THE ‘KIEL EXCHANGE’ - THE FIRST FIFTY YEARS

Donald F Macgregor (Madras College exchange organiser 1975-99)

Kieler Gelehrtenschule

In June 2007 the exchange between Madras College, St Andrews and the Kieler Gelehrtenschule in Schleswig-Holstein, Germany, marks its half-century. It is as far as is known the oldest continuing exchange between two individual schools in the two countries. To celebrate these five decades of friendship – around 1500 German and Scottish families have been directly involved, as well as generations of staff – it was decided at Madras College that various souvenirs should be produced, and that an anniversary ceilidh be held in the South Street building on Saturday 30^th June, two days before the 2007 Kiel group departs.* Previous participants and their families will be warmly welcomed and from the KGS itself we hope to welcome an extra-large delegation of past and present students and staff. One unique feature is that for the very first time a serving head teacher, Rainer Schöneich, will be visiting the partner school.

OStD Rainer Schöneich

[*More information about the event is available from Jim.Bennett@fife.gov.uk at

Madras College.

Madras College, South Street

There have been many adaptations to the exchange programme, but it continues to be regarded as a highlight of their school career by many participants. A lot of people who met on the exchange have remained in contact over the years and decades – and there have even been a few international marriages (and at least one divorce). The exchange has been led by a succession of members of staff and over the periods of service of four Madras College and five KGS head teachers.

[In this article all German-language quotations have been translated into English, on the (not entirely accurate) grounds quoted in 1988 by a Madras participant in a list of ‘Do’s and Don’t’s in Kiel’: “Don’t speak to any German pupils you meet in German – it’s a waste of time, their English is far better.”]

Beginnings

In alten Briefen saß ich heut’ vergraben,

als einer plötzlich in die Hand mir fiel,

auf dem die Jahresziffer mich erschreckte,

so lange war es her, so lange schon… (Detlev von Liliencron 1844-1909*)

[Today I sat, old letters all around me,

when suddenly one fell into my hand

on which the year when it was written shocked me,

so long ago it was, so very long…]

(* well-known writer and poet who attended the KGS from 1854)

The exchange started as a result of correspondence between two historians, Dr John Thompson, who in 1955 had just become Rector of Madras College, and Professor Karl Dietrich Erdmann who had recently become professor of modern history in Kiel University. In Madras College Dr Thompson had introduced the study of German instead of French as first foreign language. He wrote twenty years later of his “immense admiration for the Germans as a people”, and that (after fighting in the battle of Normandy and then acting as town-major of Göttingen during the immediate post-war period) “the more closely I came into contact with them, the more enormous my respect for them grew – and that respect continues to this day.”

“If the historian asks how [the exchange] originated”, wrote the first German exchange leader Oswald Hauser in 1981, “he must note the remarkable fact, that the first stimulus came not from the German but from the Scottish side…” John Thompson, “one of those far from rare Britons who, deeply impregnated with humanism, are after wars ready for reconciliation and mutual understanding”, wrote in early 1955 to his friend Prof. Erdmann suggesting an exchange. Erdmann contacted Dr Oswald Hauser, a teacher at the Kieler Gelehrtenschule [KGS] (founded 1320) as well as at the university, and he proved keen to take up the challenge of this new enterprise.

The KGS from 1955

In 1955 the Kieler Gelehrtenschule was a mixed (since 1919) ‘Staatliches [state] Gymnasium’ which laid emphasis on Latin and Greek. Kiel, the Baltic home of the German navy, was heavily bombed in 1943-44. Many people were killed and much of the city destroyed, including (on 26.8.44) the KGS building that had stood since 1868 in the Dammstraße ‘am Kleinen Kiel’, a small lake near the town hall. ‘Sammelklassen’ (collective classes with pupils of other schools) were held for a year or so, but by 29 November 1945 temporary accommodation was provided in a school building near the Kiel canal to the north of the town centre, where (as in Madras for part of World War II) classes were taught on a shift system. It was not until August 1953 that the staff and pupils were able to move into the present building on the Feldstraße, about 10 minutes’ walk from the centre.

From 1983 until 2005 the KGS, now officially called ‘Altsprachliches Gymnasium der Landeshauptstadt Kiel’ [classical high school of the regional capital Kiel] was under the aegis of the city council. In 1995 it celebrated its 675^-year Jubilee (to which Madras sent an emissary), and since 2005 the KGS has been officially an Ogts (Offene Ganztagsschule [open whole-day school]), still stressing ancient languages within a very wide curriculum, and taking in pupils from the whole of Schleswig-Holstein. Compulsory schooling starts at age 6 in Germany, and the transfer to secondary school takes place after the first four years. KGS entrants thus start at age 10 with Latin as first foreign language and add English one year later.

