Anna Essinger

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Anna Essinger (born September 15, 1879 in Ulm , † May 30, 1960 in Otterden , Kent ) was a German reform pedagogue .

Life

Their ancestors come from Essingen (Palatinate) . As a result of the devastation of the Palatinate by French troops, the Essingers came to Oberdorf ( Oberamt Neresheim ), today a district of Bopfingen . David Essinger (1817–1899), Anna's grandfather, worked there as a respected doctor. His son settled in Ulm .

Anna was the oldest of six girls and three boys from Leopold Essinger and Fanny, nee Oppenheimer . The family of the Mosaic faith lived on the insurance office run by the father. What set the family apart, however, was their sense of community and life in it. The entire Essinger family suffered from eye problems, and Anna was also affected by severe myopia all her life.

When she was 20, Anna moved to live with her aunt in Nashville , Tennessee, USA . She quickly made intensive friendships with the Quakers in particular . She completed a German studies course and financed this through language lessons. She also ran her private student residence. She then worked as a teacher. In 1919 she returned to the war, as part of humanitarian aid from the Quakers to Germany back. Their task was to convince mayors, teachers and directors to set up kitchens so that children could at least have one hot meal. For this she collected food and clothes.

Information board at the main building of the former country school home

Landschulheim Herrlingen

Since 1912, her sister Clara Weimersheimer has been running her own children's home in Herrlingen , where she mainly looked after children who were difficult to raise, but also those who were mentally unstable and those who were left behind. In 1925, both her own and many foster children were of school age when she had the idea for her own country school home . Clara Weimersheimer initially wanted to realize this project together with Ludwig Wunder , but this was not possible for financial reasons.

With the support of the entire family, the project was nevertheless able to be implemented a year later. On May 1, 1926, the private school with boarding school and 18 children (aged six to twelve) opened at Wippinger Steige 28 (today: Erwin-Rommel-Steige 50 ).

emigration

Memorial stele for Essinger in downtown Ulm

The approaching takeover by Hitler did not go unnoticed by Anna either. Even the first measures after the beginning of the Third Reich were boycotted: So she set up a day of hiking without further ado in order to avoid the decreed hoisting of the swastika flag on Hitler's birthday . But informers raised a negative mood against Essinger in the party . It was recommended to appoint a school inspector. The courageous as well as far-sighted educator therefore looked around for a new domicile abroad and found it in the south of England . After the parents had been informed and agreed, 66 children, their teachers and Anna were willing to leave the country. In a well-prepared "night and fog" campaign disguised as an excursion, three groups left Germany from different directions. They met in Ostend and from there crossed together to Dover , where they arrived on October 5, 1933. The next day, classes began at Bunce Court School.

With prudent foresight, Anna Essinger had not formally closed the Herrlingen school home , but handed it over to the Berlin educator Hugo Rosenthal in the same year . He was able to continue it as the Jewish country school home in Herrlingen until 1939.

Bunce Court School

In Otterden at Faversham in Kent was an old mansion, Bunce Court, from the time of Henry VIII. With respect. With over 40 rooms on three floors and large outdoor areas, it was an ideal location for a boarding school. By dividing the work among all the refugees and with the support of the authorities, self-administration was vigorously achieved, even if chronic financial difficulties always hung over the community like a sword of Damocles. Anna soon won the respect of the authorities and advocates in all areas of public life. The children who came to England from Germany included the future documentary filmmaker Peter Morley and his siblings Anne Marie and Thomas Meyer.

Richard W. Sonnenfeldt and his younger brother Helmut came with the Jewish emigrant children from Germany in late summer 1938 . After the Kristallnacht pogroms on 9/10 November 1938, England took in about 10,000 children from the German Reich as part of the Kindertransporte campaign , including Frank Auerbach , Leslie Baruch Brent and Gerard Hope . Anna, almost sixty years old, organized the reception camp and the care for some of these children with her teachers and older students. She also looked for foster families and homes. In 1940 the school had to be evacuated again after southern England became a defensive zone. With around 100 children and teachers, the boarding school moved to Trench Hall in Shropshire . People tried to lead a normal life in very cramped conditions. It was only in 1946 and after lengthy negotiations that Bunce Court could be moved into again.

