as a secret weapon depot - the weapon found in the Wöhlerschule in 1921
  5. Wöhlerschule - list of abbreviations. In: woehlerschule.de. February 6, 2017. Retrieved April 17, 2017 .
  6. http://www.woehlerschule.de/?page_id=689
  7. http://www.schulhomepage.de/topliste/award/2010/enderresult.php
  8. ↑ Radio contact with the International Space Station ISS. November 12, 2014, accessed December 21, 2014 .
  9. From the auditorium into space . In: Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung . No. 261 , November 10, 2014, p. 30 .
  10. A short radio contact into space . Students talk to the astronaut Alexander Gerst. In: Frankfurter Neue Presse . November 10, 2014, p. 14 ( online [accessed December 21, 2014]).
  11. Have a chat with the astronaut . In: Frankfurter Rundschau . November 10, 2014 ( online [accessed December 21, 2014]).
  12. School contact of the Gymnasium Wöhlerschule . In: DARC (ed.): CQ DL . No. 2 , February 2015, ISSN  0178-269X , p. 67-68 .
  13. Alfred Grosser, see paragraph on April 1, 1933 on: juedische-pflegegeschichte.de
  14. Univ.-Prof. Dr. iur. Gabriele Britz. In: uni-giessen.de. Retrieved January 28, 2019 .