^{2009, in lecture theatre 1 of the University of Oldenburg}

August 2022

Contents

First of all: I have spent almost my entire professional life in Einstürzende Neubauten[1] almost my entire professional life:

- No sooner had I become an employee of the North Rhine-Westphalian Ministry of Education and Cultural Affairs in 1972 to help set up the NW collegiate school experiment than this experiment was cut short by the then state government of NW due to a veto by the co-governing FDP in its most important element, namely the merger of the upper secondary school and the vocational school. We academics protested against this, but to no avail.

- No sooner had I been offered a professorship at the University of Oldenburg in 1975 and committed myself to actively participating in the development of the pilot scheme for single-phase teacher training than this pilot scheme was cancelled by the newly elected CDU state government in 1976.

- In 1989, I had barely used my long-standing contacts with Lothar Klingberg (Potsdam) and Edgar Rausch (Leipzig) for a cooperation agreement with the Clara Zetkin University of Applied Sciences in Leipzig as the then Dean of Faculty 1 when the GDR and, shortly afterwards, the Leipzig University of Education were wound up.

- No sooner had we switched to the (still halfway sensible) two-phase teacher training examination regulations at the University of Oldenburg following the cancellation of the "single-phase" model experiment, than the Bachelor/Master model was introduced as part of the Bologna Process and everything we had built up was shaken up again.[2]

That's life: And for me, this has meant that over time I have become accustomed to not putting too much heart and soul into the organisational structure of my own workplace and paying more attention to discovering meaning in my own work, even under adverse conditions. My Oldenburg colleague Astrid Kaiser remarked 20 years ago that this was an apolitical attitude. That's why I want to be more specific: I continue to believe that the debate about the right organisational form of teacher training is indispensable and I am still a staunch advocate of the concept of single-phase teacher training linked to early practical phases. However, the failure of major projects is no reason for me to sulk or even reduce my workload. Especially under adverse circumstances, it is all the more important in day-to-day teaching to act as a role model as a university teacher, to show students in concrete terms how to teach well and to support them in developing a humane teacher attitude. I have endeavoured to do this in my courses. More on this in section 6!

Text genesis: The first version of this text was written in 2006 at the request of my long retired Oldenburg colleague Bernhard Möller for a collection of essays with autobiographical texts by Oldenburg educationalists.[3] This old version has now been quadrupled in size and supplemented with many photos and drawings. Hence the new subtitle: "An autobiographical report".

Intentions: This text is not a contribution to educational theory, and certainly not to theorising. I have tried to do that in other places.[4] Despite its subtitle, the text is not an autobiography, but something like an account of 58 years of academic appointments, first at the Ocholt primary school (in the Oldenburg region), then at the Free University of Berlin and the Westphalian Wilhelms University in Münster, and from 1975 to the present day at the University of Oldenburg. The text also contains some rather personal background information on my professional career, which I am publishing here for the first time. They would have no place in a textbook!

Memory: I am writing this report from memory. I have only occasionally rummaged through old records and documents to check dates and names. Errors can occur with such an approach. As a former student of history, you know this from the analyses of oral history. I ask for your understanding.

Photos and scans: I have integrated many drawings, photos, guestbook excerpts, etc. into the text to make the descriptions more vivid. If anyone recognises themselves, I ask them afterwards for what is nowadays called a model release in the publishing industry.

A hint of narcissism: A clear egocentricity can hardly be avoided in such a self-report. People particularly like to report on people who have a well-known name in their own discipline and then bask in the fact that they have had dealings with them. The many small, pleasant and sometimes irritating experiences on the fringes of a long professional life are then ignored, partly because I have often long forgotten them. I ask for your understanding! Nevertheless, when this text was finished, I was astonished, even shocked, at how many nice and co-operative people I have worked with in 57 years.[5]

Oldenburg, 1 August 2022

1 August 2022

1. parental home

1.1 Birth and flight

I was born on 2 October 1941 in Lauenburg, Pomerania, the fourth of six children. I am the younger twin of my brother Meinert Meyer by ten minutes. Our mother told us how to tell us apart: Meinert's face is a little pointed (like the point in the capital letter M), Hilbert's face is parallel (like the capital letter H).

My parents came from the state of Oldenburg (my father from Wilhelmshaven, my mother from Delmenhorst). So I was born in the north-east of what was then Germany rather by chance. It wasn't until 35 years ago, when I read a biography of the Polish Jewish educator Janus Korczak for the first time and looked up on the map where Treblinka[6] I was horrified to realise how close we lived to the extermination camps back then. My mother told us that she had heard from her brother-in-law Georg-Heinz (a theology student, then a soldier near Minsk, missing in Russia since 1944) that "bad things were happening in the East". But her brother-in-law hadn't told her anything more specific.

2 Childhood and school

2.1 Twins

As mentioned at the beginning, I have an identical twin brother, Meinert Meyer (1941-2018), who - what a coincidence - also became a professor of school education and, after a first professorship in Halle (Saale), taught in the Department of Education at the University of Hamburg.

^{1943 - Mother Erna, Berend, Dierk and the twins}

When we were still children, we were rather bothered by our twin status. Meinert liked to emphasise that he was 10 minutes older than me. I then told him something about Jacob and Esau (or at least planned to tell him). With one or two exceptions, our teachers couldn't tell us apart. That's why we only received different grades at grammar school in those subjects where written work was required. We sat in the same class until we finished school. We went on every school trip and holiday together. We had to share many birthday presents, which I felt was unfair to my older siblings, who didn't have to share. That's why we were both happy when we were finally able to go our own ways after leaving school.

