Biography: UN refugee worker and author
Altenburg
UN refugee helper, author, honorary professor – the life of Reinhold Friedl would be suitable as material for a book. The man from Oldenburg has already incorporated various episodes into stories and novels.
Its history begins in Hamburg in 1948. Years later, the teacher there falls into the hands of a bulletin from the school authorities. It states that anyone wishing to work internationally should contact the Office Manager for International Organizations (BFIO). Reinhold Friedl wanted. He was invited to interviews at UNESCO in Paris at the UN refugee agency UNHCR in Geneva, where he was asked, among other things, how he envisioned his career. “UN Secretary-General,” he replied. The UNHCR head of human resources found this amusing and ended up as a senior at UNHCR in 1977.
education for refugees
His job was to ensure that young refugees around the world could go to school and get professional or university education. “At that time, many refugees from Ethiopia and Somalia arrived in Djibouti. I flew there to find out what schooling they had,” reports Friedl. “Many had no certificates because they had to flee quickly. We selected the teachers from among the refugees and worked with them to create tests so that we could classify the young people and place them in educational institutions in other host countries according to their level of knowledge.”
Friedl later wrote the first critical scholarly study of UNHCR refugee education, did his PhD on the subject, and published a standard work with a foreword by the UN High Commissioner for Refugees.
To a beer with Augstein
Experiences from this eventful time as well as the background to the peace movement of the 1980s and the NATO double-track decision flowed into his first Roman “Geneva Strolling Days”. It also contains a description of an unexpected encounter: on December 23, 1983, at around 9 a.m., Reinhold Friedl went to Hamburg for breakfast. The place was empty except for a beer drinker at the bar. They ask Friedl: “Do you just look like Rudolf Augstein or are you?” It was the editor of the news magazine SPIEGEL. He invited Friedl to join him.
“SPIEGEL sat there in person, a bit sour because he hadn’t been invited to Helmut Schmidt’s birthday. According to his statement, he had fallen out of favor because of a comment on the dual resolution,” Friedl recalls. A four-hour conversation ensued – in which the two could not agree, however, as to why Herbert Wehner was not writing his memoirs.
Volunteer – full-time position
Friedl had been chairman of the Hamburg Jusos and had asked “his” member of the Bundestag in Harburg exactly this question. Wehner’s answer: “There are still people who could be harmed.” However, Augstein was certain that the paperwork was the reason. Wehner always writes everything down. His house is full of index cards that the politician can no longer sort.
Friedl became head of department in the presidential department of the Hamburg school board (Ministry of Education) for Europe and International Affairs, wrote scientific publications and books, especially crime novels, took on teaching positions at the University of Oldenburg and was appointed honorary professor there.
His honorary “part-time full-time job” has been the management of the UN refugee aid for northern Germany for 32 years. “We are the national UNHCR partner organization, we do public relations work, we provide information about the fate of refugees and displaced persons, the background to flight, we do fundraising, we support your UNHCR projects worldwide and refugee projects in Germany,” says Friedl.
He likes to quote the former UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), Prince Sadruddin Aga Khan: “The goal of our work should be that our shop here is closed”. There is still a long way to go to reach this goal. According to UNHCR, more than 100 million people are currently displaced – more than at any time since the end of World War II.
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