Werner Kindt

Werner Kindt (born July 5, 1898 in Stralsund , † January 2, 1981 in Hamburg ) was a German journalist . During the Weimar Republic he was involved in leading positions in the Bundischen youth movement and after the Second World War he published the three-volume “ Documentation of the Youth Movement ”, which was long considered a standard work. Kindt recently demonstrated not only a one-sided selection of sources, but also deliberate manipulation.

Life

Kindt went to school in Hamburg and Lübeck . In 1909 he joined the Alt-Wandervogel in Hamburg and in 1912 the Wandervogel e. V. From 1914 to 1916 he volunteered for a Hamburg insurance company. From January 1917 he fought in the First World War . He fell on 20 November 1917 during the Battle of Cambrai in British captivity . During his imprisonment he was an interpreter and camp manager in the prisoner of war camp.

At the end of 1919 Kindt returned to Hamburg and began studying education and economics there. In the meantime, he also studied in Marburg , but dropped out to become a journalist. In 1920 he joined the Bund Deutscher Wanderer , but above all he was involved in the Wandervogel e. V. Here he was Gauleiter Niederelbe and a member of the federal government. After the dissolution of the Wandervogel, he founded the Wandervogel, Gau Nordmark , which in 1923 integrated into the alliance of free Wandervogel . Via the Wandervogel, the German Youth Association , which he integrated into the Association of Wandering Birds and Scouts , Kindt finally came to the German Freischar . He represented the German Freischar in the so-called “Spandauer Kreis der Bündische Jugend”, a contact committee that was created on the initiative of Heinz Dähnhardt ( Young National Association ). Kindt was also instrumental in founding the Bündische Gesellschaft Berlin in 1929, another cross-union initiative that organized political events with speakers such as Adolf Reichwein and Hans Zehrer . After all, he was one of the founders of the Political Guild of the German Freischar , which should serve the political education of the federal government.

During this time, Kindt worked in key press organs of the youth movement as a journalist and editor. In 1926 he founded the Bundische newspaper service Wille und Werk , which he also published. From 1927 to 1931 he was also the successor of Friedrich Fulda as editor of the discourse. Weekly newspaper of the German youth movement , an all-encompassing publication that combined traveling romanticism, life reform and national-conservative or national-revolutionary political approaches. In 1930/31 he published the features correspondence People of Tomorrow .

Kindt got involved in September 1930 for the transformation of the DDP into the German State Party . The German Freischar had allied themselves with the Greater German Youth Association (GDJ) only a few months earlier . The fact that Kindt and another leading member of the German Freischar had signed the call to found a party was the reason for the break between the "old" German Freischar and the GDJ.

After the National Socialist seizure of power , Kindt was one of those leading leaders of the Bundestag youth who tried to portray the Bundestag youth as a pioneer and forerunner of the Hitler Youth . Kindt wrote a contribution to the anthology Deutsche Jugend (1934) edited by Will Vesper and took over its editing. He justified his collaboration after the Second World War by saying that this anthology was actually a “real resistance document”. They wanted to publish a book on the history of the bourgeois youth movement and only for reasons of "camouflage" let it end with praise of the Hitler Youth by Hans Friedrich Blunck . From today's perspective, however, the book is rated as a “document [...] of the youth movement's readiness to adapt”.

In January 1934, Kindt joined the Reichsbund Volkstum und Heimat (Reichsbund Volkstum und Heimat) , under which he - according to his own account after conflicts with the Hitler Youth and the Reich Youth Leadership - published his youth press service Wille und Werk as the press service of the German Young Team . In the Reichsbund, which was sponsored by Rudolf Hess , allies who were critical of National Socialism gathered without fundamentally fighting it. In terms of content, Wille und Werk tried to legitimize the integration of the Bundestag youth into National Socialism. On January 4, 1934 Kindt wrote: "The former members of the Bund Youth are very grateful and happy that this synthesis has become possible thanks to the victory of the National Socialist revolution in the new empire." Kindts attitude is by Matthias von Hellfeld as "resigned self-sacrifice" described.

After the dissolution of the Reichsbund in February 1935, Kindt went into business for himself and bought the Berlin Cultural Policy Service . In October 1936 he was expropriated, according to his own statements, while the NS student union shut down both of its press services. The extent to which Kindt was actually put under pressure can no longer be fully clarified. Between 1937 and 1940, Kindt earned his living as a freelance journalist. In 1940 he joined the central editorial office of the German news agency for overseas Transocean , where he worked as a translator until the end of the war.

After the end of the war, Kindt returned to Hamburg and in May 1945 took over the management of a youth home in Hamburg for homeless young people from eastern Germany who were usually discharged from the Wehrmacht . In 1946 he became a consultant for folk culture at the Hamburg cultural authority . In 1947 he was one of the founders of the Freideutschen Kreis , a collective organization for former members of the Bundische youth movement, and became editor of the Freideutschen Blätter , later the joint news bulletin of the Freideutschen Kreise and the Ludwigstein Youth Castle Association . Finally, in 1950, he took over the management of the press office of the Hamburg State Labor Office and, in 1951, was also the educational director of the Hamburg unemployment training center .