Similarity: We twins looked extremely similar as children. Our mother never had any problems - not even when the Lauenburg nurses exchanged our name tapes two days after the birth to test whether my mother would notice. But my father sometimes had difficulty telling us apart when we were a little further away. Then he would shout "Meinert/Hilbert come here!"

Mistaken identity games: When we had gone our separate ways and then bumped into each other again fifteen years later in our academic appointments, we really enjoyed our twin status. My brother took over my job with Herwig Blankertz in 1975 at the Academic Support Centre in Münster - for years to come we met people who hadn't noticed the change of person. When my brother was approached by a colleague who mistook him for me, he used to say: "I don't know you. But I know your problem." And vice versa, when my friend Jürgen Lüthje, then President of the University of Hamburg and former Chancellor of the University of Oldenburg, met my brother Meinert on an Intercity train, he asked: "Is it you - or is it you?"

In Banff and Canada at the same time? In December 1979, I had to stand in at short notice for the Vice-Rector of our university, Friedel Busch, and had the pleasure of joining Detlef Spindler, Uli Steinbrink and Klaus Winter on a business trip to the Rocky Mountains in the Canadian resort town of Banff, where an international conference on teacher training was being organised by the Norwegian Per Dalin. My only task was to give a 15-minute presentation on the Oldenburg single-phase teacher training programme. The decision was made at such short notice that I was unable to cancel the next lecture session (on the topic of "Student-oriented lesson planning"). So my brother jumped in, put on my clothes and marched into the Oldenburg auditorium without coming out, even though, as he told me afterwards, he would have liked to add a note here and there in the lecture text I had prepared: "My brother is wrong here!" Apart from my youngest sister, who was studying in Oldenburg at the time, and four or five students who knew that I had a twin brother, nobody realised the hoax. My brother actually wanted to make it public at the end of the meeting. But he never got round to it because all the students left the auditorium so abruptly after 90 minutes that he didn't fulfil his intention. Years later, I was still being asked whether it was really true that I had let myself be represented in that session. A student came to me a week later and said that I had seemed so strange to her and that she had wondered whether I had had a marital quarrel. There was a student in the lecture who was a member of the radical right-wing NPD. He liked to ask questions and was annoying. We hadn't pointed this risk out to my brother. So, to the surprise of the other students, he responded to his question, which also came up in this session, in a very petulant manner.

Hamburg: Conversely, I stood in for my brother when he was dean at the University of Hamburg in 1996 and had to organise the graduation ceremony for the teaching professions. I had research semesters and was flexible in terms of time. My brother hid in the wings before the event began, I opened the ceremony with a speech about the expectations of the teaching profession and, on an agreed word, my brother joined me and we finished the talk as a dialogue presentation.

We don't have the impression that we have acquired a lack of ego strength through our twin status.[14] The opposite seems more likely to us. We just ticked very similarly, even if there were this or that competitive game until the end, but it wasn't Meinert who suffered from this, but at most his wife Christel, because she - having grown up as an only child - found these games very exhausting.

In 2017, my brother fell ill with a brain tumour and died at the end of 2018.

2.2 Childhood and adolescence

3 First degree and school service

3.1 Bethel Church College

From the summer semester of 1961 to the winter semester of 1961/62, I studied at the very small ecclesiastical college in Bethel near Bielefeld (200 students), where I passed the Graecum examination, which was approved by a state commission. Studying at Bethel was an offer from our father that three of us children took up. He justified these additional costs on a tight salary as follows: "At the grammar school in Westerstede you couldn't learn what hard work is. But when you have completed the Graecum in Bethel with the Greek professor Krämer, you will know for the first time what real work is." Our father was right, by the way! The professor bullied us, albeit in an amiable way, because he had the ambition to achieve the same level of performance with us students after 11 months as the grammar school for classical languages in Bielefeld had achieved in 8 years. That's why we had to pass the Abitur written exam at this grammar school as our last preliminary exam at the university. My Graecum grade was "satisfactory".

The year at Bethel broadened my horizons, partly because we students were expected to help out in Bethel's hospitals at weekends to relieve the deacons working there. Since then, I have had no fear of contact with epileptics or people suffering from schizophrenia. And the language skills I acquired in the Graecum help me to deal with the many educational terms of Greek origin.

PH Bielefeld: At the same time, I was enrolled as a guest student at the University of Education Bielefeld. My fellow students in Bethel thought it was strange that I was learning Greek to become a primary school teacher. When I once blabbed and said that I could imagine teaching at a teacher training college later on, they laughed at me. So I learnt that "professor" is not a communicable career aspiration, but I never gave up the idea that it was an attractive job.

3.2 Oldenburg University of Education

From the summer semester of 1962 to the summer semester of 1964, I studied at the University of Education in Oldenburg for five semesters. In Oldenburg, I had received credit for two semesters of the part-time programme at the PH Bielefeld, but no examination parts were waived. That's why I only used one of the recognised semesters.

Main subject and minor subjects: I chose German as my main subject. The four minor subjects were history, maths, Protestant religion and English. I chose German because I was a fan of Brecht. Unfortunately, for my lecturer, Prof Hans Lüschen, the serious literature - and only that was covered - ended with Hugo von Hofmannsthal. I didn't know that Lüschen belonged to the Stefan George circle - I had never heard of this circle either. The four minor subjects had to be covered with two credits each, i.e. 4 semester hours per week - better than nothing!

