Here is the speech by Sophie Weidlich, daughter of Jocelin Winthrop-Young, on the occasion of the handover:
As a boy, my father, Jocelin Winthrop-Young, attended Eton School with his father. There are walls there that list the names of Etonians who died in the war, so that they will never be forgotten. My father was particularly impressed by a wall listing former Etonians who had fought and been killed on the side of the enemy. The Amicus Hostis - the friend among the enemies.
Helmuth Bastian, Heinrich Ihrig, Horst von Papart, Sigmund von Rotenhan, Hans Jürgen Ruef, Hans Richard Schraube, Wiprecht von der Schulenburg and Christian von Steinaecker.
These eight young men died for Germany in the Second World War. They had previously attended Hohenfels at the same time as my father. The latter survived on the opposite side in the Royal Navy and, as their friend among the enemy, wanted their names never to be forgotten. AMICUS HOSTIS - Friend Among the Enemy.
In 1931, my father came to Burg Hohenfels as an 11-year-old English boy. It was to be the happiest school years of his life, despite the fact that he didn't speak a word of German at first and the increasing Nazi threat, which he learned about largely through letters from his parents and the English press. He told me about a night that remained in his memory for the rest of his life: after bedtime, a Jewish classmate named Erwin came to his room and asked him to go out into the corridor. There Erwin whispered to him that he would immediately run down into the valley to the woodshop below the castle, where his parents were going to pick him up. They would then drive to Switzerland. He asked my father not to speak to anyone about it for the time being and only later to greet all his friends and also the teachers. My father promised to do this, but wondered why Erwin asked him of all people to make this promise. Later he realised: as a foreigner at Hohenfels, my father was one of the few people Erwin thought he could trust at the time.
At Hohenfels, my father could roam around in the forest with his friends to his heart's content and play cops and robbers on the gallows hill. Peace and quiet up there were rarely disturbed, at most by Kurt Hahn's car, which could be heard driving up the hill from far away, because otherwise there was hardly any traffic. My father loved Hohenfels as much as he later hated Spetzgart, partly because the then director Meese denied him the prize as winner of a high jump competition with the words "You are not German". So he used to walk from Spetzgart to Hohenfels on free weekends to visit his friends.
After leaving school in Gordonstoun, he joined the Royal Navy. Kurt Hahn visited him in 1940 shortly before his speedboat left the harbour in Liverpool and gave him a small travelling clock, with the dedication "Jocelin Winthrop Young. With love from Salem and Gordonstoun. January 1940".
Then, a few years after the end of the war, my father in turn wanted to commemorate his - now fallen - Hohenfels friends, and his choice fell on this statue, which he donated to Hohenfels in 1949.
This bronze statuette so poignantly depicts the despair and grief at the horrific futility of killing felt by Shakespeare's King Lear as he bends here over his dead daughter Cordelia. It was created by another Salem resident, Martin Krause, and came into my father's possession via my grandfather, who was a friend of Kurt Hahn.
Martin Krause, who was seven years older, was never a pupil at Hohenfels himself, but at Salem. He was, as Heinrich Blendinger was later to write in his obituary, (and I quote) "far too impulsive to let life roll along calmly. Enthusiastically he rushed into it, and since his imagination made his goal seem a thousand times more significant than others were able to see, the dramatic entanglements did not fail to occur". After cycling to Milan without permission with a few friends in 1933, he was grounded in Salem on his return. Sullen, he asked for some clay and modelled, among other things, this wonderful work of art. When Kurt Hahn saw it, he asked him why no one knew that he was so talented, why he had never shown it before. Martin Krause replied: "I can only do this when I am sad. But I am never sad here in Salem."
Instead of following his talent, however, Martin Krause became an aviator in the Luftwaffe a few years later and was killed in action in 1941.
After my father gave the bronze to Hohenfels in 1949, it hung on the wall in the living room there for many years until it found its place in the sacristy of the chapel in 2005. After the sale of the castle, it has now found its way back to Salem, where it has been given this wonderful place here.
Jocelin Winthrop-Young
Jocelin Winthrop-Young attended Hohenfels Castle and Spetzgart Castle as a schoolboy from 1931. In 1933 he followed Kurt Hahn, who was a friend of his parents, to Scotland and experienced the construction of Gordonstoun. From 1939 to 1946 he took part in the Second World War as a naval officer. During a telephone conversation with Kurt Hahn, the latter suggested that he go to Greece to become the private tutor of Crown Prince Constantine. From 1949 to 1959 he founded and directed the Greek Salem School Anavryta near Athens. After a stint in the press office of the Foreign Office in London, he took over as head of the boarding school in Salem from 1964 to 1973. During this time he decreed that outreach work was compulsory for all pupils, founded the Kurt Hahn Archive in 1965 and the Round Square Conference in Salem in 1966, of which he was director for many years. He died on 8 February 2012 at the age of 92.
His daughter Sophie Weidlich took her Abitur at Schule Schloss Salem. In 1983, she returned to Schule Schloss Salem to become a mentor in Salem and Spetzgart. She worked in public relations for 10 years and managed the Kurt Hahn Archive from 1990 to 2010. From 2007 to 2019, she also worked as a boarding school counsellor. She retired in 2020.