The "Documentation of the Youth Movement"

In 1958, the Freideutsche Kreis Hamburg founded the "Joint Documentation of the Youth Movement" in order to realize the long-cherished plan of publishing their own work on the history of the youth movement in the form of source volumes. A scientific commission was appointed to accompany the event, initially under the direction of Theodor Schier , then Günther Franz . Kindt, who had been very committed to this project beforehand, was commissioned with the edition of the source collection and won Theodor Wilhelm for the introduction. Between 1963 and 1974 the documentation of the youth movement appeared in three volumes , which still serves as a reference work on the history of the youth movement and is at the same time a self-portrayal of the same. Kindt received an honorary doctorate from the Philosophical Faculty of the University of Hamburg for his work .

From the beginning it was about "a public relations project of the youth movements for their movement, with which their own experiences should be organized and institutionalized." Since the end of the 1950s, the youth movement was mainly by the publicist Harry Pross because of its rejection of the Weimar Republic has been criticized. Kindt justified the attitude of the youth movement by saying that the state and parties were "calcified" at the time. Even Karl Otto Paetel had not least the approval of some bündischer youth leaders to Nazism and Kindts of loyalty in will and work pointed out. Faced with such criticism, Kindt organized the edition in such a way that the actors involved in the bourgeois youth movement no longer appeared vulnerable. According to Ann-Katrin Thomm, the actors involved in the youth movement succeeded in organizing and institutionalizing memories of the bourgeois youth movement with the help of the source editions, “[a] ls 'memory cartel'. [...] They succeeded in leaving a memorial for the bourgeois youth movement and its representatives for posterity. "

Kindt's edition of documents and writings of the youth movement soon provoked sharp criticism. The question was raised why Kindt only edited already published sources instead of also using archival sources. In addition, representatives of the left spectrum of the youth movement were missing, such as Max Hodann and his Central Workplace for Youth Movement . The historian Michael H. Kater suspected as early as 1977 “that Kindt [...] must have been guided by the desire for self-portrayal of a youth to which he finally belonged and with whom he is still as unwilling to criticize as most of his brotherhoods identified. ”He also warned that Kindt, even in his newspaper service, had demonstrably not always neatly edited Wille und Werk .

In the meantime, the social pedagogue Christian Niemeyer has actually proven to Kindt that the sources have been purposefully and deliberately cut or manipulated. It was already known that Kindt de facto censored early documents of the youth movement, for example by publishing the forewords of various editions of the popular song collection Der Zupfgeigenhansl , but withholding the "commitment to the nation" in the war edition . Niemeyer finds further evidence of tendentious work in the shortened depiction of representatives of the right-wing spectrum, such as the völkisch anti-Semitic writer Hermann Burte . He describes Kindt's comments on the völkisch wing of the youth movement, such as the Bund Artam and the founder of the Hakenkreuz Verlag , Bruno Tanzmann , or the silence of Willibald Hentschel , as incidental or misleading . Using the example of anti-Semitically motivated criticism, which the reform pedagogue Karl Wilker and the Viennese teacher Bruno Immendörffer exerted on Gustav Wyneken and Siegfried Bernfeld in the Wandervogelführer newspaper in 1913/14 , Niemeyer shows how misleading citation is . In his 1968 reprint, Kindt omitted the wording that the “Kreis um Wyneken” was “an organization to combat and eradicate German moral values” and the remark that Bernfeld “probably did not claim to be German himself”. Niemeyer comes to the conclusion that the Kindt edition should only be consulted with great caution.

"What Kindt intended with his way of processing the material seems clear: he systematically trivialized - with the help of his assistants - the völkisch motives in the pre-war youth movement and made the equally German and aggressively anti-Semitic motives of the Wyneken and Bernfeld critics as unrecognizable as possible."

- Christian Niemeyer : Werner Kindt and the "Documentation of the Youth Movement"

Niemeyer therefore interprets the documentation as an attempt to leave behind a politically embellished image of the youth movement , especially for critics such as Walter Laqueur , Karl Otto Paetel and Harry Pross: “Kindt had, even if it was only through clever text selection, fudged the second volume of his documentation that interpretations like those by Laqueur or Pross were impossible for the future. ”Instead, Niemeyer demands that the“ pre-fascist jungle ”( Uwe Puschner ) also be included in the presentation and analysis of the youth movement.