Teaching started in 1962 in the former "teachers' seminary" in Peterstraße, which was built in 1846 - incidentally with a very beautiful wood-panelled auditorium that has been preserved to this day. After two semesters, we all moved to the new building in Ammerländer Heerstraße, which had just been completed and is now the oldest part of the university on Ammerländer Heerstraße.

Rural school internship: I was particularly influenced in my academic appointment by the so-called rural school internship that I completed in the summer holidays of 1962 with fellow student Reinhard Riedel, who had only recently arrived in Oldenburg as a late repatriate from East Prussia. We were assigned to the two-class primary school in Arle/East Friesland. Our mentor was Ellen Riggert. She was the main teacher.

^{The school building in Arle - behind the three windows in the attic is the workroom, where we two students were accommodated free of charge for six weeks.}

We were in the upper class with years 5 to 8, which was taught by Ellen. This meant that we had to do departmental lessons every day and learnt what internal differentiation was right from the start.

Ellen advocated and realised reform pedagogical ideas in her lessons, which she had learnt about during her studies at the Hanover University of Teacher Education. I was impressed by the methodological expertise of the "country kids". In religious education lessons, for example, they were able to identify different layers of a parable or a miracle story - and most of them did so in East Frisian Platt (which I only partially understood with my knowledge of Oldenburg Platt). Ellen impressed upon us: "As a teacher, you must learn to leave your weapons in the locker." Unfortunately, she later abandoned this principle when she became a primary school headteacher in Oldenburg.

- Farewell from the rural school internship with Ellen Riggert

Every afternoon (!) we had to turn up at the teacher's office during our work placement and usually stayed there for three hours. First we had a cup of tea (good East Frisian with kluntjes and cream). Afterwards, every lesson held in the morning was thoroughly analysed, then the next day's lessons were discussed. Ellen regularly wrote in her lesson logs: "Teacher disrupts the lesson!" And she was almost always right. We were simply still too clumsy and had not yet realised how independent these East Frisian country children were and how many working techniques they had already mastered.

City school internship: After the 1962/63 winter term, it was my turn to do the city school internship. I plucked up all my courage and asked my fellow student Christa Konukiewitz if we wanted to do the internship together. I had known her since the first week of term in 1962, because we happened to have been assigned to the same group for the so-called Thursday work placement, where we spent one morning a week at school. I wasn't at all sure whether Christa would say yes - but she did.

- In the photo, Christa is teaching our pupils the hand signs for singing a scale.

The internship took place in class 2b at Haarentor primary school (Oldenburg), right next to the PH. Our mentor Gudrun Heise was great, just like Ellen Riggert in the country school internship. She showed us how challenging it is to organise an appropriate spelling and numeracy course in primary school. Since then, I have taken the view that teaching reading, writing and maths is more didactically demanding than any advanced course in a grammar school.

At the same time as the internship, I had my first subject examinations in the minor subjects of English and history because of the semesters I had to take into account. It was tedious, but it worked out, partly because Christa was tolerant enough to take on some of the work I was supposed to do. Our supervisor and marker in the city school internship was the music didact Ulrich Günther. Christa got the grade "good", I got a "satisfactory".

Protestant Student Community (ESG): Christa and I were involved in the student community. Apart from the AStA and the SHB, there was no other student organisation back then that you could get involved in. Joining the ESG was an obvious choice for us because Christa is a pastor's daughter and I also come from a Protestant family. We were both, but not at the same time, student spokespersons for the ESG - a job with a limited workload. The ESG organised camps in the Blockhaus Ahlhorn, but also a close co-operation with the Reformed Protestant Church of East Frisia and - of course - a cabbage trip in winter. The newly appointed first Oldenburg student pastor Peter Wagner from Detmold, with whom we remained friends throughout our lives, left a strong impression. He was clearly on the left - both politically and theologically. We learnt about Dorothee Sölle from him and he explained to us why he was a pacifist.

Excursion to the FDJ in East Berlin: I vividly remember that in 1963 - shortly after the Wall was built - the then AStA of the Oldenburg PH accepted an invitation from the FDJ university group at Humboldt University in East Berlin/DDR.[17] My future wife and I were able to go along. Werner Loch and Hans-Jochen Gamm, then the holders of the two professorships for general education at our university, were also there. Hans Jochen Gamm gave a courageous lecture on school policy.[18] We looked at polytechnic education in an electrical company and discussed it with the teachers. At Humboldt University on Unter den Linden, we discussed educational issues with a relatively large group of education professors. One professor went so far as to claim that, in view of the hostile attitude of the capitalist states in the GDR, an "education to hate" was necessary. We went to the cabaret "Die Distel" one evening and experienced Wolf Biermann's last or penultimate public performance in the GDR. We talked to important people and - what a coincidence - the then GDR Foreign Minister Bolz also dropped in on us, seemingly by chance.[19]

The university teaching staff at the PH: In the 1960s, we had committed and fit professors in Oldenburg, many of whom had made a good name for themselves nationwide a few years later, e.g. Werner Loch (later Erlangen University, then Kiel University), Hans-Jochen Gamm (later Darmstadt University), Erwin Schwartz, founder of the nationwide primary school working group (later Frankfurt University), the art didactician Reinhard Pfennig, the music didactician Ulrich Günther, the didactician Hartmut Sellin, the biology didactician Ernst Kelle and the aforementioned Heinrich Besuden.

