The world is in motion and our society is constantly changing. Some changes tend to take place in secret and only few people notice. One of the most gratifying changes in the past fifty years has been the way people with disabilities have become an almost normal part of our society. The Hilda Heinemann House in Borbeck-Mitte is a good example of this. Today, December 1st, the facility will be forty years old.
There are three names at the beginning of this story: Heinrich Gehring, Gerhard Haase and Hilda Heinemann. So a pastor, a deacon and the wife of the former Federal President Gustav Heinemann. What did they have to do with each other? Heinrich Gehring, today retired Superintendent, came to the Borbeck-Vogelheim parish in 1967 as the new pastor, where he met the deacon Gerhard Haase. This encounter was momentous, because Haase was determined to change something about the treatment of people with disabilities, which at the time was still quite often backward.
“At that time, those affected were treated in a way that was shaped by the era of National Socialism,” Heinrich Gehring remembers today. “There were some workshops in which the disabled could work, but otherwise they lived at home, shielded from the public and ignored – even if their parents raised, trained and protected them with infinite love.” Public schools, care and assistance? Nothing. Rather, there was a “culture of contempt and repression from everyday life,” as Gehring calls it.
In the Borbeck community, however, a delicate plant of change was already growing. There was a so-called “leisure club” for people with disabilities. Out of this work, the decision arose in 1970 to create a new home for people with disabilities in the district: a place where people with disabilities can still live at an advanced age, namely when their parents themselves are too old to to look after them intensively. Together with Deacon Haase, Heinrich Gehring, who had meanwhile also become a board member of Essen’s “Lebenshilfe eV”, campaigned for the project. The community made one of their properties available and together with “Lebenshilfe” their plan took shape.
However, it would take a long time before it was realized: it took ten years to plan and build the house. The “bureaucratic hurdles were unimaginably high,” remembers Heinrich Gehring. And it wasn’t just the bureaucracy that sometimes put one or the other obstacle in the way of the project. The question of financing also had to be clarified.
The wife of the former Federal President helped decisively
And that’s where Hilda Heinemann comes into play. The wife of the former Federal President had founded her own foundation, which had set itself the task of supporting disabled people, and had also become “an important inner support in the fight for the rights of disabled people”. Heinrich Gehring and Gerhard Haase got to know them personally during these years and they succeeded in convincing them of their plan. In the end, Hilda Heinemann made sure that the entire assets of her foundation flowed into the project; the foundation was to a certain extent merged with the new home. It quickly became clear that the house would be called “Hilda Heinemann House” after its completion. A nice side note is, by the way, that the residents later with a wink of the eye called their newly founded band “Die Hildis”.
Hilda Heinemann herself no longer saw the opening of the new home. Shortly before her death in May 1979, she was able to take part in the laying of the foundation stone. When the building was occupied in 1980, to the regret of the initiators and the first residents, she had already died. But the project was a success: a large crowd of happy people moved in and took possession of the premises. Later, further residential units were built in Essen, among other things in cooperation with the then Heimstättenwerk. Today the Hilda-Heinemann-Haus is a society in which the association “Lebenshilfe”, the parish of Essen and the Borbeck-Vogelheim community are equally involved. “Our joint project made an important contribution to overcoming the mortgage left by National Socialism,” Heinrich Gehring is convinced.
A special house for special people
Whoever visits the house at Wüstenhöferstrasse 179 will still find many special people who live here together and learn to cope with the typical tasks of everyday life: What belongs on a set dining table? How do you wash dishes? What do I have to consider when I am on the road? And that’s not all: some residents fell in love and got married. What we take for granted today would have been unthinkable in the 1970s. Every resident gets what he or she needs: from intensive care to an almost independent life. A facility that adapts entirely to the wishes and needs of its residents.
The importance of the house for the emancipation of people with disabilities is beyond question. Unfortunately, the 40th anniversary cannot be celebrated this year due to the corona pandemic. But after the establishment of this home took ten years, the postponement of the anniversary celebration by perhaps several months does not scare anyone here.
Text and photo: Kirchenkreis Essen / Raoul M. Kisselbach
–
