Walter Rohn

Walter Rohn (born November 12, 1911 in Reichenberg / Bohemia, today Liberec / Czech Republic; † October 21, 1997 in Wuppertal ) was a German lawyer and pioneer in executive training. For the first time in Germany he used the computer-aided business simulation game from 1961. As the founder of the European Business Game Forum, he significantly promoted the use of business games in adult education.

Life and career

Walter Ernst Rohn was born as the son of the teacher and later Lord Mayor of Reichenberg Eduard Rohn and the housewife Anna Rohn, nee. Harrer born. He was married and had four children. From 1930/31 he studied law at the German Karl Ferdinand University in Prague (the German part of the former Charles University), which he obtained with a doctorate. jur. Graduated in 1937. He was committed to the peaceful coexistence of Czechs and (Sudeten) Germans in Czechoslovakia and was politically persecuted for this by being criminalized as an alleged homosexual. Since he was German after the occupation of the Czechoslovak Sudetenland by the German Reich in 1938, he was drafted into the Wehrmacht in 1943. He did his military service on the island of Rhodes , which was occupied by Germany, from February 1944. While working as an interpreter in the command staff, he got to know the island and published a travel guide about the island of Rhodes after the war. Following Germany's surrender, he was held in British captivity in a camp on the Suez Canal in Egypt until February 1948 . After his release from captivity, he moved to Germany and worked as a personnel manager in several companies before moving to the Technical Academy Wuppertal (TAW) in 1959 , where - most recently as deputy director - he set up and headed the institute for leadership. After leaving the company, he founded the German Business Game Center in 1981, which was dedicated to promoting business games and organized the European Business Game Forum that it founded every year from 1985 to 1994.

Social work

Commitment to peaceful coexistence between Czechs and Germans

The nationality conflict between Czechs and (Sudeten) Germans in Bohemia, which smoldered after the First World War, aroused his socio-political interest. From this grew his membership in the Sudeten German Comradeship Association for National and Social Political Education (KB), which was founded in 1921 as a group within the Wandervogels and had been registered under this name since 1930. The KB, which was founded by Heinz Rutha and Walter Heinrich - influenced by the work of Stefan Georges - formed the intellectual center of the Sudeten Germans in Czechoslovakia before integration into National Socialist Germany, had up to 200 members and was officially dissolved in 1935. He represented a spiritually and culturally determined concept of nationality and was thus ideologically and politically in sharp contrast to the racist theory of National Socialism ; The political goal was a federal state system based on the teachings of Othmar Spann , whereby u. a. the conflicts between the ethnic groups of Czechs and (Sudeten) Germans should be overcome; it should be autonomous, i.e. independent of Germany. As a student in Prague, he was a member and guild master of the “Pedagogical Community” guild body at the university there, which was an academic offshoot of the KB. The guilds were student bodies of the German Gymnastics Association (DTV). From 1935 onwards they were in fierce competition with the nationalist student associations, in particular with the student union of the National Socialist “Aufbruch” group. From 1935 he was a member of the Sudeten German Party (SdP) and founding editor of the newly founded Sudeten German monthly “People and Leadership”. After the radicalization of the magazine Die Junge Front from 1934 onwards, Volk undführung was the organ of publication of the - officially dissolved - KB as well as the traditionalists of the SdP and the DTV from April 1935. The magazine had violent arguments with radicals and National Socialists and advocated international understanding and the integration of different cultures.

Due to reports in the Czech media about homosexual activities by Heinz Rutha , the co-founder of the SdP and the KB, who was considered politically moderate, he and 11 young men belonging to the KB were arrested by the Czech police on October 6, 1937, including one Walter Rohn. It was not clarified whether the Czech police were appropriately instrumentalized by the National Socialists through reports in the media. In all cases the pretext for arrest was the suspicion of a homosexual crime (according to Section 129b of the Austrian Criminal Code: fornication with persons of the same sex). In the trial before the court in Böhmisch-Leipa he was sentenced on December 9, 1937 to eight months' imprisonment, presumably with suspension on probation, and then expelled from the SdP. Heinz Rutha committed suicide in the judicial prison of Böhmisch-Leipa on the night of November 4th to 5th, 1937.

After the annexation of the Sudetenland to the German Reich, an arrest by the German police and imprisonment in the Dresden court prison took place in April 1939 because of - as he himself said - "political allegations". As part of the Dresden trials , National Socialism took action against the Sudeten German supporters of Othmar Spann, the so-called Spannkreis , and arrested around 300 men; This often happened under the pretext of violating Section 175 of the German Criminal Code (homosexual acts). Due to a personal request from his father Eduard Rohn to Heinrich Himmler, the chief of the German police, he was released in December 1939. This spared him a fate like his friend Walter Brand , who spent six years in concentration camps after his arrest in the Dresden trials.

