Landesarchiv Baden-Württemberg,
Abt. Hauptstaatsarchiv Stuttgart, P 39
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Fonds
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(Vorakten ab 1831) 1882-2010
Part of Landesarchiv Baden-Württemberg, Dept. Main State Archives Stuttgart (Archivtektonik)
- on the Gauger/Heiland family: Joseph Gauger is the first person documented in the collection with originals. He was descended from a Swabian family that can be traced back to the 16th century and that early confessed to Pietism. His father, Johann Martin Gauger (1816-1873), was head of the Paulinenpflege, his half-brother Gottlob Gauger (1855-1885) was in the service of the Basler Mission and was active 1878-1888 in Africa at the Gold Coast and afterwards in Cameroon, where he died. Joseph Gauger's brother Samuel (1859-1941) was also a pastor and last dean in Ludwigsburg. Born in 1866 in Winnenden, Joseph Gauger became an orphan early on, at the age of 13. He graduated from the Karlsgymnasium in Stuttgart. He first attended the teacher training seminar in Esslingen and became a teacher in Dürnau after graduating. From 1889 to 1893 he studied law in Tübingen, then Protestant theology. Afterwards he became vicar in Mägerkingen and Großheppach, 1898 finally town parish administrator in Giengen. The emerging Swabian career was broken off by the marriage with Emeline Gesenberg from Elberfeld. She was to stay in Elberfeld to care for her father, so the young couple moved into their parents' house in Hopfenstraße 6. There was also a Pietist community in Elberfeld. Joseph Gauger found employment as the second inspector of the Protestant Society, which provided him with a solid foundation for an equally pietistic career in his new Rhineland homeland. Later he was able to obtain the position of Director of the Evangelical Society. The Evangelical Society in Elberfeld had dedicated itself to mission in Germany since 1848. Here Gauger became responsible for the publishing work and the so-called writing mission. Since 1906 he was editor of the weekly "Licht und Leben", an activity he carried out until 1938, shortly before his death. From 1923 he also published the widely read political monthly "Gotthardbriefe". In 1911 Gauger became a member of the board of the Gnadauer Verband and in 1921 - not least because of his musical talent - chairman of the Evangelischer Sängerbund. In 1921 he also became a member of the Constituent Assembly of the Evangelical Church of the Old Prussian Union. His favourite sister Maria married Jakob Ziegler, who worked at the Ziegler Institutions in the pietist community of Wilhelmsdorf (near Ravensburg) as a senior teacher and later director at the boys' institution. Due to the very intensive correspondence and frequent visits to his sister, Joseph Gauger remained attached to Swabian pietism. During the Third Reich, Joseph Gauger and his family were followers of the Confessing Church. Joseph Gauger was finally banned from publishing, his publication organ "Licht und Leben" was banned, and in 1939 he was expelled from the Reichsschrifttumskammer. In 1934 his son Martin refused the oath to Adolf Hitler, whereupon he - a young public prosecutor - was dismissed from public service. Since 1935 he has worked as a lawyer for the 1st Temporary Church Administration of the German Evangelical Church and since February 1936 for the Council of the Evangelical Lutheran Church of Germany in Berlin. When the war broke out in 1939, he also refused military service and fled to the Netherlands. However, he was seized here, arrested and later taken to the Buchenwald concentration camp. He therefore had to give up his church service in 1940. In 1941 he was murdered by the Nazis in the Sonnenstein Killing Institute near Pirna. The younger son of Joseph Gauger, Joachim, was also harassed by the Gestapo for his work for the Gotthard Letters and "Light and Life". After the death of Joseph Gauger (1939) and the complete destruction of the Gauger House in Elberfeld following an air raid in June 1943, the family returned to the south. Siegfried Gauger, after a short time as town vicar in Schwäbisch Gmünd, had already become town priest in Möckmühl in 1933 and had settled there with his wife Ella. Martha Gauger has lived in Heidenheim since her marriage to Theo Walther in 1934. Hedwig Heiland moved in 1943 to Gemmrigheim, the new parish of her husband. The parsonage there also offered space for the mother Emeline Gauger and the nanny of the Gauger children, Emilie Freudenberger. A little later, after her early retirement in 1947, her sister Maria Gauger also moved to Gemmrigheim. After his release from captivity as a prisoner of war, Joachim Gauger had also moved professionally to Möckmühl, where he ran the Aue publishing house. Only Paul Gerhard had stayed in Wuppertal, where he lived in the Vohwinkel district. Emeline Gauger's mother and sister Maria moved from Gemmrigheim to Möckmühl in 1951, which became the centre of the Gauger family, as a result of the forthcoming move of the Heilands to Stuttgart. Because now the mother lived here with three of her children: Siegfried, Maria and Joachim. The family gathered here regularly for sociable celebrations and the grandchildren of Emeline Gauger often came to visit here during the holidays. It was not until the grandson generation of Emeline and Joseph Gauger entered working life in the 1970s that the family scattered throughout Germany. Despite everything, this generation remained in contact with each other and organized regular family reunions. 