4. doctoral studies and work for the Kollegschulversuch

4.1 Just in time - studies at the Free University of Berlin (West)

From the summer semester of 1967 to the winter semester of 1968/69, I studied at the Free University of Berlin and began my doctoral studies with the main subject of educational science and the minor subjects of philosophy and history.[29] I had been invited to do my doctorate by Herwig Blankertz. It was the time when this potholed rule of not being allowed to ask for supervision yourself had just been abandoned: "... a thousand years of mustiness under the gowns."[30]

5th marriage - four children - golden wedding anniversary

The private sphere is public. - That was a principle of the 1968 generation, which I don't consider to be entirely correct, but in some respects. That's why, in the middle of this autobiographical report, I'll explain why you can't work full steam ahead for decades as a university lecturer if your family circumstances aren't right.

Christa Konukiewitz, a pastor's daughter from Delmenhorst, and I met in April 1962 in the first week of term at the Oldenburg University of Teacher Education because we happened to be in the same work placement group (see above). After a cautious process of getting to know each other, we were married on 27 December 1969 in Delmenhorst by my father-in-law Fritz Konukiewitz, pastor at the town church. I have never regretted it! Christa was and is the greatest stroke of luck in my life. And she patiently kept my back free and thus made a significant contribution to me being able to invest a lot of time in my professional work.

Unlike me, Christa had a decent salary at the time of our wedding and she owned a Citroen "duck". In October 1970, we moved to Roxeler Straße 13 (now Sebastianstraße) in Nienberge with our newborn first son Onno in the back seat - the first flat of our own just outside the city of Münster!

^{Photos: New Year's Eve 1972 on Langeoog}

Four children: We have four children, none of whom have become teachers. My wife's ancestors come from East Frisia. So we thought that, in view of the boring surname Meyer, the children could have somewhat rarer first names. Hence the East Frisian names Onno, Gesa, Tiedo and Tale. When the eldest, Onno, was in the 5th grade in Oldenburg, he had to draw the family in English class: "This is Meyer fämeli":

Buying a house: in 1979, when it was clear that we wanted to stay in Oldenburg, we bought a semi-detached house in the Haarenesch neighbourhood. We paid off the loans for 38 years, but have never regretted the purchase. In the meantime, our son Tiedo and his family have moved into the upper flat. So we are a multi-generational house (including grandchildren, cat and sheepdog).

^{The drawing (1994) is by daughter Gesa}

After the family phase, my wife wanted to return to teaching in 1985, but this was not possible because there was extreme teacher unemployment at the time. For 18 years, she therefore worked as an organist and choirmaster in the Bloherfelde/Oldenburg parish. She was involved in the ecumenical peace movement and founded the Oldenburg Ecumenical Centre, of which she was Chair for many years. She was a councillor for the SPD in the Oldenburg city parliament for 10 years. And she has a speciality: she bakes very tasty pizzas with the character of a mound. That's why we've invited an entire seminar to our house for pizza every semester for 30 years. I did the maths at the retirement party in 2009: It was a total of 2200 portions!

Denmark: Every year, we went to the village of Klitmöller in Jutland/Denmark with all our children, my parents-in-law, my twin brother's family, my mother, my sister Dörte and Waltraud and Friedhelm Zubke, who had already become our friends during our PH studies, and spent 4 weeks on holiday there - action-oriented, i.e. with big scavenger hunts.This included big scavenger hunts, Punch and Judy shows (in a children's hut hammered together out of flotsam and jetsam), mushroom picking, lots of swimming and long walks on the beach. Just lying on the beach and dozing off was not our thing. We always came with several families and often rented four or five holiday homes at the same time. We regularly met our Bielefeld colleague Theodor Schulze and his wife Dorothee there. This year (2022) will be the 46th time we have travelled to this village, now with our daughter, our son-in-law, daughter-in-law and two grandchildren, our second son, his partner and two grandchildren, and then my younger sister, my sister-in-law and my godchild. Together we have spent three and a half years of our lives in Klitmöller, and unfortunately we still don't speak Danish.

^{Meinert Meyer: "View of Denmark's blossom"}

Brother Meinert always took oil paint and brushes with him and painted a lot. He once painted a paraphrase of Karl Friedrich Schinkel's famous painting "Blick in Griechenlands Blüthe" (1825), which hangs on our wall in Oldenburg: Schinkel's Greek temple in front, but with a Danish post box, an old brick church from Klitmöller's neighbouring village of Nors (near Klitmöller) on the left and our bathing lake Nors-Sö, also just "around the corner".

Building ship models: I developed a hobby in Klitmöller: I collected scraps of wood from the beach, which were still being thrown overboard in huge numbers off the coast in the 70s and 80s, and used them to build ships for the children, and later also for the grandchildren. Of course, that only worked if I took my toolbox with me on holiday: a rescue cruiser for my daughter Gesa in 1978 and a harbour tug for my grandson Lüko in 2020 - in each case big enough to use the Playmobil figures for playing. The ships float because they are made of wood. But their centre of gravity is so high that they usually tip over very quickly.

Golden wedding anniversary: On 27 December 2019, we celebrated our golden wedding anniversary in the "Krömerei" in Westerstede with 75 relatives and 15 friends in the "closest family circle".

Now we are getting old together, as the photo from 2020 (taken in our garden in Kastanienallee in Oldenburg) shows, and the first age-related ailments are making themselves felt.

