Horst Rückert was 14 years old at the Luisengymnasium. From 1979 to 1990 as a teacher and again from 2009 to 2012 as an “employee in the directorate”. Years he likes to look back on. “I still feel a deep connection to Luisen today,” says the 72-year-old.
Some former students may have felt differently about their school days and see the flaming red leaves on the walls of the large building in the direction of the main station as a warning sign. Sweaty hands before exams, poor grades, blue letters? Many young people have suffered here to a greater or lesser extent over the past 200 years, but have also felt joy at being able to learn here. This was probably the case especially in the first decades after it was founded in 1822, when school was still reserved for “higher daughters” and was a way of escaping boredom at home. It only became a school with a grammar school after “a decree from the magistrate of November 8, 1911”, as Horst Rückert writes in his book about the history of the school.
Rückert knows her as a member of the teaching staff. He himself grew up near Nuremberg. He came to Munich in 1969 to study at the Ludwig Maximilian University. Just in the year when the Luisengymnasium admitted boys to its girls for the first time.
If you talk to Rückert about his job as a teacher, you quickly hear how much he enjoys teaching and being with children and young people. “You have to like them and show them what you want,” he says. “Students need ten minutes, then they know who they have in front of them.” You have to be technically competent, but you can admit to making mistakes. “Showing weakness, yes, but being a weakling, no.” He sums up his time at the Luisengymnasium: “This school has come full circle for me, this is where I started as a teacher and ended my career.”
There are many positive feelings that connect the former teacher for German and history with Munich’s oldest municipal high school. A good prerequisite for the assignment to deal with the history of the school. When Rückert was asked by upper school coordinator Mareile Müller in autumn 2019 whether he could write a chronicle for the upcoming 200th birthday, he gladly agreed.
“The Luisen” is the colloquial name of the school. And that is also the name of the book that Rückert finished on time at the beginning of the year. It is more than 430 pages thick, with footnotes, bibliography, historical illustrations, photo credits and acknowledgments. It is the work of a historian with a doctorate who likes to write and enjoys researching archives, who knows what can be gleaned from student lists, personnel files and annual reports.
Horst Rückert spent hundreds of hours researching archives, reading student lists, personnel files and annual reports.
(Photo: City Archives)
Horst Rückert receives at his home in Moosach. He lives here with his wife. The daughter, a doctor, and the son, an actor by trade, have long since left home. Rückert is involved in the Moosach History Association. He is the secretary there and organizes guided tours and events in the district. Moosach is a good district, he feels comfortable here, says Rückert.
The conversation takes place on the small terrace in front of the living room. Corona-related. The work on the book got him through the pandemic well, says Rückert. He started researching at the end of 2019 and then started writing from Easter 2021. “voluntarily”, i.e. free of charge. “What should I have asked for? Hundreds of hours have gone into this work.” The student association of the Luisengymnasium, which published the book, could never have paid for it. From a legal point of view, the book was self-published. The good connection to the publisher Jonathan Beck, who was at Luisen in the 1990s, ensured that it was professionally proofread, typeset and printed. It is sold through the Studiengenossenverband at the Gymnasium.
The book is structured chronologically “because it made sense,” as Rückert explains. The first chapter begins with a date in the year 1822 that is important for the school. On November 27th of the founding year, the “Königlich-Baierisches Police-anzeiger von Munich” published an “announcement” about the opening of the higher girls’ school on “December 2nd, 1822 ” appeared, writes the author.
The conditions for admission to the school were: a minimum age of twelve years, three classes at the elementary school, an entrance exam and parents who could afford a school fee of one “Baiernthaler” a month. The origin of today’s co-educational grammar school (with language and music branches) in Maxvorstadt was a school for girls from better-off families. They should be prepared here “for entry into civil life”, but above all they should bridge the time meaningfully until they get married.
