Elfriede Kaun

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1935: Elfriede Kaun wins the high jump at the German athletics championships on the SCC square in Berlin
Elfriede Kaun 1936

Elfriede Rahn-Kaun (born October 5, 1914 in Büttel (Elbe) , † March 5, 2008 in Kiel ) was a German athlete . At the 1936 Olympic Games in Berlin , she won the bronze medal in the high jump .

Life

Kaun, the youngest of four children, came to Kiel with her family from Büttel in the Lower Elbe in 1921, where her father had found a job as a crane operator at the former imperial shipyard. Elfriede Kaun attended elementary school from 1921, then middle school. In 1930 she began a two-year training course as a nanny, which she successfully completed in 1932 and soon found a job in a kindergarten in Kiel.

In 1933 she joined the Kiel gymnastics club , where she first tried cross-country skiing and the long jump . Since she lacked speed, she finally got to the high jump. As early as 1934 she was champion in this discipline in Sportgau Nordmark, second at the IV German Fighting Games in Nuremberg in July 1934, fifth at the Women's World Games in London in August 1934 and winner of the international athletics competition against Japan with 1.56 m. On July 22, 1935, Kaun in Wuppertal increased the German record by one centimeter to 1.60 m. In the same year she won the German championships and the international match against Poland . At the Olympic Games in 1936, like her competitors Ibolya Csák from Hungary and Dorothy Odam from Great Britain, she again jumped 1.60 m, but only achieved the bronze medal in the jump-off. She gave an extensive interview about her relationship with the high jumper Gretel Bergmann , who, as a Jew, was part of the German Olympic team but was not allowed to compete in the games.

Elfriede Kaun also worked in Leni Riefenstahl 's first Olympic film . Due to her sporting successes, she was offered a position in the sports department of the city of Kiel in 1936 and a further training as a kindergarten teacher made possible. After the outbreak of the Second World War , she gradually had to give up her sporting ambitions. Now she tried to find a job as a kindergarten teacher in Berlin, where she also worked as a kindergarten teacher from 1943. In the same year she married the graphic artist Heinz Rahn, whom she had met in Kiel. The son Kai Rahn (1946–1992) emerged from the connection, the marriage was divorced in 1964.

As part of the evacuation of Berlin, Elfriede Rahn came to Timmendorfer Strand with a group of children towards the end of the war , where she ran a kindergarten in the Niendorf district until 1948. In 1952 Elfriede Rahn got a job at the German Olympic Society with the help of Georg von Opels . Between 1952 and 1954 she lived with her son in Stuttgart , but then returned to Kiel. Between 1964 and 1972 Elfriede Rahn-Kaun, as she called herself since the divorce, worked in a Timmendorfer sauna bath. When this position was terminated, she lived as a partner with Editha Marwitz von Stephani (1905–1986), the widow of the Duke of Anhalt in Garmisch-Partenkirchen .

After Elfriede Kaun an honorary award of the committee women in the state sports association Schleswig-Holstein is named, which is awarded every two years and since 2015 has been called "Elfriede Kaun Prize for Equality". With her, the last surviving German medalist of the 1936 Olympic Games died.

Sporting successes

Olympic games

  • 1936: bronze medal

German championships

  • 1934: German runner-up
  • 1935: German champion
  • 1936: German champion
  • 1937: German champion
  • 1939: German runner-up

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Schleswig-Holstein, Hamburg, Mecklenburg (without Lower Saxony and Bremen)
  2. ↑ Winfried Joch : The Olympic Games in Berlin in the eyes of a contemporary witness. In: Arnd Krüger , Swantje Scharenberg (Hrsg.): Times for heroes - times for celebrities in sport. Lit, Münster 2014, pp. 113–122.

literature

Web links

personal data
SURNAME Kaun, Elfriede
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Rahn-Kaun, Elfriede
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German athlete
DATE OF BIRTH October 5, 1914
PLACE OF BIRTH Büttel (Elbe)
DATE OF DEATH March 5, 2008
Place of death Kiel