2nd history of the stock: Bettina Heiland, Marburg, and Susanne Fülberth, Berlin, handed over the family documents Gauger/Heiland to the Main State Archives for safekeeping in January 2011 after the death of their mother Hedwig Heiland. Some further documents were submitted in June 2013. Hedwig Heiland, née Gauger, born 1914, was the youngest child of Joseph and Emeline Gauger and had survived all siblings and close relatives at the age of 96. The documents handed over originate from different persons in the family. Important documents come from her aunt Maria Ziegler, her father's favourite sister who lives in Wilhelmsdorf. She kept the letters of Joseph Gauger and his wife to their relatives in Wilhelmsdorf (to which she also belonged), a remarkable series of correspondence. Memorabilia such as her place card for the wedding of Joseph and Emeline in Elberfeld in 1898 and individual books by Joseph Gauger and the history of the family are also included. After her death Hedwig Heiland received her from her daughter Ruth Dessecker. Other documents come from mother Emeline Gauger, including letters to her and valuable memorabilia as well as files. They must have come to Hedwig Heiland after her death in 1964 or after the death of her daughter Maria, who lived with her. The documents of the brother Siegfried, city priest in Möckmühl, who died in 1981, are also rich. They date back to before 1943, when the parents' house in Elberfeld was destroyed. Worth mentioning are the dense series of letters of his brother Martin (the Nazi victim) and his parents, as well as his sister Hedwig to him. Furthermore there are letters of Sister Maria (until she moved to Möckmühl in 1950). Less dense is the letter tradition of the brothers Paul Gerhard and Emil Gauger to the city priest. Only the memorial book of the young Siegfried, which has a very high memorial value, his children did not want to do without. It is therefore only available as a copy, but in two copies. Sister Maria Gauger was primarily important as a photographer from the early days of Elberfeld. In addition to files on her own life and fate, she kept a family guest book in Möckmühl, which contains many interesting entries on family life and mutual visits. This is also included in the original stock. Her cousin Maria Keppler, née Ziegler, and her husband Friedrich also sent documents to Hedwig Heiland, especially correspondence and photographs. After the death of her husband Alfred in 1996, the documents of the older family Heiland also came to Hedwig Heiland and were kept by her. These were correspondences and the pastor's official records as well as family history materials, investigations and genealogical tables, but also documents from the mother Anna Heiland. In addition, the family of Hedwig and Alfred Heiland had a large number of younger records. Hedwig Heiland also proved to be a collector here, who rarely threw away a document and preferred to keep it. It didn't stop at collecting and picking up. Hedwig Heiland also arranged the documents and supplemented them with his own notes and investigations. Numerous notes on the family history of Gauger bear witness to this. Hedwig Gauger read the letters from her youth, extracted important dates and took notes. On the basis of the documents she kept and evaluated, she made a film in 2007 entitled "This is how I experienced it. Memories of my family and my life, told by Hedwig Heiland née Gauger" (DVDs in P 39 Bü 469). It consists essentially of an interview with her and numerous photos about her life and the fate of her family. Hedwig Heiland was particularly committed to the rehabilitation of her brother Martin. She intensively supported the research on his fate with information, compilations and also with the lending of documents. She collected the results, i.e. books and essays, and compiled the state of research almost completely. For the exhibition "Justiz im Nationalsozialismus" she read letters of her brother Martin Gauger and other documents about his life, which are stored as audio documents on a CD (P 39 Bü 468). Despite the richness of the available material, gaps in the tradition are to be noted. The sudden destruction of the Elberfelder Haus der Gaugers in 1943 resulted in a severe loss of family documents. About Maria Ziegler from Wilhelmsdorf and Siegfried Gauger, who did not live in Elberfeld anymore at that time, other documents from this time have fortunately been preserved, which compensate this gap somewhat. Another gap exists in the correspondence of Hedwig Heiland during the 70s to 90s of the last century. Even then, there must have been a rich correspondence, of which there is hardly anything left. The correspondence of Hedwig Heiland, on the other hand, which has been richer again since 2000, is present; it was hardly ordered, but has not yet been thrown away. In 1993 documents concerning Martin Gauger were handed over to the Landeskirchlichen Archiv Hannover for archiving. They received the inventory signature N 125 Dr. Martin Gauger. The 1995 find book on these documents is available in the inventory as no. 519. 