Fonts

• The tent camp book of the wandering bird, Gau Nordmark. Edited by Werner Kindt. The White Knight , Potsdam 1925.
• The Sturm und Drang of the post-war migratory bird. A contribution to the federal history of the EV , [Hamburg-Fuhlsbüttel] 1926.
• Against the current. Stories from the young wandering bird. Greifenverlag , Rudolstadt in Thuringia 1927.
• People of tomorrow. Zwiesagsverlag, (Rudolstadt 1929-30).
• Academic proletariat . In: trade union monthly books , vol. 2 (1951), no. 6, pp. 325-330.
• Five years of unemployment education, Hamburg. A statement of accounts with the participation of numerous employees of the plant edited by Werner Kindt. Note, Hamburg 1955.
• Life skills and leadership in the unemployed education center in Hamburg. In: cultural work. 7, No. 12 1955, pp. 232-235.
• Freideutscher Kreis Hamburg eV Freideutscher Kreis Hamburg e. V., Hamburg 1956.
• Hans Dehmel, Heinz Gruber and Werner Kindt: Press review of the Meissnertag. 1963. For the main committee of the Meissner day in cooperation with Hans Dehmel and Heinz Gruber ed. by Werner Kindt. [Munich] 1964.
• and Karl Vogt (ed.): The Meissnertag 1963. Speeches and forewords. Diederichs, Düsseldorf 1964.
• (Hrsg.): Hermann creates. A life's work. Stauda, ​​Kassel 1966.
• (Ed.): Documentation of the youth movement . 3 volumes:
  • Volume I: Basic scripts of the German youth movement . Diederichs, Düsseldorf 1963
  • Volume II: The Wandervogelzeit. Sources for the German youth movement 1896 to 1919. Diederichs, Düsseldorf 1968
  • Volume III: The German Youth Movement 1920 to 1933. The Bündische Zeit . Diederichs, Düsseldorf 1974. ISBN 3-424-00527-4 .

literature

• Heinrich Steinbrinker: co-creator and chronicler of the youth movement. Werner Kindt (1898–1981) . In: Yearbook of the Archives of the German Youth Movement . tape 13 . Wochenschau, 1981, ISSN  0587-5277 , p. 147-153 .
• Christian Niemeyer : Werner Kindt and the "Documentation of the Youth Movement" . Text and source critical observations. In: Historical youth research NF . No. 2 . Wochenschau, 2005, ISSN  1863-1185 , p. 230-250 .
• Christian Niemeyer: Youth Movement and National Socialism . In: Journal of Religious and Intellectual History . No. 57 . Brill, 2005, ISSN  0044-3441 , pp. 337-365 .
• Christian Niemeyer: Werner Kindt in his capacity as chronicler of the youth movement . In: Gisela Hauss, Susanne Maurer (eds.): Migration, flight and exile in the mirror of social work . Haupt, Bern 2010, ISBN 978-3-258-07559-4 , pp. 227-248 .
• Ann-Katrin Thomm: Old youth movement, new democracy . The Free German District of Hamburg in the early Federal Republic of Germany. Wochenschau, Schwalbach 2010, ISBN 978-3-89974-576-4 .

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Hans-Christian Brandenburg: The history of the HJ. Paths and wrong turns of a generation. 2nd edition, Cologne 1982, p. 68.
2. ↑ Thomm, Alte Jugendbewegung , pp. 169 f., 310, 313.
3. ↑ Werner Kindt (ed.): Basic writings of the German youth movement. Düsseldorf 1963, p. 569.
4. ^ Matthias von Hellfeld : Bündische Jugend and Hitlerjugend. On the history of adaptation and resistance 1930–1939. Cologne 1987, pp. 117, 84, 151.
5. ↑ Thomm, Alte Jugendbewegung , p. 302.
6. ↑ Steinbrinker, Mitgestalter , p. 153.
7. ↑ Thomm, Alte Jugendbewegung , p. 320.
8. ↑ Thomm, Alte Jugendbewegung , pp. 275–359, cited above. 368, 376.
9. ^ Karl O. Paetel: Youth in the decision. 1913-1933-1945. 2nd edition, Bad Godesberg 1963, p. 164.
10. ↑ Thomm, Alte Jugendbewegung , pp. 275–359; Niemeyer, did Hitler come out of nowhere? , Pp. 45-50.
11. ↑ Thomm, Alte Jugendbewegung , pp. 275–359, cited above. 368, 376.
12. ↑ Michael Kater: The unmanaged youth movement. To new books by Rudolf Kneip, Werner Kindt and Hansjoachim W. Koch. In: Archive for Social History 17 (1977), p. 563. online
13. ^ Historical youth research NF 2 (2005), p. 236.
14. ↑ Christian Niemeyer: Did Hitler come out of nowhere? - or: A case of defense against reflection: On the theoretical-political significance of the documentation of the youth movement by Werner Kindt for the humanities (social) education. In: Volker Kraft (Ed.): Between reflection, function and performance. Facets of educational science. Bad Heilbrunn 2007, pp. 50, 62.