Erna Corte

Erna Corte (front center) among the founders of the German Association of Women Academics (1926)

Erna Corte (as Erna Christine Margarethe Corte ; * December 12, 1892 in Halle (Saale) , † November 8, 1975 in Berlin ) was a German social politician.

Live and act

Corte grew up in a wealthy merchant family. She received private lessons, then attended the municipal lyceum in Halle and then completed her training as a kindergarten teacher in Leipzig. Erna Corte worked for several years as a kindergarten teacher and at the same time prepared privately for the Abitur. From 1914 to 1919 she studied economics and social policy in Heidelberg. She completed her studies with a doctorate. The topic of her dissertation was: "Liberalism and Social Policy".

After completing her studies, Erna Corte worked in the Ministry of the Württemberg government until Gertrud Bäumer appointed her to the Archives for Youth Welfare of the Reich Ministry of the Interior in Berlin . There she played a decisive role in the development and expansion of the Reich Youth Welfare Act. She was also responsible for the care of boys and girls who were mostly left to their own devices during the day, i.e. childcare. In this context she criticized the lack of cooperation between school and youth welfare and the like. a. social positions:

Children [are] looked after at school in one place, medically treated in another, accommodated in a third during the free periods, fed from a fourth and finally looked after by other departments ... without these departments knowing about one another, let alone one work uniform plan .

When the institution was converted into the German Institute for Youth Welfare in 1933, its primary task was to monitor and interpret the National Socialist laws for the protection of young people. Erna Corte was also responsible for the adoption system and the placement of foster care. Since she had been a member of the SPD since 1933 , she was a thorn in the side of those in power, although Erna Corte adapted her publications and many book reviews in various specialist journals to the prescribed ideology. For example, she rated the book “Why Education Despite Heredity?” Published by Gerhard Pfahler in 1935 as follows:

It is true that it initially shows the limits that hereditary teaching has set for human formation and upbringing, which cannot be torn down by anything, neither through parental love and wishes, nor through devoted art of education; but then it is proved with unbelievable forcefulness that within the bonds through the species there is a wide scope for the development of man towards evil or good, towards self-interest or common good .

Despite adapting his writings, “Erna Corte also professed to resist the Nazis. Courageously and prudently, she took over the guardianship of the six children of Hermann Maaß , who was sentenced to death on July 20, 1944 and whose mother died shortly afterwards ”. Before that, he was involved in the association "Deutsch-Ausländisches Jugendhilfswerk", a "cover organization" founded by Elsa Brandström and Lotte Lemke , which helped children (including Jewish children) after most of the social welfare organizations were smashed by the National Socialists in 1933.

From 1947 until her retirement, Erna Corte was a magistrate and advisor to the youth welfare office at the Berlin-Steglitz district office . As such, she advocated the placement of difficult children in surrogate families. In her opinion, homes should only serve as temporary accommodation for difficult children or as "places of observation and healing education":

For the physically and mentally healthy youth, homes can never replace family education. So stay as another way ... their accommodation in a strange family ... to take care of them who have been deprived of the security of the family or have never participated in such a way that their livelihoods are secured and they thereby become part of the people and the state Inserting it correctly early on is the purpose and task of foster child protection .

In addition to her professional activity, Erna Corte was involved in many associations, clubs and committees: from 1914 to 1931 she was a member of the board of the Federation of German Women's Associations , from 1925 to 1930 she was a board member of the German Academy for Social and Educational Work with Women , from 1925 to 1934 she was a board member, then on the advisory board of the "German Froebel Association" and from 1950 to 1959 she was part of the main committee of the " German Association for Public and Private Welfare ". She was particularly interested in the neighborhood home "Schlösschen", which she co-founded in Berlin-Steglitz in 1948, to which Erna Corte was first chairwoman until 1970.

Web links

• http://www.kindergartenpaedagogik.de/468.html
• http://www.nifbe.de/fachbeitraege/beitraege-von-az?view=item&id=495:erna-corte-1892-1975&catid=37

Works (selection)

• The protection of minors in the German cinema, Berlin 1926
• Developmentally inhibited children, Leipzig 1926
• School child care, Berlin 1928
• The family relationships of children in crèches, kindergartens, after-school care centers and day care centers, Berlin 1930
• Kindergartens and after-school care centers in times of need, Berlin 1932
• Literature report on German kindergartens abroad, in: Kindergarten 1933 / H. 6, pp. 145-146
• Foster children, Berlin 1956

literature

• Manfred Berger : Women in the history of the kindergarten, Frankfurt / Main 1995, pp. 30–34
• Manfred Berger: On the 100th birthday of Erna Corte, in: Theory and Practice of Social Pedagogy 1992 / H. 6, p. 36
• Manfred Berger: Corte, Christine Margarethe Erna, in Hugo Maier (ed.): Who is who in social work, Freiburg / Brsg. 1998, pp. 129-130
• Manfred Berger: Corte, Christine Margarethe Erna , in: Eva Labouvie (Ed.): Women in Saxony-Anhalt 2. A biographical-bibliographical lexicon from the 19th century to 1945, Vienna / Cologne / Weimar 2019, pp. 119–123

Individual evidence

1. ^ Corte 1928
2. ↑ Kindergarten 1935, p. 264
3. ↑ Berger 1995, p. 33
4. ↑ Corte 1956, p. 10 ff.