Philosophical background

The Bunkernacht-Project follows the academic and later military non-career of Wolfgang Ritzel, my grandfather, during the Third Reich, and tries to establish amical relationships with friends, collaborators, resistance-fighters, or victims of the nazi reign.

The Bunkernacht-project combines historical research about pedagogy, philosophy and the political influence of german foreign affairs AA in the occupied countries of Europe between 1933-1945

with a theatrical .....implementation and adaptation of personal testimonies

to create an inquiry of a kind of network behind the political scenes and public stages, du to the personal relationships of our protagonists to very high placed philosophers and political figures

as Rudolf Hess

as Martin Heidegger, Bruno Bauch and Richard Hönigswald, Moritz Löwi,

or Edmund Husserl

as Martin Buber, Hermann Cohen

as Maria Montessori and Gandhi and Indian education..

To align those different influential figures or thinkers on one main line - a main topic,

radical new pedagogy as an opposite to a nationalistic reactionary brain washing could be a possible mobile in a way that conceives thinking as a radical uprising mouvement, based on new forms of cultivation and terrestrial exploitation:

From Husserl's crisis to Heidegger's critique of techne

to Hönigswald analysis of experimentation and Löwis cognitive experiments

from the pacifist pedagogy of Elisabeth Rotten and the British Diplomat Philip Noel Baker

to Montessorian cosmic teaching

to all black education in Durham

even, in the worst case, reaching out to Karl Haushofers reactionary Geopolitics and his intrinsic paradoxe

Unfortunately, to work with a dramatical hypothesis in a kind of scenic experimentation, using Augusto Boals techniques of social inquiring observation

combiend with some ideas of the family constellation method (Familienaufstellung), to reconstruct broken testimonies, to re-establish memories obstructed by trauma and/or guilt, silenced by postwar enlightement and Antifascism (as Wolfgang Ritzel would say) or obscured by insignificance

even with the goal to recreate an non- biased non- western but universal pedagogical humanitarian project with comedians from France, Austria, Russia, Angola or Cameroun…

means still today to affront negative stereotypes about germans, and inherently about race -PROUVED by history cemented and eternalized by the result-thinkers - which poses the main threat to the entire undertaking.

Hugo Schmidt hasn't existed or if he had, he did not die in a Konzentrationslager

(Answers from german communal authorities, french actors and directors from Israel - combined)

That in a group of people joining Elisabeth Rotten with Carl and his daughter Eve Theil, Abs Joosten with his mother Rosalie Joosten-Chotzen with Maria and Mario Montessori, Wolfgang Ritzel with his fiancée Hanna Schmidt and her brother Hugo Schmidt, with whom Otto Salomon has worked - and who was Karl Barth's former editor and a collaborator to A. Freudenberg, then even André Trocmè entering the scene ...COULD suggest that

there might have been a network as a kind of philosophical theological understanding between opposites parties, men and women that could have been, in the words of Elisabeth Rotten 'an informal network'.

The project is developing a second frame-line, opposed to race and the filter of absolute enemies, the new or old kind of metaphysical and anthroposophical evil.

From a theoretical point of view it seems easy to find connections or intellectual interferences between all those people,

but in a scenic reconstructions a lot of practical questions arise, because contact must be made by a kind of physical contact…

The scenic conceptual design we are - a group of very different comedians - working on:

How to speak with invalid words or invalid bodies?

How to express yourself in a language that is not your own?

On a topic that bigger than your personal point of view

overlapping every human comprehension?

How about dealing with materials you don't know nothing about? Quantumphysics, mathematics, building a bomb, or in details about Auschwitz?

We are establishing a collage based on personal documents, letters, books, reviews

academic publications

of Wolfgang Ritzel,

and some of his friends and relatives or some of his academic teachers

The surprisingly abundant documentation containing:

a diary held by Mathilde Fath

the weekly send letters from Wolfgang Ritzel to his mother Thilde Ritzel

The huge cope of jurisdictional letters from his future brother in law, Pastor Hugo Schmidt and the drafts for letters sent by his wife to the Gestapo

medicinal testimonies

hidden theological flyers

and philosophical writings of WR (about Löwi, Cohen, Hönigswald and Heidegger)

and his later students

small bunches of letters by Hermann Ritzel ( and from Edmund Husserl)

letters from Carl Theil to Martin Buber, obtained via the university of Jena and Theil’s granddaughter...

Archives:

Arolsen ArchivesArchiv der evangelischen Kirche, Berlin BrandenburgKarl Barth Archiv, Basel, SchweizBundesarchiv Koblenz, DeutschlandBundesarchiv Berlin Lichterfelde, DeutschlandBayrische Staatsbibliothek, Nachlass der Münchner PhänomenologenHusserl Archives, Louvain BelgiqueInstitut für Zeitgeschichte, MünchenMontessori Association Amsterdam, NetherlandsPolitisches Archiv des Auswärtigen Amtes BerlinUniversitätsarchiv Berlin (Nachlass Hans Leisegang)Universitätsarchiv BonnUniversitätsarchiv Frankfurt (Nachlass Hans Trüb, Microfiches: Nachlass Martin Buber) Universitätsarchiv Jena

Archiv de l'église protéstante Protestantische Kirche, Strasbourg, Nachlass Jean Hering

Communication Bergzabern (Edith Stein et Hedwig Conrad -Martius). par J. Feldes