Reichwein was born in
Bad Ems, then located in the province of
Hesse-Nassau within the
Kingdom of Prussia (modern-day Germany). He took part in the
First World War, in which he was seriously wounded in the
lung. Reichwein studied at the universities of
Frankfurt am Main and
Marburg, under
Hugo Sinzheimer and
Franz Oppenheimer, among others. In the 1920s, he was active in education policy and adult education in Berlin and Thuringia. It was he who founded the
Volkshochschule ("People's High School"; i.e.
Community College) and the
Arbeiterbildungsheim ("Workers' Training Home") in
Jena and ran them until 1929. In his
Hungermarsch nach Lappland ("Hunger March to Lappland") he described in diary form a punishing hike with some young jobless people in the far north. In 1929–1930, he worked as an adviser to the Prussian Culture Minister
Carl Heinrich Becker. From 1930 until 1933, he was a professor at the newly founded Pedagogical Academy in
Halle. After the Nazis seized power, he was let go for political reasons and sent off to
Tiefensee in
Brandenburg to become an elementary schoolteacher. There, until 1939, he conducted many instructional experiments, which received a lot of attention, with
educational progressivism and especially vocational education in mind. Reichwein described in his work
Schaffendes Schulvolk ("Productive School People") his instructional concept, inspired by the
Wandervogel movement and labour-school pedagogy, whose main focus was on trips, activity-oriented instruction with school gardens, and projects spanning age groups. For
Sachunterricht (~field education, or practical learning) and its history, he included important historical documents. Reichwein split the instructional content into a summer cycle (natural sciences and social studies) and a winter cycle ("Man as former"/"in his territory"). From 1939, Reichwein was working at the Folklore Museum in Berlin as a museum educator. As a member of the
Kreisau Circle, Reichwein belonged to the resistance movement against
Hitler. In early July 1944, Reichwein was arrested by the
Gestapo, and, in a trial against
Julius Leber,
Hermann Maaß and
Gustav Dahrendorf, sentenced to death by
Roland Freisler's
Volksgerichtshof. He was killed next to Maaß at
Plötzensee Prison in
Berlin on 20 October 1944. == Selected works ==