Arthur Götting – Barred from Teaching in 1937 in Eckernförde

On Saturday, July 4, at 12:30 p.m., Rainer Beuthel will introduce the Eckernförde artist Arthur Götting. Arthur Götting created art in Eckernförde that can still be seen today. In 1937, he was barred from teaching.

Commissioned by the city, Arthur Götting—an art and crafts teacher at the local Reform-Realgymnasium—designed the Gefion Fountain in what is now the Kurpark in the mid-1930s, as well as the exterior of the “Golden Book,” which remained in use until 1979.

His fate is representative of that of many others who, as artists and cultural figures, fell victim to persecution by the Nazi regime.

After completing his training at the Kiel School of Crafts and Applied Arts and subsequently passing his exam to become a crafts teacher, Götting began his teaching career in Eckernförde in 1929. That same year, he married Clara Kaufmann, who came from a Jewish family in Göttingen. (Her mother, Else, died in 1943 at the Theresienstadt concentration camp.) He viewed the Nazi regime with reserve or even hostility and—unlike many of his fellow teachers—never joined the NSDAP, not even for tactical reasons, as Wilhelm Lehmann did.

Götting had been under the critical scrutiny of the Nazis since 1933 because of his marriage to Clara. In 1936, all teachers were required to fill out questionnaires regarding their spouses’ ancestry. Götting refused to separate from his wife. On October 31, 1937, he was finally forced into retirement, and a year later he was expelled from the Reich Chamber of Fine Arts. From then on, it was impossible for him to work publicly as an artist or educator. The Göttings moved to Göttingen, where Arthur was forced to work in various companies in the arms industry until the end of the war. It was only because of her poor health that Clara was not sent to a concentration camp in January 1945. Both spouses survived.

The fact that the city of Eckernförde, as his former employer, challenged the pension awarded to Götting in the compensation proceedings during the 1950s is an embarrassing chapter in the city’s “coming to terms with the past.”