Fritz Mankowski

Fritz Mankowski was born in Vienna as the son of a former professional officer who moved to Graz in 1920. In 1937 he completed the Realgymnasium in the Lichtenfelsgasse. From the well-known later student pastoral caregiver and Seckauer Mönch P. Laurentius Hora he is animated to enter the pen there.

The abbot, however, advises Fritz Mankowski to first strip the one-year volunteer year at the Bundesheer. This is what he does, but is surprised during this by the connection and then immediately taken over to the German Wehrmacht where he remains. So he took the Poles and the Balkans campaign.

After his work in Greece, Fritz Mankowski is looking for a study holiday. Since he hadn't got it for a theology study, he's giving medicine. He is subsequently transferred to the student company Graz and starts studying medicine.

Already in 1939, on the initiative of the student association Carolina, a group of Catholic high school pupils gather, meeting in the Barbara Chapel of the Graz Cathedral and therefore also called Barbara community. From this circle, Carolina wins its “illegal” members.

Fritz Mankowski, whose spiritual center he will soon become and who also proves to be a courageous confessor of his faith, also encounters this Barbara community. He left the lecture of histology professor Alfred Pischinger twice in protest. The first time, because this is called the Old Testament as pornography, the second time, because he publicly boasts of handing over his brain-damaged son to the euthanasia.

This results in Fritz Mankowski having to give up his studies. He is therefore relocated to the East Front in the autumn of 1943, but can be taken up before the student association Carolina “illegal”. Already at Pentecosts in 1942 he laid the oblation in Seckau. This is the promise to lead a Christian life in close connection with a particular monastery. The oblate becomes a member of the monastic family, but without living in the Convention.

Fritz Mankowski is a pardon poet and also prosadier, many of his texts have remained. On 9 January 1944, a month before his death, he wrote for the last time a letter to his parents, beginning with the following verses:

The moonlight flows on strange land,

is strange where we drive –

But over us is God's hand,

let them keep us.

We thank him so many days,

as the earth bloomed us,

some hot heartbeat,

in which the joy glowed –

We know: Power is the light,

that He inflamed in us,

we do not fear the dark,

into which the journey ends.

At the beginning of February 1944, he falls 25 years at Nikopol (Soviet Union) at the mountain of a wounded and is buried near the water tower of Tok on the Nikopol–Apostolowo railway. Because of the manganese deposits, Nikopol is strongly defended by the German Wehrmacht. Shortly after Fritz Mankowski fell, the bridge head will be on 16. February 1944.