Commitment to Europe

The war and the expulsion made him homeless as a Sudeten German. Only the unification of Europe seemed to him to be able to secure lasting peace. He became an active member of the Europa-Union Deutschland (EUD), which sought to unite the free peoples of Europe. In addition to lecturing at her events, he represented her as a German delegate at the 2nd Hague European Congress (October 8-10, 1953). He published a meticulous collection of facts and figures in the paperback Europa organizes itself, a picture book for Europeans , which appeared in six updated editions until 1966.

Pedagogical work

On March 1, 1959, he moved from his position as HR manager in industry to the Technical Academy Wuppertal (TA) with the aim of establishing an institute for leadership teaching in TA and developing a management seminar for middle and senior executives to complement the existing seminar program. This management seminar, the so-called FFK seminar, was introduced in 1961 and expanded into a 6-week, 5-phase seminar with accommodation in the mid-1960s; The participants were initially accommodated externally in Hohenscheid Castle near Solingen, and later in the TA's own new building in Wuppertal. The seminar with its holistic management approach contained an innovative, group-psychologically oriented seminar module in cooperation with the Dutch Pedagogical Institute (NPI), which only became common property in Germany much later. This made the FFK seminar known beyond the economy, so that u. a. the junior staff of the Federal Foreign Office also regularly took part in the higher service. The FFK seminar broke new ground above all in that it focused on the first computer-aided business simulation in Germany; The IBM 650 tube computer with magnetic drum storage, which was the first computer to be produced in series , initially served as the mainframe for market and company simulation. Walter Rohn has "... done pioneering work in the field of business simulation games".

After resigning as deputy head of TA, Walter Rohn founded the "Deutsche Managementspielzentrale" (DPSZ) in 1981 in order to systematically promote the dissemination of the simulation game in Germany. “In the years that followed, she determined the institutional level for simulation games in Germany. It… developed… over the years into an information and advice center for all aspects of simulation games. ”From 1985 it was the organizer of the German and later the European Simulation Game Forum as an annual event that developed into the central meeting point for providers, users and scientists , initially in the Walberberg Monastery near Bonn, later in the Dorint Hotel in Bad Neuenahr. At the age of 83 he organized and directed the “10th European Business Game Forum ”in Bad Neuenahr. The success of this event continues to this day; It is now organized by SAGSAGA (Swiss Austrian German Simulation And Gaming Association) every two years together with the Center for Management Simulation (ZMS) of the DHBW Stuttgart . It is the largest manufacturer-independent specialist forum on the topic of business simulation.

Publications

• Ed., People and Leadership, Independent Sudeten German Monthly Issues for Politics and Education. Prague, June 1935 - September 1938
• Rhodes. Goldstadt Travel Guide, Volume 22, 6th revised edition, Goldstadt-Verlag, Pforzheim 1972, English translation: Goldstadt Travel Guide Rhodos, 1970
• Management decisions in the business simulation. W. Girardet publishing house, Essen 1964
• Europe is organizing itself. Erich Schmidt Verlag, Berlin 6th edition 1966 (series number pictures from politics / economy / culture special issue 3 - a number picture book for Europeans)
• Methodology and didactics of the simulation game. Deutscher Instituts-Verlag, Cologne 1980 (series of articles on social and educational policy, vol. 50) ISBN 3-88054-587-1 .
• German simulation game overview. Self-published, 5th edition 1996
• Literature list Management game and simulation: publications on business games, decision simulations, model constructions, game theory, system theory, management: structure and process, teaching methodology and learning process, management didactics and related areas , self-published, 5th edition 1993

Individual evidence

1. ^ Andreas Luh: The German gymnastics association in the First Czechoslovak Republic . Oldenbourg Verlag, Munich 1988, p. 260, 376 .
2. ↑ Helmut Kellershohn: In "Service to the National Socialist Revolution", The German Guild and their relationship to National Socialism . In: Yearbook of the Archives of the German Youth Movement . tape 19 (1999-2004) . Wochenschau Verlag, Schwalbach / Taunus 2004, p. 25, 28 .
3. ^ Andreas Luh: The German gymnastics association in the First Czechoslovak Republic . Oldenbourg Verlag, Munich 1988, p. 249 .
4. ^ Andreas Luh: The German gymnastics association in the First Czechoslovak Republic . Oldenbourg Verlag, Munich 1988, p. 244 .
5. ^ Mark Cornwall: The Devil's Wall: the nationalist youth mission of Heinz Rutha . Harvard University Press, 2012, pp. 260 f .
6. ↑ Jasmin Raffoul: Comparative analysis of business game research in English and German-speaking countries . In: Friedrich Trautwein et al. (Ed.): Business games - developments and perspectives: Review of the German Business Game Prize 2010 . Books on Demand GmbH, Norderstedt 2010, p. 189 ff .
7. ^ Sebastian Hitzler et al .: Status quo of the European business game scene . In: Friedrich Trautwein et al. (Ed.): Business games - developments and perspectives: Review of the German Business Game Prize 2010 . Books on Demand GmbH, Norderstedt 2010, p. 221 .
8. ^ Nils Högsdal: A short history of the business game - the development from antiquity to the information age. March 4, 2013, accessed December 6, 2018 .