Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy: Man Must Teach (1959)
NOTE OF THE EDITOR
This is the edited transcription of one lecture April 1959.
1
The transcription was made by Frances Huessy – my work are the following changes:
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Commonplace phrases as “you see”, “so to speak” are eliminated. Where the speaker corrects himself within the same sentence, only the corrected version is kept.
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Additions: paragraphs,
chapters with titles scooped from the text,
Roman numbers for the four parts of a chapter,
Arabian numbers for the four parts of the parts of a chapter,
titles for the stories – which are marked by color – which communicate either a personal or historical event,
sentences are marked in bold print, which are as a sum of thought and to be kept as taken for themselves,
indices of contents, names, stories, sentences.
2
In this lecture is touched the following encounter with one of Rosenstock-Huessy ́s colleagues in the “Hohenrodter Bund”, Wilhelm Flitner (1889-1990). After he gave a lecture in the Volkshochschule Köln I asked him to say something to his experiences with Rosenstock-Huessy, and he said: “Er wollte immer Nachfolger haben.” (He always wanted to have successors.) I was disturbed, I understood that he didn ́t give freedom enough to his listeners – which means that Flitner didn ́t distinct between Lehrer and Führer (teacher and leader) – his word meant: Rosenstock-Huessy wanted to be a leader, he wasn ́t a teacher (at least this was what I heard).
And now here we have this tremendous confession:
I have buried two generations of my own students in two world wars – and so I know what it means as a teacher to survive the people one had thought that would take one’s own place.
Nachfolger (successor) meant this! Successor in time! His successor in Jena was Adolf Reichwein, in 1925, one of those mentioned by Rosenstock-Huessy. And Wilhelm Flitner stayed as professor in Nazi-Germany all the time, remaining in the space of contemporaries and surviving Rosenstock-Huessy by seventeen years!
I am grateful to have found this interpretation of “successors” and understand myself that I didn ́t answer Wilhelm Flitner in any way.
Cologne, May 9, 2017
Eckart Wilkens