Sigrid Hunke

Sigrid Hunke (26 April 1913, Kiel – 15 June 1999) was a German author. She is known for her work in the field of religious studies.

Biography

Sigrid Hunke was born in Kiel, Germany on 26 April 1913, the daughter of the publisher (1879-1953) and Hildegard Lau (1879-1944). Her mother was the daughter of engineer Thies Peter Lau (1844-1933) and Walewska Berta Anna Artelt (1856-1943). She had two sisters, including Waltraud Hunke.

Sigrid Hunke received her PhD in religious studies from the Friedrich-Wilhelms-Universität Berlin in 1941. Her tutor was Ludwig Ferdinand Clauss, who later became associated with the ideology of the '' Neue Rechte''. Hunke joined the "''Germanischer Wissenschaftseinsatz''", the German Sciences Service of the SS, the organization established by Heinrich Himmler to oversee the Germanization of Northern Europe. Her job was to research racial psychology. After 1957, she went to Morocco and stayed two years in Tangier (Tanja), after which she returned to Bonn.

Hunke was a pagan Unitarian. She was also known for her claims of Muslim influence over Western values. In her book, "''Allahs Sonne über dem Abendland''" (1960; "''Allah's sun over the Occident''") she asserts that "''the influence exerted by the Arabs on the West was the first step in freeing Europe from Christianity.''" The scholar Sylvain Gouguenheim includes a lengthy description of her work in an appendix to his book ''Aristote au Mont-Saint-Michel'' under the heading “The Legacy of Sigrid Hunke”. He refers to her book on Islam and Europe, ''Allahs Sonne über dem Abendland'', in this way: “This text, which extols the superiority of Islam over Christianity, is the work of a Nazi intellectual. At its origin lies the political commitment of the author, who joined the NSDAP (the German National Socialist Party) on May 1, 1937 and was an active member of the Berlin section of the National Socialist Student Association (Nationalsozialistischer Studentenbund) from 1938 onwards.”See Sylvain Gouguenheim, ''Aristote au Mont-Saint-Michel. Les racines grecques de l’Europe chrétienne '', Éditions du Seuil, coll. L'univers historique, Paris, 2008, Appendix I, ()

References

Further reading

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1913 births
1999 deaths
Writers from Kiel
SS personnel
People from the Province of Schleswig-Holstein
20th-century German women writers
German modern pagans
Modern pagan writers

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