Wilhelm Kuchenmüller

from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Wilhelm Kuchenmüller (born 1900 ; died 1998 ) was a German classical philologist , teacher and director of the Birklehof boarding school .

Wilhelm Kuchenmüller studied classical philology in Basel with Peter from the Mühll and in Berlin , where he in 1928 with the work reliquiae Philetae Coi at Ludwig Deubner received his doctorate. Even before his doctorate, Kuchenmüller worked as a teacher for Latin and Greek at the Schloss Salem boarding school founded by Kurt Hahn in 1920 . One of his students there was Golo Mann . He then headed the Hohenfels branch school , established in 1931 , before taking over the management of the Birklehof boarding school established in 1932 at Kurt Hahn's suggestion in 1933 , which he held until 1944.

In the early 1920s, Kuchenmüller was close to the NSDAP . In 1925, he was dismissed from the civil service because of a speech directed against the Weimar Republic , and shortly afterwards Kurt Hahn brought him back to Salem as an employed teacher. In 1932 he finally joined the NSDAP. When Kurt Hahn was arrested as a Jew after the National Socialist seizure of power in 1933 , Wilhelm Kuchenmüller - like many others - nevertheless advocated Hahn's immediate release. For this advocacy, he was expelled from the party in 1933, but was soon resumed because of his services to the party.

His role as headmaster during the National Socialist era has not been fully clarified to this day. In the first few years at least, Kuchenmüller succeeded in protecting school operations from Nazi conformity and continuing to teach Jewish students. Politically persecuted teachers also remained employed at the school. Kuchenmüller continued to pursue Hahn's concept of educating students to take responsibility for themselves, even though Nazi youth organizations such as the Hitler Youth were represented at the school as early as 1933 . With the beginning of the Second World War , Kuchenmüller began to prepare his students for the war and changed the educational concept of the Birklehof, at the center of which he placed “soldierhood as an idea and way of life” and nationalized the facility. This led to a break with Georg Picht , a former student who had been a teacher at Birklehof himself since 1940, who left school in 1942 and was Kuchenmüller's successor in the management of the Birklehof, which was reopened after the war, from 1946 to 1956. In the fall of 1944, Kuchenmüller volunteered for military service and resigned from his position. The Birklehof was nationalized in 1944 and closed in 1945 by order of the French occupation authorities.

At the end of the war, Kuchenmüller was interned in 1945. On the occasion of the Arbitration Chamber proceedings against Kuchenmüller in 1948, Picht wrote an opinion on Kuchenmüller "of his own accord [...] for his political clean-up". After the war, Kuchenmüller was a permanent teacher at a grammar school in Stuttgart. In 1959, Kuchenmüller met the former student Golo Mann, to which the man stated in a letter that Kuchenmüller had not changed and that he had probably adhered to his attitudes. In the 1970s and 1980s, too, Kuchenmüller apparently stuck to his National Socialist worldview. This emerges from his biographical typescript "Experienced in letters" and from letters to Jocelin Winthrop-Young, the founder of the Kurt Hahn Archive.

Wilhelm Kuchenmüller achieved lasting importance through his translations of Antigone and Philoctet of Sophocles , which were first published in 1955. Until 2012 they saw numerous new editions. In addition, he made a name for himself as a poet in ancient Greek: between 1959 and 1965 he published 18 sequels to Nostima , a Hellasfahrt written in verse, which appeared in the magazine Alindethra .

Publications

  • Philetae Coi reliquiae. Noske, Borna 1928.
  • Sophocles: Antigone. Tragedy. Translated by Wilhelm Kuchenmüller (= Reclams Universal Library . No. 659). Reclam-Verlag, Stuttgart 1955.
  • Sophocles: Philoctetes. Tragedy. Translated and provided with an afterword by Wilhelm Kuchenmüller (= Reclams Universal-Bibliothek. No. 709). Reclam-Verlag, Stuttgart 1955.
  • Protagoras. A game based on Plato. Supplement to The ancient language teaching. Volume 5, Issue 4, 1962.
  • Terror Sueborum. A game based on Caesar's Bellum Gallicum 1, 39–41. Supplement to The ancient language teaching. Volume 10, Issue 3, 1967.
  • Cicero and Catiline. Fabella. Supplement to The ancient language teaching. Volume 13, Issue 4, 1970.

literature

  • Stefan Würthle: The Birklehof - a German rural education home in the National Socialist era. 2nd corrected edition. Historical seminar of the Albert Ludwig University, Freiburg im Breisgau 1998, pp. 13–29 and passim.

Remarks

  1. ↑ Joachim Latacz : The chatterbox from the catalog. In: Christoph Schäublin (Ed.): Catalepton. Festschrift for Bernhard Wyss. Seminar for Classical Philology at the University of Basel, Basel 1985, pp. 77–95 (= Joachim Latacz: Inclusion of antiquity. Small writings on the literature of the Greeks and Romans. Edited by Fritz Graf , Jürgen von Ungern-Sternberg , Arbogast Schmitt with the assistance of Rainer Thiel . Teubner, Stuttgart / Leipzig 1994, p. 427).
  2. ^ Golo Mann: Letters 1932–1992. Edited by Tilmann Lahme and Kathrin Lüssi. Wallstein, Göttingen 2006, p. 141. 393 f.
  3. ^ Ruprecht Poensgen: The school at Salem Castle in the Third Reich. In: Vierteljahrshefte für Zeitgeschichte . Volume 44, issue, 1996, pp. 25–54, here: pp. 34–36.
  4. ↑ Golo Mann: Memories and Thoughts. A youth in Germany. Fischer, Frankfurt 1986, p. 161.
  5. ^ Eva Hezel: The effects of the student riot (1968) on the Birklehof boarding school in Hinterzarten. Historical seminar of the Albert Ludwigs University, Freiburg im Breisgau 2016, p. 14.
  6. ↑ Stefan Würthle: The Birklehof - a German country education home in the National Socialist era. 2nd corrected edition. Historical seminar of the Albert-Ludwigs-University, Freiburg im Breisgau 1998, p. 86; see also Götz Plessing: The Birklehof School. A historical portrait. In: Helmut Schubert (ed.): Hinterzarten in the 20th century. From the farming village to the climatic health resort (= Hinterzartener Schriften. Volume 6). Stadler, Konstanz 2002, pp. 398-413, here: p. 401.
  7. ↑ Stefan Würthle: The Birklehof - a German country education home in the National Socialist era. 2nd corrected edition. Historical seminar of the Albert Ludwig University, Freiburg im Breisgau 1998, p. 71.
  8. ^ Eva Hezel: The effects of the student riot (1968) on the Birklehof boarding school in Hinterzarten. Historical seminar of the Albert-Ludwigs-University, Freiburg im Breisgau 2016, p. 15.
  9. ↑ Georg Picht in: Altbirklehofer Blätter. Christmas 1948, pp. 12-14; compare Teresa Löwe: Georg Picht and the Birklehof School in the post-war period (1946–1955). Berlin 2004, p. 10 with note 24.
  10. ^ Letter to Julio del Val Caturla dated December 29, 1959, see Golo Mann: Briefe 1932–1992. Edited by Tilmann Lahme and Kathrin Lüssi. Wallstein, Göttingen 2006, p. 141. 393 f.
  11. ↑ Compare Tilmann Lahme: Golo Mann. Biography. Fischer, Frankfurt / Main 2009, note 194.
personal data
SURNAME Kuchenmüller, Wilhelm
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German classical philologist and school principal
DATE OF BIRTH 1900
DATE OF DEATH 1998