6 Professors at the Carl von Ossietzky University

6.1 A professorship in Oldenburg - what more could you want?

The first professorship I applied for, I got straight away. [44] That was the full one[45] professorship for school education (then H4, then C 4 and even later W 3) at the newly founded Carl von Ossietzky University, which was not yet allowed to be called that because the FDP had pushed through in the coalition agreement with the SPD that the name of the Nobel Peace Prize winner, who was not a communist but stood for a broad alliance with all left-wing forces, should not be chosen. It was Gerhard Schröder who, immediately after taking office as Minister President of Lower Saxony in 1981, passed a law allowing universities to give themselves a name.

The PH Oldenburg, where I had studied, was integrated into the new university. This meant that I ended up in my father's former position (see above, point 1.3) and that I was assigned a number of colleagues, some of whom I had sat in seminars with 11 years earlier and two of whom had even examined me.[46] Unlike at the University of Bremen, where there were decades of heated disputes between the staff of the old PH and the new academic appointments at the university, the PH integration in Oldenburg went surprisingly smoothly. We lecturers did not organise ourselves into two blocs of "old PH" and "new university", but along common university political factions, ranging from SPD and DGB representatives (of which I was one) to the undogmatic left (especially supporters of the Frankfurt School of Sociology, with whom I enjoyed working a lot in the years to come) and Marxists close to the Stamokap. There was no CDU-affiliated group of university lecturers at the University of Oldenburg in 1975, but there were allegedly two lecturers in the natural sciences with CDU party membership. At the beginning we met once a week, later much less frequently, in these groups at 8.00 pm to discuss the situation.

Appointment committee: As I received a file containing all the confidential documents from a member of the appointment committee twenty years later, I can easily reconstruct how the selection decision was made and what the balance of power in the committee was. The Chair was the lovely colleague Ilse Mayer-Kulenkampff (1916-2008), a social pedagogue[47]who did not want to harm anyone and therefore considered the fierce disputes between the university teacher factions to be more of an evil. Other members of the commission were the philosopher Rudolf Lengert, the psychologist August Schick and the sociologist Gerd Vonderach as well as the secret string-puller in the commission, the holder of the professorship for General Education Hans-Dietrich Raapke, who, like my doctoral supervisor, had completed his doctorate under Erich Weniger. The mid-level representatives were Gustav Denzer (who, like me, came from Lauenburg/Pomerania) and Friedhelm Zubke (with whom I had completed my PH studies). The student representatives were Gudrun Patel (member of the MSB - Marxist Student Union Spartakus) and Hans-Joachim Schwebe.

"Audition": I remember my audition in the summer semester of 1974 very well and I was very excited. I had chosen my field of work at the time (setting up an integrated upper secondary school as a continuation of the comprehensive school at lower secondary level) and developed a proposal on how a collegiate school could be set up in Oldenburg. In the ensuing discussion, Gerd Vonderach, who wanted to see a candidate other than me, Johannes Beck, in first place, asked: "You mentioned Niklas Luhmann in your presentation. Can you explain again what you meant there?" My answer: "You caught me at my weakest point. I haven't yet thoroughly familiarised myself with Luhmann's systems theory!" Six months later, Herbert Hasler (former assistant to Erwin Schwartz and then a university lecturer in Oldenburg) came to me and said: "I was at your lecture. At the point where Gerd was heckling you, I said to myself: That's exactly the right person for us, if he can admit so openly that he doesn't know something."

ELAB commitment: Every applicant for a university teaching position in Oldenburg was asked whether they were willing to participate in the development of the project-based teacher training programme at ELAB (see below). Of course, everyone answered "yes" to this question because otherwise they would have had no chance of getting a place on the list. My former fellow student and assistant to the rector at the time, Meinard Tebben, had informed me about this beforehand so that I could prepare myself thoroughly for this question.

Fellow applicants: Christine Möller (later University of Siegen), Johannes Beck (later University of Bremen), Hans-Dieter Haller (colleague of Karl-Heinz Flechsig, University of Göttingen), Karl Frey (Kiel), Hans Glück (later University of Cologne) and Kurt-Ingo Flessau (later TU Dortmund) had applied for the position.

My most "dangerous" competitor was my Swiss colleague Karl Frey (1917-2011). At that time, in 1974, he was already Director of the Institute of Educational Sciences in Kiel (IPN). With his habilitation (which I lacked) and a highly remunerated position in Kiel, he was formally far superior to all other applicants. If he had been on the list, the SPD Minister of Education at the time, Jost Grolle (previously a history teacher at the Oldenburg University of Teacher Education), would probably have preferred him, even if Johannes Beck or I had been in first and second place and he had only been in third place. However, the committee decided not to put him on the list in the first place because they were convinced that he only wanted to "silver" his Oldenburg reputation, i.e. use it to improve his Kiel salary in negotiations to stay.[48]

Johannes Beck (1938-2013), who shortly afterwards received a professorship at the University of Bremen, was the second young scientist to be nominated for first place. He belonged to the "undigmatic left" and was therefore more left-wing than me. The two students voted against me because I was too close to the bourgeois camp. The middle peasants and the majority of university lecturers voted for me because they thought my profile was suitable and trusted Herwig Blankertz's verbal and written judgement. He then also wrote one of the two expert reports, a copy of which he sent to me confidentially and wrote: " ... with one laughing and one crying eye".

List of three: Hans-Dietrich Raapke originally favoured someone else for first place, but when he saw that a majority in the commission was in my favour, he changed his mind. So there was a list of three: 1st place: Meyer, 2nd place: Beck, 3rd place: Glück.

