Gräfelfing – Association wants to remember Professor Kurt Huber – Munich district

There is a new institution in the municipality of Gräfelfing: the association “Kurt Huber Foundation” was founded at the beginning of the week. Its ten members, including Dieter Püschel as chairman, want to raise awareness of the work of Professor Kurt Huber, a member of the White Rose resistance group during the Nazi regime, and actively publicize it. And there is another purpose of the association: the association wants to collect 50,000 euros in order to set up a long-term foundation that, among other things, enables scientific work and specialist conferences on Kurt Huber.

Professor Kurt Huber fell in love with the philosopher Dieter Püschel: Püschel, who had lived in East Germany for 40 years and came to Munich in 1989, had never heard of the musicologist and resistance fighter Huber until he moved to Gräfelfing a little over a decade ago. Huber had lived in the community since 1938, and it was here that he wrote the sixth leaflet for the White Rose resistance group, which could no longer be distributed at Munich’s Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität because in the early morning hours of February 27, 1943, Huber was killed in Gräfelfing by the arrested by the Gestapo and later executed in Stadelheim. It was only when Püschel was standing in front of the stele at the junction with Professor-Kurt-Huber-Straße, which commemorates the resistance fighter, that the newcomer to Gräfelfingen, Püschel, experienced an “initial spark”, as he calls it. Since then he has been working intensively on Huber and “the amazement continues”, as he says.

Huber is well known in Gräfelfing, and the Kurt Huber High School named after him commemorates the resistance fighter. But there is still “a lot of room for improvement” in terms of the fame of this historical person, says Püschel, who lived in Graefelfing for twelve years and only recently moved to Olching. The association aims to change that and sees itself as a supplement to existing initiatives in the field of remembrance culture in Gräfelfing. Püschel is chairman, Susanne Ludwig, born in the Huber villa in Gräfelfing, is his deputy. The philosopher Dominic Kaegi from Heidelberg is the speaker of the general meeting, Püschel’s wife Sandra Meilhaus is on the board and Wolfgang Huber, Kurt Huber’s son, is honorary chairman. The villa on Professor-Kurt-Huber-Straße was sold in 1956. The Willi family, who now live in the Huber house, are also among the founding members of the association.

Collecting the start-up capital for the foundation will probably take “a few years,” says Püschel. The foundation is “the dream”. With it, the memory of Huber is to be “anchored in Europe” and the foundation is to provide political education. Because many of the topics that the professor dealt with are still highly topical today: Huber pleaded for a democratic post-war Europe, Russia’s role in Europe was then as now a “burning question”. Until the foundation can become active, the association will commemorate Huber: Next year will be Huber’s 130th birthday, a good first reason for the association to go public.

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