Clara Stern

Clara Stern , nee Clara Joseephy, (born March 12, 1877 in Berlin , † 1948 in Durham (North Carolina) , USA ) achieved excellent results in the field of developmental psychology at the side of her husband William Stern . She did this without having obtained her own academic degree, as that was not possible for women in Germany before 1900.

Clara Stern was the mother of the well-known German essayist, technology critic and philosopher Günther Anders and the translator and resistance fighter against National Socialism, Hilde Marchwitza .

biography

Clara Stern came from a wealthy Jewish family in Berlin. Her father was the banker Julius Joseephy, her mother Friederike geb. Benjamin. She was born in her parents' house at Mathäikirchstrasse 12. Her family saw Wilhelm Stern, Clara's future husband, only a “commoner”, in their opinion not a suitable husband for Clara. But she prevailed and married him in 1899. In Breslau , where William Stern held a professorship for education , the couple raised their three children, Hilde (1900–1962), Günther (1902–1992) and Eva (1904–1992) .

William and Clara Stern wrote their observations on the development of children in scientific, very precise diaries. The two of them summarized the results of their research in "The Child Language" (1907), "Memory, Testimony and Lies in First Childhood" (1908) and the "Psychology of Early Childhood up to the Sixth Year of Life" 1914. The children later reported that they hardly noticed any of these observations. This was essential for the scientific method of this diary method , because its results should not be falsified by "targeted" investigation methods with bias . The majority of the entries came from Clara Stern, as William Stern had to meet the obligations of his chair in Breslau.

The computerized transcription of the childhood diaries of the 1900s, which can be researched on the internet via the database project CHILDES , is currently the starting point for in-depth developments in the context of qualitative social research and developmental psychology .

By the seizure of power by the Nazis in 1933 Jewish scholars were, so to speak pushed overnight from office. Clara's husband William Stern had to give up the management of his psychological institute and his functions in all committees at the University of Hamburg . Warned by their 31-year-old son Günther that Hitler's “Mein Kampf” propagated the extermination of the Jews, the Stern couple went into exile abroad in good time , first to the Netherlands , then to the USA. In the state of North Carolina , the world-renowned founder of differential psychology, William Stern, received a professorship at Duke University in Durham (North Carolina) , which secured the livelihood of the German-Jewish couple. Clara Stern died there at the age of 71, about ten years after her husband.

Fonts

• Clara and William Stern: The Language of Children . 1907, reprint of the Scientific Book Society Darmstadt (WBG) 1987 (1)
• Clara and William Stern: Psychology of Early Childhood . 1914 - the standard work that was published many times before 1987

Secondary literature

• Sibylle Volkmann-Raue (ed.): Important psychologists. Biographies and writings . Beltz-Vlg, Weinheim 2002, ISBN 3-407-22136-3

Web links

• Literature by and about Clara Stern in the catalog of the German National Library
• Biographing of childhood by Clara Stern
• Symposium on Life and Thought in Word May 2004
• German transcripts: Bibliography - details
• Qualitative research in developmental psychology, Clara Stern as a field pioneer
• History of the Psycholog. Institute at the University of Hamburg, Clara Stern is mentioned at the end of the section
• Learning theory modeling of language acquisition

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Birth register StA Berlin III No. 369/77 .