It was a time when nobody was talking about “inclusion”, about equal and respectful coexistence of people with and without disabilities. Hedwig Döbereiner, then national champion of the Association of Christian Girl Scouts (BCP), was looking for a place for a large tent camp that should also be accessible for wheelchair users. Because there were some of them at the BCP. In April 1964, Döbereiner drove through half of Upper Bavaria before she found what she was looking for in Pfaffenwinkel, in Steingaden, near the world-famous Wieskirche: in Langau.
There, on the site of the former Schwaige of the Premonstratensian monastery in Steingaden, Döbereiner discovered the right place, not only for her girl scouts, but – what she didn’t know at the time – also for herself. The place that was to become the center of her life. The BCP bought the Langau from the Free State of Bavaria. And over the past 58 years, this has become a facility that is unique in Germany: an institution with numerous model projects in work with the disabled, a meeting place for people with and without disabilities, a barrier-free house that is open in every respect, in which families, school classes, Bundeswehr soldiers who have returned to Afghanistan, church choirs, meeting people from all walks of life and talking to each other.
Hedwig Döbereiner not only founded this institution, but managed it for 26 years. Born in May 1924, as a young girl she joined the Girl Scouts banned under Hitler. The fearlessness, the daring and the straightforwardness, which should also determine her later life, let her found the “Casteller Ring” underground in 1942 together with six friends in Franconian Castell, which was to become an evangelical sisters’ community in 1950. She didn’t even tell her parents about it.
Her warmth and perseverance infected even bishops and ministers
After the war, Döbereiner trained as a youth leader, first took over the management of the Federal Center for Girl Scouts, then that of the Schwanberg Castle conference and training center (Kitzingen district) and in the process established a network of contacts in church, politics and administration. Her visionary power, her stamina and entrepreneurial imagination, as well as her warmth, were so contagious that she won ministers, bishops, state parliament presidents and top civil servants over and over again for new projects. For decades, she has successfully collected money for Langau, which became the center of her life from the mid-1960s, most recently for a complete renovation of the 240-year-old building.
Döbereiner was involved at all levels of the Evangelical Lutheran Church. She was a member of the state synod, belonged to the diaconal council in Bavaria, as well as to the federal government, the board of the working group for evangelical adult education and many other bodies. When she left as head of the Langau in 1993, Heimo Liebl, then President of the Bavarian Diakonie, called her the “mother of the Diakonie” in the Free State. He honored Hedwig Döbereiner’s work with the Bavarian Order of Merit and the State Medal for Social Merit.
Hedwig Döbereiner was always on the side of the weak. For several years she needed help herself, she – the stand-up woman – could no longer walk. But she did not lose her happiness and confidence. In her wheelchair she looked from the living room of her retirement home in Munich towards the mountains and towards Langau. She died in Munich last Friday at the age of 97.