Late years

During these 22 years Essinger had looked after and taught over 900 children from Germany, Austria, Poland, Czechoslovakia and England. The last few years have been particularly difficult. Not only did she slowly go blind with age, but the last generation of children in particular were problematic cases, since from 1945 Essinger had mainly taken in surviving Jewish children from concentration camps who no longer knew a life like that led on Bunce Court and sometimes it was difficult to find it. Essinger was now unable to actually hand over the management of the school to new hands in order to cope with the new tasks, and fell out with the new director Fridolin Friedmann , who was engaged by her , so that the school's closure in 1948 was inevitable.

Essinger spent her years writing in Bunce Court until her death. She corresponded a lot with former students whom they called her aunt Anna . Open-mindedness, foresight and her unwavering pragmatism were her most outstanding qualities. Consistently and with a lot of personal commitment, she helped children and adults in need, true to her motto: Shake hands with children, give them a chance .

The Herrlinger institution, which Rosenthal continued as a Jewish country school home, had to close in spring 1939. The building complex served as a forced retirement home for Jewish seniors from summer 1939 to mid-1942, before they were deported to the extermination camps. The building below at the former Wippinger Steige 13 served as an apartment for Erwin Rommel and his family between 1943 and 1945. Her sister's children's home at Oberherrlinger Strasse 28 was also closed a few years after Anna's escape.

Honors

In 1990 the secondary school and the grammar school on the Kuhberg in Ulm were renamed after Anna Essinger. On March 16, 2016, the Steglitz-Zehlendorf district assembly in Berlin unanimously decided to merge the Nikolaus-August-Otto-Oberschule and the primary school at Rohrgarten. These two schools will work under the new name ANNA-ESSINGER-GEMEINSCHAFTSSCHULE - Montessori Elementary School from the 2016/2017 school year.

Critical voices

Anna Essinger's contribution to the rescue of many Jewish and non-Jewish refugee children is undisputed. Her warmth is praised by many alumni as well as her selflessness. But critical voices have not only been raised in connection with the end of the Bunce Court School (see above). Especially from among those who were very close to her and who owe her a lot, there are some comments that illuminate Anna Essinger's behavior more critically in some situations. Leslie Baruch Brent, who was closely related to her and her sisters, reports that despite her love for the children, she appeared to many as cold and aloof. “Some children were noticeably afraid of her. In retrospect, I realize that TA made a serious mistake as a teacher: she tended to judge children (and sometimes some of the teachers) quite harshly and to prejudice those who did not exactly correspond to her ideas while she was doing them preferred others. I happened to be one of her favorites - but she had a lot of them - and got to know her very well after I left school, to which I returned to my home whenever I was on vacation, home leave or semester break. "

Hans Meyer, a long-time teacher at the Bunce Court School around whom many alumni gathered well into the 2000s, was also of the opinion, according to Brent, that Anna Essinger “was too authoritarian because she left a small circle selected colleagues to advise instead of a majority decision at teachers' meetings. But he admitted that in times of strict financial constraints and exceptionally difficult circumstances, it may have been the only way forward. ”The withdrawal to“ a small circle of selected colleagues ”is also put into perspective when you consider that the majority of teachers and teachers had mostly been young professionals and the college was subject to constant change in its composition. And many of the young teachers were closer to their students in terms of age than Anna Essinger, who was already over sixty in 1940.

Hans Meyer's criticism is also shared by Lucie Schachne, who worked as a teacher and housemother in Bunce Court. For them, teachers' meetings were only formally democratic and dealt with practical matters, but not with educational methods, and the atmosphere was usually more relaxed when Anna Essinger was not present. At the same time, Schachne also praised Essinger as a person who made practically everything possible.

