Erna Blencke

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Erna Blencke (* July 25, 1896 in Magdeburg ; † June 21, 1991 in Bad Soden am Taunus ), student of Leonard Nelson , worked as a teacher and politician within the German Reich and in emigration against Nazi rule. In the 1950s she played an important role as the director of the Springe Folk High School in building trade union education after the end of the Second World War.

Life until 1933

Erna Blencke's father was an authorized signatory in Magdeburg. In 1917 she was qualified to teach in elementary schools and from 1919 studied mathematics, physics, philosophy and education at the Georg-August University in Göttingen . She was also a student of Leonhard Nelson and was able to take the state examination for teaching at secondary schools in 1923.

From autumn 1923 to May 1933 Erna Blencke worked at schools in Frankfurt am Main and in Hanover. From her position as a student councilor in Frankfurt, she voluntarily switched to an elementary school in Hanover, according to Beatrix Herlemann, "to a reform pedagogical collective school in Hanover". In addition to her school work, Blencke also taught at the Walkemühle State Education Center and was involved in the German Teachers' Association , the Freethinkers Association and was a functionary of the International Socialist Combat League (ISK) .

Resistance and Emigration

Due to the law to restore the civil service , Erna Blencke was dismissed from school in May 1933 for political reasons, lived from the bread trade and did resistance work, whereby the bread trade also served to camouflage the illegal work of the ISK. Blencke built up ISK groups mainly in the Hanover area and in 1937 became the head of ISK resistance work throughout the German Reich.

In 1938 a number of ISK members fell victim to a wave of arrests, which caused Erna Blencke to flee. The following quote shows how necessary this was: “Several members and supporters were also arrested in Hanover. Eberhard, the domestic manager, was able to flee abroad, as did Blencke and Dannenberg. Three ISK members from Hanover were sentenced by the People's Court to prison terms of up to four years. However, Rieloff was acquitted on the basis of exculpatory testimony. He fled to France in the late summer of 1939. After the ISK was largely broken up, formal organizations were dispensed with. "

Erna Blencke fled via Switzerland to France, where the ISK international management was based in Paris. Under the pseudonym Rosa Fricke she wrote for the Sozialistische Warte and was a member of the Association of German Teacher Emigrants .

After the outbreak of World War II, Erna Blencke was interned in 1939. She escaped from the Gurs camp at the beginning of July 1940 and arrived in the United States via Portugal and Puerto Rico in April 1941 with the help of international aid committees. She remained politically active there and worked in many organizations, including the American Labor Education Service (ALES), the International Ladies Garment Workers Union (ILGWU), the International League for Human Rights , the Socialist Party of America , and the Civil Rights Union and the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). Reimut Schmitt also mentions her involvement in the German-speaking branch of the Workmen's Circle and her membership in the Jewish Labor Committee . Erna Blencke herself refers to her "auxiliary work for friends in Germany", which she probably carried out in the post-war period.

Return to Germany

In March 1951 Erna Blencke returned to Germany. She followed a request from the German Federation of Trade Unions in Hanover, which had asked her to take over the management of the Springe folk high school . She held this position until 1954 and then moved to Frankfurt am Main, where she continued to work in adult education. Erna Blencke led Socratic Talks and took care of building the archives of Leonard Nelson, the ISK and Minna Specht . Most of these archives are now in the holdings of the Archives of Social Democracy .

In the 1960s and 1970s Erna Blencke was active on the board of the SPD in Frankfurt am Main, and from 1978 to 1982 she was chairwoman of the Philosophical-Political Academy .

Honors

In Göttingen ( Lage ) and Hanover ( Lage ) there is an Erna-Blencke-Weg named after her.

Works

  • On the history of the New Fries School and the Jakob Friedrich Fries Society , in: Archive for the History of Philosophy , Vol. 60 (2), 1978, pp. 199–208
  • "Hakenkreuz am Galgen", in: M. Köttenheinrich, U. Neveling, U. Paetzold, H. Schmidt (eds.): Rundfunkpolitische Kontroversen. On the 80th birthday of Fritz Eberhard , Europäische Verlagsanstalt, Frankfurt am Main and Cologne 1976, ISBN 978-3-434-00321-2 , p. 467 ff.
  • In the catalog of the German National Library , 34 publications by Erna Blencke are listed, almost exclusively publications in the Sozialistische Warte from 1938 to 1940.

swell

literature

In the IfZ questionnaire, Erna Bencke mentions two publications in which her work was also reported:

  • Werner Link: The history of the International Youth Association (IJB) and the International Socialist Fighting Association (ISK). A contribution to the history of the labor movement in the Weimar Republic and the Third Reich , Hain, Meisenheim am Glan 1964.
  • Gerda Zorn: City in Resistance , Röderberg-Verlal, Frankfurt am Main 1965.

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ a b c d e Reimut Schmitt: Against the current: Erna Blencke
  2. ^ A b c d Philosophical-Political Academy: Erna Blencke
  3. ↑ a b c d Hildegard Feidel-Mertz / Hermann Schnorbach: Teachers in Emigration , p. 227
  4. ↑ Beatrix Herlemann: Blencke, Erna Elisabeth. For the significance and history of the collecting schools in Hanover, see: Klaus Mlynek and Waldemar R. Röhrbein: History of the City of Hanover , Volume 2 - From the beginning of the 19th century to the present , Schlütersche Verlagsanstalt und Druckerei, Hanover 1994, ISBN 3-87706- 364-0 , p. 477
  5. ↑ Beatrix Herlemann: Blencke, Erna Elisabeth
  6. ↑ Ludwig Eiber: Review by: Susanne Döscher-Gebauer / Hans-Dieter Schmid / Detlef Schmiechen-Ackermann, Left Socialist Resistance against the National Socialist Dictatorship in Hanover (Writings on the Culture of Remembrance in Hanover, Vol. 3), Verlag Hahnsche Buchhandlung, Peine 2015, in : Archives for Social History (online) 57, 2017
  7. ↑ On ALES see the article by Eleanor G. Coit and John D. Connors: Agencies and Programs in Workers' Education , in: The Journal of Educational Sociology , Vol. 20, No. 8 (Apr., 1947), pp. 520-528
  8. ↑ On the ILGWU see the article en: International Ladies 'Garment Workers' Union in the English-language WIKIPEDIA.
  9. ↑ a b Questionnaire of the IfZ with answers from Erna Blencke from November 24, 1969
  10. ↑ For the Workmen's Circle, see the article Workmen's Circle in the English-language WIKIPEDIA.
  11. ↑ On the Jewish Labor Committee see the article en: Jewish Labor Committee in the English language WIKIPEDIA.
personal data
SURNAME Blencke, Erna
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Blencke, Erna Elisabeth; Fricke, Rosa (pseudonym)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German educator, resistance fighter and emigrant
DATE OF BIRTH July 25, 1896
PLACE OF BIRTH Magdeburg
DATE OF DEATH June 21, 1991
Place of death Bad Soden am Taunus