Athena-Halle, KGS with copy of statue by Myron

Pioneers

Dr Thompson’s move to establish an exchange in 1955, such a relatively short time after the end of hostilities, was a pioneering one; and it was embraced on both sides of the North Sea with tremendous enthusiasm. In the words of Dr Hauser, “ten years after the war we were totally convinced that international understanding and co-operation were among our most important tasks for the future.”

In those days foreign travel was much more restricted and difficult than now, and the extra-curricular programme in schools offered fewer opportunities. In both schools the new Austausch/Exchange was genuinely a “whole school” endeavour. Until the mid-seventies the programme at the St Andrews end was financed largely by proceeds from a ‘Kiel Coffee Morning’ organised by parents, staff and pupils. As other extra-curricular ventures proliferated, it was decided to finance the St Andrews programme via a small levy on participant families and to seek extra funds if necessary from the Madras trustees. Over the decades the KGS and Madras have both added other overseas exchanges, so that both the “Schottenaustausch” and the “Kiel Exchange” have inevitably come to be less prominent though of course they still play an integral and important role in the total life of both schools.

‘Das Madras-College’

In 1957 Madras College was a mixed ‘senior secondary’ school of around 750 pupils aged 11-17/18. Until Dr Thompson’s arrival in 1955, French had been the first foreign language, but the new Rector had little trouble in persuading his new young PT modern languages, Ian M Hendry – some of the other colleagues took rather more persuading – that most new entrants should learn German. In those days, as Dr Thompson wrote in 1981, “Rectors in Fife had greater freedom than any others in Scotland to determine the curricula of their schools.”

Dr Hauser, I presume?

(Ian M Hendry, St Andrews railway station, late evening of 8 September 1956)

Dr Hauser came to St Andrews in 1956 on an exploratory visit. He was warmly received. In the summer term of 1957 he returned to Scotland with the first group of KGS senior pupils.

Dr Thompson and first KGS group, St Rule’s Tower June 1957

The success of that first visit, described by Dr Thompson in his annual report as “a parent-teacher venture”, stressing the school’s indebtedness, then as now, to the host parents, is clear from this extract from a letter of thanks written by the KGS headmaster, Prof. Dr. Erwin Assmann: “…An example of the general mood: my own son, a typical tough teenage lad, said to me: ‘you know, dad, when we said goodbye at St Andrews station, when the bagpipers played, I was crying but I’m not ashamed of those tears.’”

St Andrews Railway Station, July 1957 – the Kielers staying in St Andrews head for Leuchars Junction

Dr Thompson, pipers, Ian Hendry, Dr Hauser at Leuchars Junction, July 1957

In 1958 a 28-strong group of Madras pupils, led by Ian Hendry, travelled to Kiel. That first visit to Germany was also very successful, as the contemporary Rector’s report makes clear. Half the pupils had entertained their German partners the previous year, and the other half, from the year group below, would be meeting them for the first time – a principle that continues to this day, so that the exchange always has continuity.

Madras group arrives in Kiel, June 1958. Ian Hendry is 8^th from left.

Our exchange was firmly under way.

Variations on a theme – the exchange programme

The basis of the programme on both sides has strayed relatively little from that established in the early days. Guest pupils are allocated to host families by the host school, and contact between the new and the previous year’s partners is strongly encouraged. Travel, originally by an exhausting London-Harwich-Hook of Holland-Hamburg-Kiel train and ferry route (or the reverse), or in the 80s and 90s via St Andrews – Newcastle –Esbjerg/Hamburg – Kiel (coach and ferry) has sometimes proved even more arduous than expected because of work-to-rule, strike action, sudden cancellations. Although such long journeys have the dual advantage of the members of the pupils from two age-groups getting to know one another and helping them realise that the other country is not as near as it looks on the map, on some occasions – in the 1970s and in recent years - groups have travelled by air. But whatever mode of transport is used, the tearful farewells at the bus are just as emotional and long drawn out as they were at Leuchars Junction all those years ago.

In Scotland in the early days the exchange members were taken on a four-day trip to the western Highlands accompanied by several teachers. Time and staffing pressures in the end made such long trips impractical, and single day excursions became the norm, to Edinburgh and Stirling for instance, with Glasgow the farthest destination.