Call given and accepted: In autumn 1974, I received an inconspicuous letter from Minister of Education Joist Grolle. It consisted of just two sentences: "I am offering you the H4 professorship in school education at the University of Oldenburg. Please get in contact with my advisor Kronshage." Of course I accepted the offer, even though it was hard to say goodbye to the academic support at the Kollegschule in Münster. But coming back home to Oldenburg had an irresistible appeal for my wife and me.

There was no reason to be overconfident: The fact that I got the first job I applied for was largely due to the fact that in the 1970s, a good 30 new universities and colleges were founded in Germany in one fell swoop as part of Brandt-Scheel's university and education reforms. Most of them - as in Oldenburg - emerged from PHs. Almost all of these new universities had teacher training degree programmes. As a result, young educational academics who were eligible to apply at the beginning of the 1970s had very good chances, even if they were not habilitated. By 1978, the situation had become much more difficult and from 1980 onwards, almost all vacant positions in Schools of Education were cancelled without replacement.

6.2 Commencement of employment and chair

I took up my new post at Carl von Ossietzky University on 1 February 1975 and held it until my retirement on 1 October 2009. Even after that, I continued to work on the basis of my emeritus status.

At first I had no place to stay at all. The large AVZ building on Uhlhornsweg was still under construction. So for the first 12 months I was given asylum in Faculty 2, in the room of Meinhard Tebben (art didactician and assistant to the Rectorate at the time) and Prince Rudolf zur Lippe (Professor of Aesthetics in the subject of Visual Communication).

Off to Berlin to the Humboldt University? In 1991, on the initiative of my colleague Dietrich Benner, I was invited to apply for a professorship in school education at the Humboldt University in Berlin. I was signalled as having good chances by the head of department of the Senator for Science. I briefly wavered as to whether I should accept this interesting enquiry, but in the end I stayed in Oldenburg. In Berlin, I would presumably have become responsible for practical school studies again sooner or later and would then have had to invest a lot of energy in organising the Institute, which had to be radically reduced in terms of staff and restructured in its working methods after reunification. I told myself that, given my profile of expertise, it would be wiser to stay in Oldenburg, teach and write books. The decisive factor, however, was my wife Christa, who said: "You can go to Berlin - but me and the children will stay here!" That decided the issue, even if I still think about whether it was a somewhat selfish decision.

Workload: I enjoyed working a lot until I retired. And even after that, it didn't fundamentally change. To this day (2022), I simply act as if I haven't retired yet. But I enjoy the freedom to decide for myself what I do and where I turn down one of the requests that are still coming in (lectures, visiting professorships, doctoral supervisors). Until I retired, "a lot" meant that I worked through the week until Sunday evening and started again on Monday morning. However, from 1990 onwards, when the children were out of the house, I took a nap practically every day - 30 minutes, never longer.

Workaholic? Some of my friends say I'm a workaholic. I disagree because I don't feel addicted, because work benefits others and because I don't hide my "illness". As Karl Marx analysed, self-determined work serves self-realisation. And Theodor Adorno once remarked somewhere that professors don't need holidays because they can organise their workplace autonomously.[55] I tend to agree with that. The work can be very satisfying. There is also a lot of room for manoeuvre in the university teaching profession, but if you abuse it, it soon leads to social isolation in the School.

6.6 Internship supervision

From the beginning of my teaching career, i.e. from 1975 to 2009, I offered a preparatory seminar for the internships every semester, first for the practical phases of the ELAB, then for the first general school internship (ASP) in the old teacher training examination regulations and then in the Bachelor's degree programme. This included supervising the students during the semester break and then holding a joint evaluation seminar. Initially, 4 hours of the teaching load were set aside for this, but after the changeover to the BA/MA programme, there were only two hours per week per semester - in my opinion a mistake and a great annoyance. It's no wonder then that on-site supervision and evaluation of internships are sloppily carried out due to sheer lack of time.

- Practical teaching semester in the ELAB: From 1975 to 1985, supervision within the framework of the ELAB model experiment consisted primarily of supervising the so-called practical teaching semester, which was concluded with the integrated first and second examinations. There, we teachers had functions that the subject leaders at the study seminars have today. We travelled a long way because the students' locations ranged from Emden and Leer to Oldenburg, Nordenham and Delmenhorst, and from Verden to Cuxhaven. Then I would set off in the morning, often at 6 a.m., to get to the schools in time for the start of lessons. These many classroom visits had a strong influence on my "Guidelines for lesson preparation" (see section 8 below), which I wrote at the time.

- General school internship in the two-phase teacher training programme and in the BA/MA programme: From 1973 - parallel to the ELAB model trial that was coming to an end - the "normal" degree programme, which was to be completed with the state First Teaching Qualification Examination, was reintroduced. In our department, I was responsible for organising the general school internship (ASP) included in the course and always enjoyed doing so. There was a chronic shortage of teaching hours, which only ceased with the introduction of the Bachelor's/Master's degree programme, because from this date onwards, capacities were calculated at our university for the first time, so that additional staff were hired during the current semester when enrolment numbers at our Institute were too high, albeit in exploitatively poorly paid positions[56].

7 Co-operation

A professorship in school education offers a wide range of opportunities for co-operation with other university institutions, with schools in the region and with national institutions. I have enjoyed and personally benefited from this from the very beginning.

