Carl Louis Albert Pretzel (1864–1935) | English translation

• Stele: Carl Louis Albert Pretzel (1864–1935), English translation

  PDF-Dokument (5.4 MB)
  Dokument: Museum Pankow / Grafik: Kerstin John

• Stele: Carl Louis Albert Pretzel (1864–1935), English translation

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  Bild: Museum Pankow / Grafik: Kerstin John

“He used to go for walks every afternoon after school for an hour or an hour and a half, and he liked to be accompanied by one of his children. (…) I actually owe the basis of all my historical knowledge and views to my father.”
_{Sebastian Haffner on his father Carl Louis Albert Pretzel | Interview with Walter Bittermann on 31 July 1981 at Südwestfunk (SWF)
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  Carl Louis Albert Pretzel, 1920

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  Wanda and Carl Louis Albert Pretzel | Pretzel met his wife Wanda (1875-1962, née Lehmann), who was eleven years younger than him, in Berlin. Her father came from a family of Brandenburg craftsmen and worked as a primary school teacher. After Pretzel's appointment to the Prussian Ministry of Culture, the family moved to an official residence in Zehlendorfer Straße (today’s Finckensteinallee) in Berlin-Lichterfelde in 1924.

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  The Pretzel family in the courtyard of the Municipal Double School | The children, Ulrich (born 1898), Raimund (born 1907), Bernd (born 1897) and Eva (born 1899), parents Wanda and Carl, with Louis Albert Pretzel sitting in the middle (from left), about 1910

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  C. L. A. Pretzel: The Question of Religious Education, 1919 | According to Pretzel, religious education should be based on the child's experiences and familiarise him "with personalities who didn't teach religion so much as live it". The church's right to participate in religious education, Pretzel said in 1926 at a German Teachers' Association conference, endangers the independence of the education system. For this reason, schools must, in the future, do without religious instruction, without in doing so neglecting religious values in education, because: "Schools belong only to the state, and to the state alone."

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  The Community Double School on Prenzlauer Allee, circa 1925 | The Municipal Double School on Prenzlauer Allee, built between 1884 and 1886 according to plans by the town planning office and architect Hermann Blankenstein (1829-1910), offered space for around 1,200 girls at the 121st Municipal School and 540 boys at the 105th Municipal School. Both schools had separate entrances. The auditorium and gymnasium were shared. The apartments for the school attendant and the fireman were located on the ground floor of the rector's house, and one rector's apartment each was located on the first and second floor, respectively. Berlin City Museum Foundation

The elementary school teacher, ministerial official and reform pedagogue Carl Louis Albert Pretzel was rector of the 105th Municipal School for Boys on Prenzlauer Allee from 1908 to 1919. Until 1924 he lived with his wife and four children in the rector’s house on the schoolgrounds.

Pretzel was born in 1864 in Groß-Tychow (Pomerania) as the son of a country teacher. His father came from a family of farmers and craftsmen. As a child he developed a keen interest in literature. He chose his father’s profession and was first employed as a teacher in Lauenburg (Pomerania) before his appointment to the 172nd Municipal School in Berlin-Moabit in 1893.

Pretzel’s work as a teacher in Berlin marked the beginning of his close involvement with the German Teachers’ Association. He advocated for elementary school and teacher training reforms, as well as the suppression of church influence on the school system.

After the November Revolution, Pretzel was appointed to the Prussian Ministry of Culture in December 1919 and tasked with revising the elementary school curriculum. Following Georg Kerschensteiner’s (1854-1932) educational reform concept of the “work school”, Pretzel demanded that a child’s natural development be given greater freedom. Didactic games, handicrafts or the observation of natural phenomena should lead to internally experienced and independently acquired knowledge.

Up until his retirement in 1929, Pretzel spent seven years as head of the school supervising authority of the Berlin Provincial Schools Council. According to his son, Sebastian Haffner, the “last years of his life” were “darkened by the Nazis”, who destroyed his life’s work.

My father was “a good Prussian, a good liberal, a strong reformer, a very critical man, who always regarded everything with a skeptical eye”.
_{Sebastian Haffner on his father, Carl Louis Albert Pretzel | Interview with Walter Bittermann on 31 July 1981 at Südwestfunk (SWF)
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