Friedensau Chronicle – the history in pictures

The history of Friedensau is well documented. It began with the many articles published by Ludwig Richard Conradi at the end of the 19th and beginning of the 20th century in the then community magazine "Zionswächter". In this way, all members of the congregation in Central Europe were able to participate in the development of Friedensau. Otto Lüpke, the first principal, also wrote a series of articles and publicity leaflets in which the progress made in the early years can be clearly seen. On the occasion of the 10th anniversary of the school's founding, he wrote a small brochure that reviews the years since its founding in 1899.

The next significant work on the history of Friedensau was published in 1924 for the 25th anniversary celebrations. Despite difficult external circumstances, the new, young and dynamic principal Wilhelm Mueller did not fail to have a small illustrated chronicle produced, in which many interesting details of the first quarter of a century are recorded. Another 25 years were to pass before Siegfried Lüpke compiled an anniversary publication in 1949 – again in difficult times and under completely different political conditions, with strict censorship. And it was his brother Gunther Lüpke who published the first book on the history of Friedensau in 1974, "A Testimony of Faith", in which he drew on the sources already mentioned and drew the lines up to the 1970s.

It was the time when two lecturers, Dieter Leutert and Wolfgang Hartlapp, began to collect artifacts for a Friedensau museum. Even after his retirement, Wolfgang Hartlapp in particular devoted himself intensively to building up an archive in which documents, pictures and other material from the history of the village and all its facilities were collected. One result of this work is the representative illustrated book for the 100th anniversary celebrations in 1999, which was financed by DVG Lüneburg, whose origins lie in Friedensau.

Wolfgang Hartlapp not only collected existing material, but also specifically asked contemporary witnesses to record their experiences in writing. This resulted in reports and interviews about the early years, but above all about the difficult time between the end of the Second World War and the reopening of the preacher's seminary in the summer of 1947. He published some of the resulting reports in 2009 in the book "Wanderer, kommst du nach Friedensau".

This provided a good basis and an opportunity to use the 125th anniversary celebrations in 2024 to present the history in a somewhat broader context in Decades. Thanks to interesting color pictures, especially from the Wesselow family, which documented life in Friedensau as early as the beginning of the 1940s, and the continuous work of the head of the Friedensau picture office, Friedemann Mahlhus, it was possible to include many largely unknown motifs in the chronicle and compile them into a book (Text: Dr. Johannes Hartlapp).

Friedensau Chronicle – the history in pictures