Georg Max Friedrich Valentin Picht

Georg Picht (* 9 July 1913 in Strasbourg , 7 August 1982 in Hinterzarten ) was a German philosopher , theologian and pedagogue . In 1964, he coined the term " disaster " [1] , which characterized the situation of the contemporary education system in the Federal Republic and triggered a broad debate.

His mother was Greda Picht, the sister of Ernst Robert Curtius , who was also Picht's godfather. His father, Werner Picht , a. Department head in the Prussian Ministry of Culture and publicist on topics of adult education. The family's friends included Albert Schweitzer , Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy and Charles Du Bos .

Because Picht had asthma, the mother had gone with him to Hinterzarten, where he received private lessons from the old philologist Josef Liegle , but also from his mother. He attended a high school in Freiburg for the last four years.

Picht studied classical philology and philosophy in Freiburg , Kiel and Berlin with Wilhelm Szilasi , Wolfgang Schadewaldt , Eduard Fraenkel and Johannes Stroux . In Freiburg he became an academic student of Martin Heidegger . After an activity with Hans Lietzmann in the Church Fathers Commission of the Berlin Academy of Sciences in 1938/39, where he edited texts of Ambrosius , he taught at the Birklehof school in Hinterzarten Old Languages ​​until the National Socialists took over the boarding school in 1942. In 1942, Picht changed his position as an instructor to the Institute of Ancient History in Freiburg and in the same year promoted a work on the Stoic "Ethics of the Panaitios ".

Georg Picht has been married to the pianist and harpsichordist Edith Picht-Axenfeld since 1936. The marriage comes from, among others, the long-term head of the German-French Institute Robert Picht . Georg Picht had been one of the closest friends of Carl Friedrich von Weizsäcker (cousin of the maternal mother) and Hellmut Becker . In 1963 Picht gave the laudation for Weizsäcker on the occasion of the awarding of the Peace Prize of the German book trade . In 1965 he was the first to receive the Theodor Heuss Prize . Until his death, he lived in Hinterzarten at Birklehof . Wikipedia