Erna Maria Johansen

Erna Maria Johansen (born April 18, 1911 in Mecklenburg ; † April 27, 1986 in Berlin ) was a German socialist educator.

Life

Born in the working class in Mecklenburg, Erna Maria Kakuschke began training as a home teacher and kindergarten teacher. At the age of 20 she came to Berlin and studied at the social pedagogical seminar under the direction of Anna von Gierke and sought contact with psychoanalysis at an early age. At the age of 18 she joined the Socialist Workers Youth . She became a member of the SPD and moved in left-wing Marxist circles around Karl Korsch and Heinz Langerhans . She was married to Ernest J. Salter since 1934 . In 1933 she received, as well as her husband, as a member of the SPD in the district office Prenzlauer Berg, a prohibition that lasted until the war ended. She and her husband initially took part in the resistance against National Socialist rule. But they were observed from 1934; Her husband therefore emigrated, but soon came back and from 1937 until the outbreak of war had to report regularly to the Secret State Police . She experienced the end of the Second World War with four small children in a small Mecklenburg town in 1945, where after the surrender she took over the management of the social welfare office and founded a refuge for war orphans who had fled from East Prussia.

In 1947 she returned to Berlin with her family and worked under the pseudonym Maria Morum with journalistic work in education and politics, especially in connection with school reform efforts. After her divorce and the schooling of the youngest, fifth child, there followed twenty years of full-time social work as a family welfare worker in the context of educational counseling, in the foster child area of ​​the state youth welfare office and in the family care department in the Berlin Senate. After her retirement, she began to write specialist books.

In 1951, under the leadership of Grete Sonnemann , she took part in the founding of the New Education working group in Berlin. At the beginning of the 1960s she initiated the letters to parents (“Peter-Pelikan-Briefe”) within this working group and published two studies on the social history of childhood in 1978 and 1986.

Works

• Cheated children. A childhood social history . Fischer 1978
• I wish I were never born Children at war . Fischer 1986

Web links

• Literature by and about Erna Maria Johansen in the catalog of the German National Library
• Erna Maria Johansen. In: FemBio. Women's biography research (with references and citations).