7.1 Centre for Pedagogical Professional Practice

The cooperation with the Centre for Pedagogical Professional Practice and its director, Detlef Spindler, was always particularly important and satisfying for me. He has a very high level of social communication skills and has always managed to bring very different colleagues together for productive work.

Another member of the ZpB was the geography didact Wolfgang Schranke, who organised the university's PÄDAGOGISCHE WOCHE (PW) organised by the university every autumn, which offered a wide range of further training in school education and was attended by several thousand teachers. I repeatedly took part with lectures and workshops.

Hansjürgen Otto also worked at the ZpB, whom I already knew from my FU studies in Berlin. He was a reliable partner for the students and advised them on conflicts at their internship schools.

The next photo on the page shows teacher Sabine Nolte (currently Chair of the Osnabrück District Staff Council) on the podium at the PW event with students: "Schule 88 - voll ätzend?" (School 88 - sucks?)

Pedagogical Week 1998: "School really sucks?" (left: Sabine Nolte)

7.2 School reform centre

From 1992 to 2006, I was the scientific director of the School Reform Centre (AS) at the Centre for Pedagogical Professional Practice at the University of Oldenburg - an institution of the Ministry of Education and Cultural Affairs that was intended to support school development in the region and test evaluation models. To this end, the then SPD Minister of Education, Rolf Wernstedt, seconded teaching hours to the ZpB - initially four teaching posts, later two. There was an advisory board, initially headed by the Osnabrück head of department Otto Menzel, later by RSD Ernst Wille (Oldenburg) and RSD Klaus Kapell (Wildeshausen). At regular intervals, we organised closed meetings together with the advisory board, at which not only the work plan for the following year was prepared, but also a current topic of teaching development was discussed.

Schortens: The activities of the AS included the establishment of learning workshops, participation in internal teacher training programmes (SchiLF) and the Schortens headteacher conferences, often with more than 350 participants, for which we invited nationally and internationally renowned experts: Heinz Rosenbusch and Stephan Huber, Annemarie von der Groeben and Susanne Thurn from the Laboratory School, Jürgen Baumert, Klaus-Jürgen Tillman, Hans-Günter Rolff, Peter Posch from Klagenfurt and Michael Schratz from Innsbruck, Pertti Kansanen from Helsinki and Mats Ekholm from Sweden, the neuroscientist Gerhard Roth from Bremen. Comment from Ha-Gü Rolff, Dortmund: "We envy you for what you have built up in SCHORTENS!"

I enjoyed working with Ina Ulrich, Christel Wopp, Wilm Renneberg, Alida Baumann, Franz Wester and many other seconded teachers. I never understood the AS management task to mean that I was the guiding light. It was more important that the seconded teachers were able to contribute their strengths and develop them further:

Retreat with the AS at the historical-ecological education centre in Papenburg

7.3 "Teacher training" research workshop

In 1994, I organised a compact seminar entitled "Future Workshop School". The result was that the students (Carola Junghans, Andreas Feindt, Bettina Kappelhoff and Anne Eckermann, among others) were in favour of setting up a university school.[64] and a teacher training research workshop. Wolfgang Fichten, Alexandra Obolenski and I, as lecturers, joined forces with this initiative and founded the Forschungswerkstatt Schule und Lehrer*innenbildung - a joint venture between Faculty 1 and the university's Didactic Centre (formerly ZpB).

The tireless soul and head of the research workshop was Wolfgang Fichten (here at a closed meeting of the Nordverbund Schulbegleitforschung). The main task of the research workshop was to establish the "base station" for the experiments to establish our team research model, which started at the same time.

Nordverbund Schulbegleitforschung: From the research workshop, we also organised the Nordverbund , which still exists today under the name Nordverbund Praxisforschung.

8 Publications

8.1 Liaison with the Cornelsen publishing house

It is a right of university lecturers to combine academic work at the university with the publication of research results. I have utilised this right to the full. In purely quantitative terms, however, my list of publications is significantly shorter than that of several of my Oldenburg colleagues. I have concentrated on textbooks and academic records, each of which had and still has a broad target audience. A complete list of publications, updated until 2022, can be found on this HOMEPAGE. The total circulation of the monographs published by CORNELSEN Verlag Berlin in particular amounts to just under 1.4 million copies today (in 2022). In view of the current total of 880,000 teachers in Germany, this is quite a lot, which occasionally causes astonishment.[75] The high figures are also thanks to the director of Cornelsen-Scriptor-Verlag Berlin, Horst Linder, who has worked tirelessly for the distribution of my books.

9 Sixtieth birthday (2001) and retirement (2009)

Detlef Spindler, then head of the Centre for Professional Practice, is a week younger than me. We therefore decided to celebrate our 120th birthday together on 19 October 2001. Karsten Friedrichs drew the appropriate cartoon for the invitation:

Alexandra Obolenski, Andreas Feindt, Ulrike Heinrichs, Ulf Gebken and Carola Junghans were responsible for the superb organisation of the event:

Retirement ceremony 2009: On 20 June 2009, my retirement ceremony took place in the old auditorium of the university, where I had heard lectures as a student in 1963/64, organised and designed by Sylvia Jahnke-Klein, Carola Junghans, Andreas Feindt, Volker Wendt, Ulrike Heinrichs and many other nice people.

The university's AStA had politely asked me beforehand if they could drop a banner denouncing the dean's faculty policy from the balcony of the auditorium during the celebration. I happily agreed and said: "Great! This will take me back to the turbulent beginnings of my doctoral studies at the FU Berlin on the day of my retirement!"