Some of the early exchanges in Germany included a five-day visit to the divided city of Berlin, then the ‘front line’ in the Cold War. Such visits by young people were financially assisted by the West German government for political reasons. When the subventions ended, it became too expensive to spend so long in Berlin. The only disadvantage of the Berlin visits was that the German partners did not accompany their guests so that the social aspect of the exchange was diminished.

In 1990, six months after the opening of the Berlin Wall of 9/10 Nov 1989, a busload of exchange members was able to cross into eastern Germany with the help of a cutting from the ‘Kieler Nachrichten’. This stated that as from the previous day,1 June, British citizens no longer required a visa for the DDR. When shown the cutting, the totally overwhelmed East German frontier policeman was quite happy to wave the coach through. That first visit went to the former Hanseatic port of Wismar; subsequent exchanges have returned there or to Schwerin, the capital of Mecklenburg-Vorpommern. Pre-1990 exchange parties had always been taken to the border (‘Auch drüben ist Deutschland’ said the western noticeboard) a few km east of Lübeck to see for themselves the physical barriers between east and west.

‘Over there is Germany too’ – 1984 visit to border with DDR

Cultural events – theatre, opera, concerts – have from the start played a part in the programme. The Madras Parent-Teacher Association and its equivalent at the KGS for many years invited the visiting pupils to tea and then took them to a theatre performance at the Byre or the Oper, or sometimes further afield. During the Kiel regatta week the Madras groups have several times been offered hospitality on a ‘Begleitfahrt’ [accompanying trip] along the breezy Kieler Förde towards the naval landmark of Laboe.

Landeshauptstadt Kiel and the Kieler Förde, 1978

Sports competitions – of which the football matches are often the high point or at least get the players the most excited - include also athletics events, sometimes basketball, and in St Andrews a putting competition on the ‘Himalayas’ and (since the late 60s when the South Street pool was built) a ‘Swimming Gala’.

Madras (mixed) football team vs KGS 1998

Visits have usually taken place towards the end of the summer term, but because of changes in the Schleswig-Holstein school year, the dates were moved between 1966 to 1973 to a period after the summer holidays (late August/September). This became increasingly inconvenient to Madras because of the desire to get the new school year off to a good start, and the June timing was restored from 1974 onwards. One extra advantage of the ‘even’ year June visits to Kiel is that they frequently overlap with the ‘Kieler Woche’ international yachting event and its associated cultural and festive opportunities; and every four years participants can usually watch some matches in the World Cup on television – a mixed blessing for the Scots at least.

Olympic regatta, Kieler Förde, August 1972

The official end of each visit is marked by the Abschiedsabend or Farewell Party, where guests and host pupils perform a programme of music, theatre and dancing (Scottish country dances, jazz dance, etc) as a small gesture of thanks to the host families.

In conclusion, here are typical comments by only two of the 1500 or so German and Scottish pupils who have benefited from the hospitality offered by their hosts, the first by a 1980 Kiel visitor to St Andrews:

‘I was met and warmly welcomed on arrival not just by my Scottish ‘parents’ and my Scottish partner but also by some of their relatives, who happened to be staying with them for a few days. I was greeted by them as if I too were a member of the family. And this friendliness, which immediately took away all my feelings of insecurity, was quite genuine…When I woke up the next day and we all met in the kitchen at breakfast, I felt totally integrated into the family. But I wasn’t the only one. When we got to school I could hear from what everyone was saying that all the German exchange partners felt the same.’

And the second, from a Madras pupil after visiting the KGS in 1970:

‘I liked the friendly atmosphere of the school. The Germans on the exchange were great friends with us all and others who were not on the exchange always tried to keep us happy, e.g. parties. The family life for me was tremendous…I liked the school system – warning bells 2 or 3 minutes before the end of classes is a good idea, as the teachers know they must start ending off and not suddenly find the class walking out at the end. The trip to Ratzeburg and the DDR border was the most interesting. But just being in Kiel was great…Overall it was a wonderful experience, one which will stay with us till we die.’

Kiel group in South Street quad 1999

I hope that this account of the history of the exchange, a longer version of which will be published as a souvenir booklet, will awaken happy memories in the hearts and minds of many readers. Es lebe der Schottenaustausch! Long live the Kiel Exchange! Auf die nächsten 50 Jahre! Here’s to the next 50 years! Fore!

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