Wilhelm Ernst Barkhoff

Wilhelm Ernst Barkhoff (born June 26, 1916 in Kamp-Lintfort ; † September 30, 1994 in Bochum ) was a German lawyer, banker, social reformer and anthroposophist. He was the founder of the anthroposophically oriented banking system, co-founder of the GLS Bank , inspirer for ethical investment and a major reformer of German welfare work .

Life

Wilhelm Ernst Barkoff was the son of a miner in the Ruhr area . Due to the constant unrest in this area, he was very interested in political and social issues, but above all in philosophical and spiritual ideas and ideals. The concept of transubstantiation became a fundamental ideal for him, which he did not understand in the ecclesiastical and religious sense, but tried to realize it in the social sphere, in money and banking, in agriculture and care.

He studied law in Cologne, Freiburg and Berlin, was then drafted as an officer into the military service, where he was badly wounded by a grenade on the Russian front . In doing so, he had his first out-of-body experience - something that was repeated during the escape from Russia on foot.

During the war he married Ottilie Grave from Bocholt . The first son was born in 1945, had Down syndrome and only lived eleven months. They later had three other sons and a daughter.

After the second state examination in 1948, he became a lawyer and ran one of the leading law firms in Bochum. The couple maintained close ties with artists from the Bochum Art Association.

In 1956 he joined the board of directors of the Rudolf Steiner School in the Ruhr Area, which was to be founded and was looking for a lawyer. At that time, the school was implemented contrary to the moratorium on the establishment of schools decided by the Federation of Independent Waldorf Schools . This initiative became the starting point for public anthroposophical life in the Ruhr area, and the school soon became the Waldorf school with the largest number of pupils in the world. The Institute for Waldorf Education in Annen later emerged from her. In order to finance the school, Barkhoff invented the “ loan association ”, which, through solidarity-based bundling of the financial strength of individual people, gave even those with limited financial means access to bank loans. This is how anthroposophical banking was born. Through his work on the board, he met his future anthroposophical colleagues such as Gisela Reuther, Klaus Fintelmann, Klaus Dumke and Franz Schily. Gisela Reuther had her own tax office, which she connected with his law firm. As a result of the cooperation, the anthroposophical banking system developed from the loan guarantee associations. The Friedrich von Hardenberg House in Bochum, supported by Dieter Lauenstein and Barkhoff and others, became a center of anthroposophical student life in the 1970s after Bochum became a university town.

The development of the new forms of financing and his gift of connecting people in a joint work brought him into contact with curative education , especially in an intensive collaboration with Karl König and the Camphill movement, but also with Siegfried Schmock and the Wuppertal initiatives.

Soon there was also financial security and the expansion of biodynamic agriculture . In order to replace the destructive principle of dividing up the inheritance, he invented the non-profit agricultural research societies as sponsors of the farms. The farms should want to do more than “just” (agricultural) business and aim for and take on tasks in curative education, child or adult education, landscape and communal development or research, etc. He wanted to create instruments for new forms of community so that the blood relationship, which until then had shaped and supported agriculture, could be replaced as a social binding agent. For example, he advised Manfred Klett and his employees on setting up the Dottenfelder Hof , a "rural commune" on a high professional and human level. He helped the Bauck farms (Nicolaus Remer, Joachim Bauck) from the ancestral property of the Bauck family, who continued to run the farms, to socialize. Up to now, around a hundred such institutions have emerged.

The non-profit trust agency was founded as banking institutions in 1961, the non-profit credit guarantee cooperative in 1967 and the GLS community bank in Bochum in 1974 . In 1968 Rolf Kerler joined the Barkhoff / Reuther team. Through the Heidenheimer Kreis, a working group of industrialists around Hanns Voith and Peter von Siemens who sought to promote the anthroposophical social impulse, he came into collaboration with Alfred Rexroth , who, as a founder, made a significant contribution to equipping and realizing the banking facilities.

In addition to his activities in the anthroposophical scene, Barkhoff began working for the German welfare system in the 1960s. In 1961, Barkhoff became state chairman of the German Parity Welfare Association for North Rhine-Westphalia . At that time the association was hardly noticed behind the state ( Red Cross ) and ideologically bound associations ( Caritas , Inner Mission, Workers' Welfare). Welfare was the responsibility of the state and the church. Free initiatives and start-ups based on the social impulses of individuals were not considered to be the actual form of the welfare enterprise. That has changed completely today. Wilhelm-Ernst Barkhoff was largely responsible for this development.

The emancipation initiatives of parents of disabled children, the student and women's movement, self-help groups in the health sector, as well as free initiatives by the unemployed and social welfare recipients brought growth to the Paritätischer Wohlfahrtsverband Nordrhein-Westfalen, which quintupled its membership under Barkhoff's leadership between 1961 and 1981. As a member of the federal executive committee, he asserted that the greatest social bonding forces arise from belief in the individual, in the individual; that an association that has the courage to compete conceptually and spiritually with its members becomes stronger and not weaker than ideological ties and obligations can make it. Barkhoff achieved that the Paritätische Wohlfahrtsverband opened up for the social revolutionary ideas of the 1968 movement. He gave them a field of activity and new challenges. The Paritätische Geldberatung (Paritätische Geldberatung) was the new financing instrument that he created for the Paritätischer Wohlfahrtsverband as the appropriate means for social work.

From 1981 onwards, Barkoff only worked as a speaker, initiator and consultant and in this spirit made many trips to North and South America. Above all, he was repeatedly invited to Scandinavia, where together with Margit Engel from Camphill Norway and Ake Kumlander he took up funding initiatives.

Publications

• Wilhelm Ernst Barkhoff: We can love whoever we want . Free Spiritual Life, Stuttgart 1995, ISBN 9783772512353 .
• with Hans Börnsen and Gerhard Kienle: The endangered self. Man in the crisis of knowing. Free Spiritual Life, Stuttgart 1980, ISBN 3-7725-0725-5 .
• with Sönke Bai and Michael Bockemühl: The Rudolf Steiner School in the Ruhr Area. Rowohlt, Reinbek near Hamburg 1976, ISBN 3-499-16985-1 .
• Reinhard Giese (Hrsg.): Acting socially, from the knowledge of the social whole Social threefolding today. Verlag Reinharf Giese, Rabel 1980, ISBN 3-922683-01-0 .

Web links

• History of the GLS Bank 1956-2014
• Article in Forum for Sustainable Management
• Portrait of Wilhelm Ernst Barkhoff of Barkhoff & Partner, Solicitors
• Charitable trust agency, Hamburg
• History of Social Banking on GLS Bank's Homepage

credentials

1. ^ Wilhelm Ernst Barkhoff - Biographical entry in the online documentation of the anthroposophical research center Kulturimpuls
2. ↑ Barkhoff und Partner law firm ( Memento of the original from April 6, 2015 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice.