Bertha Ronge

Bertha Ronge (born April 25, 1818 in Hamburg , † April 18, 1863 in Frankfurt am Main ; born Bertha Meyer , divorced Bertha Traun ) was a German women's rights activist and educator .

Life

Cushion stone Bertha Traun
(née Meyer), family grave, Ohlsdorf cemetery

Bertha Meyer was born as the second oldest daughter of the wealthy stick manufacturer Heinrich Christian Meyer in Hamburg in 1818. At the request of her father, at the age of only 16, she married the 14 years older private secretary of the Duchess of Cambridge and later manufacturer Friedrich Traun . From this marriage there were six children. In 1846 she met Johannes Ronge , the founder of German Catholicism . Ronge exerted a special attraction on bourgeois women, as he combined his reformist ideas with the demand for the emancipation of women. Bertha fell in love with Ronge and separated from her husband. In October 1850 she followed the excommunicated priest to London with three of her children. The two married there on August 5, 1851. Soon afterwards their daughter Marie was born and Bertha asked her younger sister Margarethe from Hamburg to come to London to support her. In 1861 Bertha returned to Germany with Johannes Ronge and died a little later, in 1863, in Frankfurt.

In the area of ​​the grave site for the German Traun and Bruhn families at the Hamburg cemetery Ohlsdorf , grid square AC 18 (southwest of Chapel 7), there is a pillow stone for “Bertha Traun, geb. Meyer ".

The Traunweg in the Hamburg district of Harburg initially only referred to Bertha Meyer's first husband Christian Justus Friedrich Traun, but now also reminds of herself as a champion of the Hamburg women's movement.

Services

Bertha Ronge campaigned her whole life for the educational ideas of Friedrich Froebel , for the free religious thoughts of Johannes Ronges and for the rights of women. With Emilie Wüstenfeld and another 30 interested women, she founded the Association of Women and Virgins in Hamburg on December 12, 1846 in support of the German Catholics . a. was to achieve recognition by the Hamburg Senate for the free religious community. Since 1848 she was a member of the "Social Association of Hamburg Women for the Adjustment of Confessional Differences", which aimed to abolish the unequal treatment of Jewish citizens. In many lectures, especially in front of free religious communities, she promoted the establishment of Froebel kindergartens . With Emilie Wüstenfeld and Johannes Ronge, she founded the university for women , which began training teachers and kindergarten teachers on January 1, 1850 in Hamburg. On April 1, 1852, the female educational institution had to stop teaching because Bertha's separation from her husband meant that there was no financial support from the Hamburg donors. In London she founded a free religious congregation with Johannes Ronge and in Manchester a kindergarten and a training center for kindergarten teachers. In 1857 she founded the “Manchester Committee” (later “Manchester Froebel Society”) to spread the kindergarten. With the support of her husband, she published a guide for educators through the educational ideas of Friedrich Froebel. In England, too, she gave lectures to promote the establishment of kindergartens. After her return to Breslau, she tried to found a kindergarten there too, but failed because of the clergy and instead founded an educational institution for kindergarten teachers.

Fonts

• with Johannes Ronge: Practical Guide to the English Kindergarten, for the use of mothers, nurses and infant teachers; being an exposure of Froebel's system of infant training. London 1855.

literature

• Manfred Berger :  Bertha Ronge. In: Biographisch-Bibliographisches Kirchenlexikon (BBKL). Volume 21, Bautz, Nordhausen 2003, ISBN 3-88309-110-3 , Sp. 1225-1229.
• M. Berger: A woman's life with social responsibility: Bertha Ronge (formerly Traun). In: Forum: Women and Society. Issue 3, 2002.
• Inge Grolle : Bertha Traun-Ronge (1818–1863). "The ideal and the life". In: Irina Hundt (ed.): From the salon to the barricade. Women of the Heine Age. Stuttgart 2002, pp. 377-393.
• R. Bake: Bertha Traun (Bertha Ronge nee Meyer, divorced Traun). In: R. Bake, B. Reimers: City of Dead Women. Portraits of women and life pictures from the Hamburg Ohlsdorf cemetery. Hamburg 1997, pp. 240-242.
• Sylvia Paletschek : Women and Dissent. Women in German Catholicism and in the free parishes 1841–1852. Goettingen 1990.

Web links

• Literature by and about Bertha Ronge in the catalog of the German National Library
• Women in the history of kindergartens