I still meet colleagues today who tell me how brilliantly these five organised the ceremony: They wanted to transfer my principle of action-orientation of teaching to a university celebration - and they really succeeded! As in every one of my lectures, there was a large FAHRPLAN, this time on the topic of "Teacher training in 6 acts":

The FAHRPLAN of the retirement ceremony set up on the stage of the auditorium

The individual stages:

- Astrid Kaiser, then the Institute Director, opened the event; and the Vice President, Mrs Ahrens, gave a welcoming address.

- The Dean of our School, sociologist Bernhard Kittel, gave a short speech in which he explained that I had had a good time between 1975 and 2009. Today the work has become much more demanding! Klaus-Jürgen Tillmann, who led a discussion about teaching quality on the podium after this opening, strongly disagreed with this - which made me happy!

- Assistants' choir: A production of the 35 student assistants and research assistants who currently work for me or have done so in the past, who commented lovingly and ironically on the conditions in my office (especially the midday nap on the rubber mat under the desk).

- Carola's husband Michael Greiner staged a stomp with all 300 guests, during which the following sounds were intoned by all guests in four-four time: tapping on the desk top at the seat - loudly folding up the claddings they had brought with them (as Hilbert always used them) - banging two stones together (as each examinee received as a gift) - hitting honey jars with spoons (they were under the seat; the reason: Hilbert kept giving away his brother-in-law Wolfgang's honey) - and an ostinato, struck by Luise with Hilbert's singing bowl.

- After the speeches and presentations, my wife Christa made the necessary comments on such a male academic career from a feminist point of view.

- At the end, the auxiliary choir sang a rewritten version of Peter Fox's "Haus am See", which all the guests were asked to sing along to. The chorus after each verse:

"And at the end of your labour in to the hedgehog house/

Chestnut avenue, Christa and pipe smoke/

You have shown us so much appreciation/

oh Hilbert, your trust has made us strong/

We have learnt from your person/

a biographical curriculum!"

Singing along was a success, as the photo from the university press office shows:

Front row from left: Andreas Feindt, Carola Junghans, Sylvia Jahnke Klein, Wolfgang Konukiewitz (my brother-in-law), Gisela Blankertz (my doctoral mother), Christa and Hilbert Meyer

I was particularly pleased with the choir of assistants because I have enjoyed working with them all my professional life:

Choir of assistants - in the front row: Rabia Schadel, Friederike Güffens, Reina Freese, Gesche Willerich and Ines Hartog

Conclusion:

I have been very lucky in my professional and academic career, despite the aforementioned Einstürzende Neubauten. I am wholeheartedly grateful to all those who have allowed me to do so and who have supported me in my professional and academic development. Some things did not work out. From today's perspective, I lack a stable empirical research practice of my own. On the other hand, I suspect that I would never have written my textbooks if I had first had to establish their empirical basis myself.

When writing this report for the first time in 2006 and even more so when revising it in 2022, I realised three points about my professional and academic career:

(1) I realised how strongly the esteem in which I was held by my doctoral supervisor Herwig shaped my university teaching behaviour. He demanded a lot, but gave me confidence and made it clear that I would succeed.

(2) I realised how much influence my twin status had on my personal development and later also on my academic work.

(3) I realised that German fascism and the misery of the Second World War had a greater influence on my academic career than I was aware of at the age of 20 or 30.

Carola Junghans, with whom I co-authored the new edition of the two volumes "Teaching Methods", writes in the theory volume (on p. 82) that challenging learning processes consist of the constructive processing of crises in the personal development process. I said to her: "I can't remember any such crises in my own career." Carola replied: "You just didn't notice them!"

Addendum:

On 20 May 2020, I was appointed Dr. honoris causa at Abo Academi University in Turku (Finland) for my contribution to the Scandinavian didactics discourse, triggered by many years of collaboration with Michael Uljens, Faculty of Education and Health Science at the external location in Vaasa.

From left to right: Dr h.c. HM, Dr h.c. Jan Masschelein from the University of Leuven (Belgium); Michael Uljens (host of Hilbert), Siv Björklund (host of Jim), the Rector of the Vaasa branch Lisbeth Fagerström, Ms Ann-Katrin Svensson and Dr h.c. Jim Cummins from the University of Toronto. Jim Cummins from the University of Toronto (Canada).

The ceremony was still conducted according to medieval rites: a good 90 doctoral candidates and 13 honorary doctorates from five Schools were assembled, which were combined from two years ago due to the corona pandemic. We had to come forward one by one, receive our doctoral hat, sword and degree certificate from the dean and then make a deep bow to the rector - it took two and a half hours, during which only Latin was spoken. Afterwards, the newly graduated students processed together through the city to Turku Cathedral, the oldest church in Finland. An ecumenical service was held there in Swedish, in which the city's rabbi gave the sermon and the Protestant pastor as well as the Catholic and Russian Orthodox priests performed the liturgy. The university choir provided the music. Incidentally, the word "doctorate" comes from this rite: in the Middle Ages, all those who had passed the viva voce went from their School to the Rector once a year to receive their doctoral degree and hat. By the way: the School of Theology in Turku does not hand out swords! That's a good thing! I had to hand in my sword straight away: My nine-year-old grandson Theo Kasper begged me so hard that I couldn't resist giving him the sword.

Graduation of all doctoral candidates and doctores honoris causa at Turku Cathedral on 20 May 2022