A hard-to-verify allegation was made by former student Thilde Fraenkel, a distant relative of Anna Essinger. She claimed that Essinger was less interested in girls' successes than boys. Indirect confirmation of this assertion may be that there are virtually no published memoirs of former students and they hardly appear on the list of those who, according to Leslie Baruch Brent, “led an honorable and productive life; many have stood out and been awarded. There are numerous professors and doctors, including many women. ”For the latter, he himself has not submitted any evidence; the successful alumni named by him are all male.

Another accusation, which Brent even cited twice, concerns the question of religious neutrality or indifference towards Judaism. He claims that Anna Essinger received a lot of criticism for “never encouraging the children to remain true to their Jewish roots and thus withhold their Jewish heritage from them”. Brent returns to this by reproducing a conversation between him and Lucie Schachne in 2001, whose position he outlines as follows: “Although there was a tolerant atmosphere at school and the children were encouraged to participate in community life through work Lucie had one main point of criticism. This concerned the lack of traditional values ​​and morals in the Jewish community. In other words, she was concerned that the children were not encouraged to learn about Judaism. In her opinion, adjustment was the main reason that counteracted the development of a Jewish identity. "Brent did not comment on this at this point, but noted earlier:" The criticism of TA [= Aunt Anna = Anna Essinger] may have been justified, But it was just not in her nature to act differently. ”In his memorial address at Anna Essinger's funeral, Brent expressed this more clearly:“ Although TA was definitely not an atheist and was always aware of her Jewish roots, she could for herself accept no religious dogma, neither in life nor in death. "

Literary and artistic appreciation

  • Linda Winterberg, actually Nicole Steyer, published a novel in 2017 that, on the basis of very precise research and using fictional characters who are modeled on real people (Eva Heymann, Walter Bloch, but also teachers), describes life at the Bunce Court School makes it understandable. The book is based on the Kindertransport, but then focuses in one main strand on the fate of the children in the Bunce Court School. In an afterword, the author expressly acknowledges the importance that Anna Essinger played in this context - even if this only appears in passing in the book.
  • The memorial board of NS Documentation Oberschwaben maintains a gallery of the upright on its website , where so far “28 artists [...] have approached the people of resistance in their works in order to awaken empathy and the biographical complexity of the unadjusted to represent. [..] The gallery currently consists of around 60 portraits of people resisting the Nazi tyranny and of victims of the Nazi regime. " A portrait there is dedicated to Anna Essinger. It was painted by the artist Hermann Schenkel.

swell

  • Anna Essinger: The Bunce Court School (1933-1943) , in: Hildegard Feidel-Mertz (Ed.): Schools in Exile. Repressed pedagogy after 1933 . rororo, Reinbek bei Hamburg 1983, pp. 71-88, ISBN 3-499-17789-7 .
  • Leslie Baruch Brent: A Sunday Child? - From a Jewish orphanage to a world-famous immunologist . Berliner Wissenschafts-Verlag, Berlin, 2009, ISBN 978-3-8305-1702-3 .
  • Richard W. Sonnenfeldt , More than a Life. Scherz, Bern 2003, ISBN 3-502-18680-4 .