3rd order of the stock: The documents originate from different provenances and had been arranged accordingly. A delivery list could be prepared and handed over for the inventory. Letters from Hedwig Gauger to his fiancé Alfred Heiland from the 40 years and also the letters in the opposite direction have been numbered consecutively, which points to a very intensive reading and thorough order, which, however, is an extreme case. In the letters Joseph Gauger wrote to his sister Maria after 1920, the covers of the tufts contain summaries of the most important pieces and references to outstanding family events mentioned in the letters. This information can be used as a guide during use. However, the original order of the documents was badly confused by the frequent use by the family and by third parties. One has not or wrongly reduced the taken out pieces. Frequently, individual letters were found in the photo albums with photos that were related to the content of the letter, but had to be returned to the original series. A photo album (P 39 Bü 353) had been divided into individual sheets so that the photos required for publications could be passed on to third parties as print copies. Hedwig Heiland had attached self-adhesive yellow notes to many letters and provided them with notes and references in order to be able to orientate herself better in her family-historical research. For conservation reasons, these notes had to be removed. In addition to the restoration of the original order, further measures were necessary for the order of the stock. Many documents were too broadly characterised as "other" or "miscellaneous". Tufts with very different contents were incorporated into existing units. A larger box still contained completely disordered, but nevertheless valuable letters from the period 1943-1952, which had to be sorted and indexed. Thematically similar tufts could often be combined into one unit. For example, mixed tufts containing letters from different scribes to the same recipient were divided and transformed into tufts with uniform scribes. This order according to the principle "a tuft, a letter writer" could not always be carried out. Letters of the married couple Emeline and Joseph Gauger, for example (to Maria Ziegler) are so closely interlocked that they cannot be split into two separate tufts. Sometimes Emeline signed her husband's letter with a short greeting of her own, sometimes she is greeted in the name of both, but often Emeline wrote her own passages on the letterhead and sometimes there are whole letters from her. Separation is also impossible in terms of content. Similarly, letters from Emeline Gauger and Maria Gauger in their Möckmühl days cannot be separated from those of Siegfried Gauger. Such letters were classified according to the author author. The index refers to the other persons. The present order and indexing was based on family interests. Essentially, in addition to the corrections and restructuring measures mentioned above, the documents had to be arranged and made accessible for scientific research. For this reason, a greater depth of indexing was necessary, above all, by means of title recordings with detailed content annotations. An overall order of the holdings according to the different origins of the documents did not prove to be meaningful for a family archive of the present size. The uniformity of the documents produced by Hedwig Heiland was therefore accepted and maintained. Accordingly, the title recordings of the correspondence of members of the Gauger family are arranged according to the letter writer and not according to the letter recipient. Letters usually contain more information about the author than about the recipient. Letters from non-family members and from letter writers to whom little material has grown, on the other hand, were classified according to the recipient principle ("Letters from different correspondence partners to XY"). The present collection documents the fate of a Swabian family closely linked to Pietism over almost two centuries. Outstanding is the relatively well-known theologian Joseph Gauger, who is richly documented with his correspondence and in his writings. The marriage of his sister Maria Ziegler also gives a glimpse of the Pietist settlement in Wilhelmsdorf and the Ziegler Institutions. The family's attitude during the Nazi period and especially the fate of his son Martin, who was imprisoned for his conscientious objection and finally killed, are also reflected in the inventory. Relations with the family of the Berlin prison pastor and member of the Kreisau district of Harald Poelchau are also documented. Dense series of letters from the Second World War (letters from Hedwig Heiland to her husband Alfred, letters from Alfred Heiland to his wife Hedwig, letters from Maria Gauger to her brother Siegfried) tell of the hard everyday life of the World War II. In addition, the collection illuminates the everyday family life of a Swabian family over at least two generations. The collection comprises 529 units in 5.20 linear metres, the duration extends from 1882 to 2010 with prefiles from 1831. 4. Literature: Article Joseph Gauger in Württembergische Biographien I (2006) S. 87-88 (Rainer Lächele) Article Joseph Gauger in NDB Vol. 6 S. 97-98 (Karl Halaski)Article Joseph Gauger in Deutsche Biographische Enzyklopädie Bd. 3 S. 584Article Martin Gauger in Wikipedia http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Martin_Gauger Further literature is included in stockStuttgart, June 2013Dr. Peter Schiffer