Beginnings in Dithmarschen: Parish in Albersdorf


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Hans Asmussen took on his first parish of his own in Albersdorf, Dithmarschen in 1925. The beginnings proved to be so difficult that he decided to reestablish the congregation. His goal was to impart a faith to which the often stolid farmers in Dithmarschen could entrust their entire lives.


Politically, he shared their rejection of the Weimar Republic. When occasionally bloody protests against the government’s agrarian policy occurred in 1928, Asmussen’s conservatism mad him sympathetic to the anti-democratic rural populace.


The postcard pictured here symbolized this basic national conservative tenor in concentrated form: In addition to the church at which Hans Asmussen preached from 1925 to 1932, it pictures the local memorial to the fallen of World War I. Two crossed imperial war flags, which, however, had no longer been flown in the Weimar Republic since 1921, are displayed in between.


The conservative majority of the populace, however, indignantly rejected the republic’s symbols. The residents of Albersdorf thus saw the church and the war memorial as two related points of reference of this conservative view. The postcard pictured was mailed in 1929 – the exact year in which the Lutheran Asmussen felt provoked by local Nazis for the first time.


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  • © Photo: “Ideal” No. 61679 A. Freytag, Albersdorf (Evang. Arbeitsgemeinschaft für Kirchliche Zeitgeschichte München)