Monika Seifert

from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Monika Seifert , b. Mitscherlich (born July 11, 1932 in Berlin ; † March 14, 2002 in Frankfurt am Main ), was a German sociologist and educator , best known as the "mother of anti-authoritarian children's shops ".

biography

Monika Mitscherlich was the first child from the marriage of Alexander Mitscherlich to the doctor Melitta Behr on March 29, 1932 . Before their second daughter Barbara was born, the couple separated. The marriage was only divorced in 1936. The short duration of the marriage meant that Monika grew up "fatherless" with her sister and a half-brother. At the age of six she fell ill with polio , the consequences of which she suffered from then on.

Mitscherlich completed the preparatory course at the College for Work, Politics and Economics in Wilhelmshaven from 1956 and passed the Abitur there on March 19, 1958. The founding rector of this university was the Marxist legal scholar and political scientist Wolfgang Abendroth . At that time she joined the SDS , the student organization of the SPD , and the SPD. In 1959 she was elected to the federal executive committee of the SDS, where she played a key role in the implementation of a largely left-wing position, which ultimately led to the incompatibility decision in 1961 , i.e. the separation of the SPD from its student organization. She was also active in the Fight against Atomic Death movement, where she met her future husband, the political scientist Jürgen Seifert , whom she married in 1960.

After completing her studies in Wilhelmshaven, Monika Seifert-Mitscherlich began studying sociology in Frankfurt, a. a. at Adorno , which she successfully completed in 1963.

Her studies at the Frankfurt Institute for Social Research focused on research into the mass psychological foundations of the success of National Socialist propaganda. The pioneering work in this area is the study by the psychoanalyst Wilhelm Reich , Massenpsychologie des Faschismus (1933). Reich's work had received praise in 1934 in the Zeitschrift für Sozialforschung , the organ of the institute, but after 1934, after Freud had imposed the anathema on Reich, Reich was, as Seifert later discovered, taboo for the authors of the critical theory . The same was true of the cooperating Frankfurt Sigmund Freud Institute , which Seifert's father, Alexander Mitscherlich , had headed since 1960.

Their daughter Anna was born on November 20, 1964. From 1966 to 1967 she received a scholarship from the Volkswagen Foundation for a second degree in psychoanalysis at the Tavistock Institute , London. It was often written that she met Alexander S. Neill there , which according to her own statements is not correct. She got to know Wilhelm Reich's ideas during her studies in Frankfurt; she published one of his writings as a pirated print . The books by Alexander S. Neill (Summerhill, London 1960) and by Paul and Jean Ritter (Free Family, 1959), which she got to know during her second degree in England, were important for her educational conception of the children's school. She was in contact with the Kirkdale School, an alternative institution in London, which for her was the model for the "Children's School" she founded together with some parents in 1967 in Frankfurt-Eschersheim. Although the term “ children's shop ” was only created in 1968, the “children's school”, the first anti-authoritarian institution in the Federal Republic of Germany, is now mostly referred to as a children's shop.

Quote: To break through this repetition, individually and politically, there must be a change in the situation of children.

literature

  • Wilma Aden-Grossmann: Monika Seifert - pedagogue of anti-authoritarian education. A biography of Brandes & Apsel, Frankfurt / M.2014, ISBN 978-3-95558-056-8
  • Manfred Berger : History of the Kindergarten. From the first pre-school facilities in the 18th century to daycare centers in the 21st century, Frankfurt / Main, p. 160

Web links

swell

  1. ↑ See e.g. B. Oskar Negt : Sixty-eight. Political intellectuals and power. Steidl, Göttingen 1995, p. 298.
  2. ↑ Expressed here because one of her father's successful books is entitled The Fatherless Society .
  3. ↑ Reich himself gives the only timely report about it: The exclusion of Wilhelm Reich from the IPA
  4. ↑ Monika Seifert: To break through these repetitions ... In: Karl-Heinz Heinemann / Thomas Jaitner: A long march. 1968 and the aftermath. Conversations with… Monika Seifert… [u. a.] . Cologne: Papyrossa 1993, pp. 71-82.
  5. ↑ see e.g. B. Heide Berndt , who was an assistant there from 1966 to 1974, in psychoanalysis and revolt (lecture series June 8, 1988)
  6. ^ Inge Hammelmann: truancy. An indiscreet list. In: Inge Hammelmann (ed.): The raven. Magazine for every kind of literature , No. 36, Zurich 1993, p. 92 f.
  7. ^ Karl-Heinz Heinemann: A long march. PapyRossa Verlag 1993, p. 72.
personal data
SURNAME Seifert, Monika
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Mitscherlich-Seifert, Monika; Mitscherlich, Monika (maiden name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German sociologist, educator, founder of the children's shop movement
DATE OF BIRTH July 11, 1932
PLACE OF BIRTH Berlin
DATE OF DEATH March 14, 2002
Place of death Frankfurt (Main)