Wilhelm Jannasch

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Wilhelm Jannasch as a young pastor in Lübeck (1914)

Wilhelm Jannasch (born April 8, 1888 in Gnadenfrei , Reichenbach district , province of Silesia ; † June 6, 1966 in Frankfurt am Main ) was an active Evangelical Lutheran pastor in the Confessing Church and founding dean of the Faculty of Evangelical Theology at the University of Mainz .

Life

Wilhelm Jannasch grew up in Ober Peilau, a settlement of the Moravian Brethren . After initially attending the Theological Seminary of the Brethren, he decided to study Protestant theology in Marburg , Bonn , Berlin and Heidelberg . There he was in 1914 with a thesis on Erdmuthe Dorothea von Zinzendorf for licentiate in theology doctorate .

Lübeck

The Andreas Wilms House

When Paul Lütge became the main pastor of the Lübeck Aegidienkirche in 1914 , Jannasch was appointed to the vacated position of second pastor. With the outbreak of the First World War , he was transferred to the front as a naval pastor for its duration . There he met the Lübeck regiment in Knocke in 1918 . After Lütge died in December 1921, he was appointed his successor.

During the years of his parish in Lübeck, Jannasch quickly developed into an expert on local church history, especially the history of the Reformation in the Hanseatic city. His historical work, for example on the history of church services in Lübeck, had an extremely practical orientation: shaped by the older liturgical movement , Jannasch wanted to regain the popular character of the church of the 16th century. To this end, he introduced liturgical and church music celebrations , experimented with Low German as the language of worship and was involved in the hymn book discussion . It is thanks to his support that the Low German nativity play developed by Paul Brockhaus found its place in St. Aegidien under the rood screen, where it is performed annually by the Katharineum in Lübeck to this day .

Jannasch was also interested in the contemporary artistic design of the church. The design of the north chapel with glass paintings by Curt Stoermers , which he promoted , was destroyed by an aerial mine during the bombing raid on Lübeck on Palm Sunday 1942 . In order to better reach the part of the community outside the old town island, he had the Andreas-Wilms -Haus built in 1930/31 as a community and club house.

Church struggle

Jannasch belonged to the Pastors' Emergency League and the Confessing Church from the beginning and was far more radical than his Lübeck brothers. Because of his harsh criticism, the Evangelical Lutheran Church in the Lübeck state suspended him from July to October 1933 and forced him to retire in 1934. He was arrested again in 1935 because of the “illegal” continuation of his pastoral activities.

He was then taken out of Lübeck by the leadership of the Pastors' Emergency Association and used in travel and lecture services. From 1936 Jannasch worked for the provisional church leadership of the German Evangelical Church , the governing body of the radical wing of the Confessing Church in Berlin-Dahlem . In this role, he handed over the memorandum he had worked out with Hitler's State Secretary Otto Meissner , which denounced various legal violations by the regime, on June 4, 1936 in the Reich Chancellery .

Trip Threshold Handjerystr. 20th

From 1937 onwards, with interruptions due to arrests, he was the managing director of the Pastors' Emergency Association. From 1940 he looked after himself in the hall of the Goßner mission in Handjerystr. assembling BK community Friedenau . In 1942 he was sentenced to two months' imprisonment for a sermon on Martin Niemöller's 50th birthday.

university

In 1946 Wilhelm Jannasch was appointed to the chair for practical theology at the newly emerging Johannes Gutenberg University in Mainz through Niemöller's initiative . At the same time as the professorship, he took over the office of dean of the Evangelical Theological Faculty. As a result, he shaped the early years in appointment negotiations, efforts to find endowed professorships and the clarification of the relationship between the young faculty and the surrounding regional churches .

In 1950 Jannasch received an honorary theological doctorate from Heidelberg University. He became co-editor of the journal proclamation and research , supervisor of the practical theology department of the lexicon Religion in Past and Present (RGG), for the 3rd edition of which he himself wrote 116 articles, and member of the regional synod of Ev. Church in Hesse and Nassau .

Works (selection)

  • Erdmuthe Dorothea Countess von Zinzendorf, née Countess Reuss zu Plauen, portrayed her life as a contribution to the history of Pietism and the Brethren. Theol. Diss., Heidelberg 1914. Association f. Brother history of Herrnhut. Brother history journal. Herrnhut 8.1914. University bookstore, Gnadau 1915.
  • History of the Lutheran service in Lübeck. From the beginning of the Reformation to the end of Lower Saxony as the language of worship (1522-1633). Klotz, Gotha 1928.
  • German church documents. The attitude of the Confessing Church in the Third Reich , Zollikon-Zurich: Evang. Publisher 1946.
  • Has the Church been silent? Collection of material on the question of the position of the Confessing Church to the Third Reich. St. Michael, Frankfurt / M. 1946.
  • History of the Reformation in Lübeck from St. Peter's Indulgence to the Augsburg Reichstag 1515-1530. Publications on the history of the Hanseatic city of Lübeck. Vol. 16. Schmidt-Römhild, Lübeck 1958.
  • Wilhelm Jannasch, Martin Schmidt (ed.): The age of Pietism. Schünemann, Bremen 1965, Wuppertal 1988 (reprint). ISBN 3-417-24115-4

literature

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Otto Dziobek : History of the Infantry Regiment Lübeck (3rd Hanseatic) No. 162 . 1st edition. Lübeck 1922.
  2. ↑ Online at geschichte-bk-sh.de .
  3. ^ Jannasch: German Church Documents ... , Zollikon-Zurich: Evang. Verlag 1946, pp. 20-31.
personal data
SURNAME Jannasch, Wilhelm
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German Evangelical Lutheran theologian
DATE OF BIRTH April 8, 1888
PLACE OF BIRTH Free of mercy , Reichenbach district (Owl Mountains)
DATE OF DEATH June 6, 1966
Place of death Frankfurt am Main