literature

  • Manfred Berger : Leading women in social responsibility: Anna Essinger. In: Christ and Education 1996 / H. 7, p. 27
  • Ders .: Anna Essinger - founder of a rural education home. A biographical and educational sketch. In: Zeitschrift für Erlebnispädagogik (1997) / H. 4, pp. 47-52
  • Ders .: Hugo Rosenthal - head of the Jewish country school home in Herrlingen. A biographical and educational sketch. In: Zeitschrift für Erlebnispädagogik (1997) / H. 9, pp. 76-81
  • Sara Giebeler u. a .: Profiles of Jewish educators . Klemm and Oelschläger, Ulm 2000 (= Edition Haus unterm Regenbogen, 3), ISBN 3-932577-23-X .
  • Lucie Schachner: Education for spiritual resistance: The Jewish country school home in Herrlingen 1933–1939 (= educational examples , volume 3). dipa-Verlag, Frankfurt am Main 1986, ISBN 3-7638-0509-5 .
  • Dietrich Winter: Herrlingen as a literary and historical place: Encounters with extraordinary personalities in times of decision. Lecture given on November 9, 1997 (...) as part of the “Poets and Judges Event Project - German Literature in the Decision-Making. 50 Years Group 47 ”from the Ulm Adult Education Center (= Edition Haus unterm Regenbogen , Volume 1), Klemm and Oelschläger, Ulm 1998, ISBN 3-932577-12-4 .
  • Frank Raberg : Biographical Lexicon for Ulm and Neu-Ulm 1802-2009 . Süddeutsche Verlagsgesellschaft im Jan Thorbecke Verlag, Ostfildern 2010, ISBN 978-3-7995-8040-3 , p. 92 f .
  • Katharina Lüdtke: Anna Essinger - a very special kind of educator , Neu-Ulm 2011.

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Biography of Ludwig Wunder in the regional information system for Baden-Württemberg (LEO-BW) . There are many references in the literature to the fact that Wunder founded a country school home in Herrlingen. One could also succumb to this error if one read only the short biography preceding the actual biography in LEO-BW, which also says: "1925 founding of the Herrlingen Landerziehungsheim near Ulm together with Claire Weimersheimer."
  2. ↑ Anna Essinger: The Bunce Court School (1933-1943) , pp. 72–73, and in more detail: From Herrlingen to Bunce Court
  3. ↑ cf. Berger 1997, p. 76 ff.
  4. ↑ A Life Rewound: Memoirs of a freelance producer and director. Part One. at static.bafta.org, accessed June 9, 2016
  5. ↑ Anna's children at theguardian.com, accessed June 9, 2016
  6. ↑ see the tabular curriculum vitae of Frank Auerbach at fineart
  7. ↑ Eric Bourne: Letters to the editor: A Lost Generation ( Memento of the original from April 25, 2012 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. (PDF; 3.8 MB) AJR Journal , June 2011, p. 6. Retrieved on August 5, 2013. @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / ajr.org.uk
  8. ↑ Anna-Essinger-Gymnasium
  9. ↑ Homepage of the ANNA-ESSINGER-GEMEINSCHAFTSSCHULE & Anna Essinger conquers Berlin
  10. ↑ Leslie Baruch Brent: A Sunday Child? , Pp. 75-76
  11. ↑ Leslie Baruch Brent: A Sunday Child? , P. 81
  12. ↑ Leslie Baruch Brent: A Sunday Child? , Pp. 85-86
  13. ^ Jüdische Allgemeine: A Swabian woman in Kent. How Anna Essinger offered refugee children a new home. The article also includes descriptive visuals.
  14. ↑ Leslie Baruch Brent: A Sunday Child? , P. 94
  15. ↑ Leslie Baruch Brent: A Sunday Child? , P. 76
  16. ↑ Leslie Baruch Brent: A Sunday Child? , P. 86
  17. ↑ Leslie Baruch Brent: A Sunday Child? , Pp. 76-77
  18. ↑ Leslie Baruch Brent: A Sunday Child? , P. 77
  19. ↑ The Jewish Kindertransport to England: "The old Hitler should die!"
  20. ↑ Linda Winterberg: As long as hope is ours. Aufbau taschenbuch, Berlin, 2017, ISBN 978-3-7466-3289-6
  21. ^ Gallery of the upright
  22. ↑ Homepage Hermann Schenkel
personal data
SURNAME Essinger, Anna
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Aunt Anna
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German educator
DATE OF BIRTH September 15, 1879
PLACE OF BIRTH Ulm
DATE OF DEATH May 30, 1960
Place of death Otterden , Kent