Annemarie Franke, Supervisory Board of the Krzyżowa Foundation for Mutual Understanding in Europe
Andreas Möckel was one of the founders of the Krzyżowa Foundation for Mutual Understanding in Europe and supported the Krzyżowa Foundation until the end, both professionally and socially. This is evidenced by the annual report of the Kreisau-Initiative (Kreisau-Initiative e. V.), where we can find a report on the annual celebration of 20 July 1944 in Würzburg prepared by Andreas Möckel, 92 years old, shortly before his death.
Until his retirement in 1992, Andreas Möckel was Professor of Special Education at the University of Würzburg. His achievements as a scientist and teacher are highly valued.
I met Andreas Möckel at one of my first "May Conferences" in Krzyżowa in the early 2000s. These annual conferences were an opportunity for joint reflection and discussion on the future, which was attended by friends and supporters of the Krzyżowa Foundation and their International Youth Meeting Centre. I also had the opportunity to meet him as a mentor of the students with whom he came to Poland and as an active community worker in his own city, Würzburg.
Through his parents Andreas Möckel had a personal relationship with the Kreisau Circle. Hans-Bernd von Haeften and his wife Barbara knew the Möckel family from their presence at the German embassy in Bucharest during the Second World War. Andreas' father, Konrad Möckel, was a Protestant pastor in Kronstadt (Transylvania) and thus maintained contact with the cultural attaché - Haeften (read more about this period in Andreas Möckel's book: Umkämpfte Volkskirche. Leben und Wirken des ev.-sächsischen Pfarrers Konrad Möckel [1892-1965], Böhlau-Verlag, Cologne et al. 2011). Hans-Bernd von Haeften was sentenced to death and executed after the assassination on 20 July 1944. After the war, Möckel's father and son were deported to Soviet labour camps. While Andreas, after two years of forced labor in a Ukrainian mine, returned and left for West Germany, his father, as a Protestant pastor in Romania, had to endure repressions again, which lasted until the 1960s. He managed to leave the country only at a very old age.
In the mid 1960s, in Heidelberg, through Barbara von Haeften, Konrad and Andreas Möckel met Freya von Moltke and Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy. Andreas Möckel's meeting with the philosopher, sociologist and law historian Eugene Rosenstock-Huessy initiated an interesting intellectual dialogue and Andreas' fascination with him.
Andreas Möckel became a member of Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy's West German Society and its president in 1986. Due to his relationship with the philosopher, he participated in 1988 in a conference organised by Konrad von Moltke in Vermont (USA) to commemorate the 100th birthday of Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy. A memorable meeting took place in the garden of the "Four Wells" house where Freya von Moltke lived with Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy until his death in 1973 and then alone. His theme was Krzyżowa in Poland and the possible future of this place as a meeting place. So Andreas Möckel belonged to a close circle of people from the Netherlands, the USA, the GDR, Poland and West Germany, who had very concrete plans for Krzyżowa. No wonder that at the beginning of June 1989 he came to Wrocław to take part in the first conference of the then established international citizens' initiative, which was to create a meeting place in Krzyżowa. He was invited by the initiators - the Club of Catholic Intelligentsia in Wrocław and Aktion Sühnezeichen/Ost - to give a lecture on "Adult Education and 'Service on the Planet' according to Eugene Rosenstock-Huessy". Since then, he has been associated with the New Kreisau and until 1996, he was closely involved in the work for the International Youth Meeting Center (IYMC) as a member of the Foundation's Council, or, together with his wife Anneliese, as guardian of the summer camps for young people, as well as co-author of the first comprehensive concept for the work of the International Youth Meeting Center (IYMC) from 1993.
When the Krzyżowa Foundation organised the "May conference" on volunteering in 2006, we asked Andreas Möckel to speak about "Krzyżowa and the tradition of volunteering". In it he referred to the integration camps in Lwówek Śląski (Löwenberger Arbeitsgemeinschaft) initiated by Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy in the 1820s.
In my opinion, from Andreas Möckel's legacy comes the obligation to keep the statement in the Statutes of the Foundation about the creation of a community of persons referring to the objectives of the Foundation (§ 8, point 1 d). This goal is directly related to the experiences from Lviv Silesia, which are based on intergenerational learning and work for the benefit of the local environment, and also refers to the programme text by Helmuth James von Moltke on the role of "small communities". Andreas Möckel has repeatedly told me with conviction about this vision of Krzyżowa and regretted that things turned out differently. He was a supporter of the idea of a living community, consisting of permanent residents of villages and international volunteers who would live there from 6 months to 3 years, as well as guests who would come for workcamps or other short stays.
Such a community would work on the renovation and construction of the centre, cultivate the agriculture that would supply the centre, but could also be an ecological initiative in a region whose environment was then heavily polluted. People were to learn in this way from each other and with each other, in the spirit of education for peace and democracy.
This concept by Möckel and Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy meant that educational work at Krzyżowa should be carried out less by full-time employees and more by people who spend part of their lives here to learn in the international community, I always liked it very much.
We preserve the memory of Andreas Möckel, we join in sadness with his family and thank him for his witness and work.
*Photo: Michał Czaplinski (left), Wolfgang Ullmann (centre), Andreas Möckel (right) and Stephan Steinlein (back) look at the Krzyżowa Palace, 1989.