The initiative to found the school goes back to Simon Spitzweg, father of three sons, including the Munich painter Carl Spitzweg. On December 10, 1822, the first lessons took place in the rooms of the school building on the cross. The school-leaving certificate did not entitle the graduates to any further training. And yet: “If a girl had successfully completed school and, as we had hoped, married, she was not only a skilful housekeeper and moral educator, she was also an educated gem at the side of her husband,” summarizes Rückert. “She was able to follow the men’s conversations in French attentively, while silently embroidering, knitting and sewing in the background (…).” Because an essential content of the curriculum was initially handicrafts in connection with French. “Pedagogical cooking” has been available at the Luisengymnasium since 2009: under the guidance of a cook, students prepare lunch for their classmates. French is probably not spoken here, maybe sometimes cursed, for example when a sauce clumps.
The school has undergone many changes over the past 200 years. It was always a secular school, i.e. not run by priests or nuns, and was open to Protestants and Jews. “It was always a school of its time. You always find the social expectations and political guidelines,” sums up Horst Rückert. In the 1870s, for example, the first pedagogical and organizational problems became apparent, questions of faith and morals became an issue, and the call for girls to have a deeper education became louder.
Munich had around 40,000 inhabitants in 1822, and 50 years later around 170,000. However, the school did not grow at the same rate. The number of students had increased from 80 in the beginning to 129 in 1871. Only in the years that followed did the school change on a large scale. In October 1901, teachers and students moved into the new school building at Luisenstrasse 7, which was designed by architect Theodor Fischer. The name is reminiscent of Princess Ludovika Wilhelmine of Bavaria, the mother of the much more famous Empress Sisi.
In the past, Rückert writes, the school trained girls to be “an educated jewel at their husband’s side.”
(Photo: City Archives)
Rückert’s book is also so exciting to read because it puts the events at the school in historical context. When he comes across sufficient material, such as about the teacher Anna Freund, he goes into detail. Freund had campaigned vehemently for women’s education. “The healthy and talented girl wants to learn” and can do it just as well as boys, if only the conditions are right, Rückert quotes her from documents in her estate.
In addition to letters and postcards, important sources for him were the personnel files, so-called visitation reports from the ministry and especially the annual reports of the school directors, which are kept in the Munich city archive. Written by hand, with some personal annotations, many internal details were revealed to the historian. The school itself has an archive, “partly still quite unorganized.” In recent years, some teachers in high school seminars have shed some light on the boxes with their students. Mareile Müller would like to equip a permanent exhibition with it. Alone, there is a lack of strength and money for it.
Like every chronicle of the past decades in Germany, the history of the Luisengymnasium also has to deal with anti-Semitism and the relationship to National Socialism. Rückert tells of the quotations from the director Hans Winter (1886 to 1921) that testify to the difficulties of the Jewish schoolgirls. Headmaster Hans Jobst (1927 to 1941) noted in shorthand which teachers were members of the NSDAP. Rückert found out that he even received a disciplinary procedure for giving Jewish women positive marks. Outwardly, the Luisen was a Nazi school, but the headmaster allowed a lot. “But it wasn’t a resistance school. There was no Sophie Scholl there.”
When researching and writing, he repeatedly asked himself the question: “How could highly educated humanists have been Nazis?” He can’t get it into his head, says Rückert. One of the most beautiful moments for him was contact with a woman in the USA. She wrote to the school management because she wanted to know why her Jewish mother had left Munich for Switzerland – in good time. “They helped to protect my family from the ultimate horror.” The ultimate terror. This sentence from the daughter burned itself into Rückert’s head. The historian gets very serious when he comes to this story.
Serious subjects, he looks for them, or maybe they find him. In 1990, Rückert went to a German school in Lima. “I wanted to do something different.” He was there with his family for eight years. Back again and after a few years at the Bertolt-Brecht-Gymnasium in Pasing, he was drawn to South America again. From 2003 to 2009 he ran a German school in Chile. “I have to work much longer than I ever had to work in Germany. It’s very exhausting and exciting because there are very few requirements,” said Rückert in a 2007 interview with Deutschlandfunk. After his retirement, Rückert worked through Chile and one of its dark chapters. First in his book “From Colonia Dignidad to Villa Baviera”, then in a doctoral thesis. And now? Gives Rückert German tutoring at a vocational school. He is a passionate teacher.