Evangelical Deaconess House Berlin Teltow Lehnin
| Evangelical Deaconess House Berlin Teltow Lehnin | |
|---|---|
| legal form | Foundation, endowment |
| founding | 2004 (origin 1841) |
| Seat | Teltow |
| Chair | Matthias Blume |
| sales | 172,734,000 euros (2018) |
| Employees | 2300 (2018) |
| Website | www.diakonissenhaus.de |
The Evangelical Diakonissenhaus Berlin Teltow Lehnin is a diaconal institution organized as a foundation with locations in Berlin and Brandenburg . It is mainly active in the elderly, child and handicapped aid and nursing. Together with several subsidiaries, the deaconess house forms a group of companies with more than 2,300 employees. This makes it one of the largest employers in the region.
The facility goes back to the Magdalenenstift founded in Berlin in 1841 , from which the Evangelical Deaconess House Berlin- Teltow developed at the beginning of the 20th century . It got its current form in 2004 when the Luise-Henrietten-Stift was incorporated in Lehnin . It is one of the oldest institutions of Protestant charity in the federal states of Berlin and Brandenburg. The facilities of the deaconess house include today
- Nursing homes
- Geronto-Psychiatric Day Care Centers
- Assisted living facilities for seniors
- Shared apartments for the mentally handicapped
- Day care centers
- Workshops for the disabled
- Clinics for internal medicine and geriatric rehabilitation
- Training centers for nursing and social professions
history
Magdalenenstift in Berlin
The foundation of the deaconess house goes back to an initiative founded in 1840 by Maria Anna Amalie von Hessen-Homburg , the sister-in-law of Friedrich Wilhelm III. von Prussia , and the Countess von Bohlen (née Walsleben, 1781–1857), who set up a so-called Magdalenenstift - a home for so-called "fallen girls" - in Berlin. In 1841 the home was established in what was then Hirschelgasse (Hirzelgasse), today's Stresemannstrasse, as a ward with twelve beds in a tenement house. The institution was given corporation rights through the “Highest Cabinet Order” of May 26, 1843, and from then on it was continued as the Berlin Magdalenenstift . After a temporary home, the home moved into its own building on the south bank of the Plötzensee in 1866 .
In 1876 the teachers formed a sisterhood, with which the development of the Magdalenenstift into a deaconess house began. In 1884 the deaconess order was adopted, which essentially corresponded to the order of the sororities of the Kaiserswerther General Conference , to which the mother house has belonged since 1888. In 1881, the “Girls Rescue House Siloah” was founded in Niederschönhausen as a branch of the monastery to educate “girls at risk” who were still in school. In addition, deaconesses were sent out to take over further stations in other places. On January 22nd, 1885, the Magdalenenstift was recognized by the Prussian Finance Minister as a “mild foundation” - that is, a non-profit organization.
Deaconess house in Teltow
In 1901 the headquarters of the Abbey moved from Plötzensee to Teltow, as the area on Plötzensee was needed for the construction of the West Harbor . The new main site, for which in addition to the motherhouse, the rectory and a laundry including the adjoining residential building, five other buildings were built for the pupils of the home, was inaugurated on September 24, 1901. In 1906 a separate asylum parish was set up in Teltow for the deaconesses, employees and pupils, to which 202 members belonged at the beginning. Their services were held in the collegiate chapel in the mother house, which was consecrated when the site was inaugurated . In 1912/13 the foundation changed its name to Evangelisches Diakonissenhaus Berlin-Teltow . This also reflects a new self-image, which included a changed view of the girls in care and a turn to other diaconal tasks.
In 1919, Pastor Max Wießner was appointed as the new headmaster and Sister Anna von Noël as the new superior , who shaped the deaconess house for the next 20 and 30 years. A focus of her activity was the profiling of the training of the pupils. The "Sonnenhof", an agricultural farm yard of the deaconess house, completed in 1927, contained a teaching kitchen. The educators' seminar founded in 1911 was followed by the training of state-recognized nannies and the establishment of a household school in 1935. In terms of personnel, this profile was evident in the appointment of Pastor Alfred Fritz as head of the educational work of the house, who was to succeed Wießner in the office of headmaster after his death in 1939.
As a further field of activity, the operation of a newly built specialist hospital for obstetrics and venereal diseases was added from 1927 . In order to improve the economic situation of the house, part of the new hospital building was used as a “women's home”, as a place to live for well-paying older women. In addition, Wießner succeeded in convincing the Evangelical Oberkirchenrat in Berlin to approve a collection for the Deaconess House Berlin-Teltow, which brought in almost 32,000 Reichsmarks in the parishes of the old Prussian church provinces . This collection has been collected annually since then, soon for all deaconess houses in the Mark Brandenburg, and has existed in a modified form until today. From the 1930s onwards, deaconesses increasingly turned to looking after mentally handicapped young women, also because, during the Nazi era, welfare children were mainly assigned to state institutions. The Diakonissenhaus was thus faced with the task of protecting the wards from euthanasia and forced sterilization .
In September 1943 part of the motherhouse and a stable building of the Sonnenhof were destroyed by bombing. In the spring of 1945 there was looting and further destruction. After makeshift repairs, refugees were soon taken in, and the hospital gained importance as an emergency and makeshift hospital beyond the deaconess house.
After the Second World War
In June 1948 the scattered deaconesses of the Evangelical Lutheran Deaconess House Bethanien in Kreuzburg / Upper Silesia moved to Teltow. The residents of the deaconess house, founded in 1888, fled westwards from the advancing Soviet troops in January 1945 . Following previous contacts, in September 1948 the Kreuzburger Diakonissenhaus donated to the Evangelical Deaconess House Berlin-Teltow. The previous Superior Luise von Werdeck from Kreuzburg became the new superior. After the unification of the two houses, 167 deaconesses lived in the Teltow Deaconess House.
In the time of the GDR , the profile of the deaconess house changed fundamentally due to the changed social conditions. The education and care work came to a complete standstill. Instead, the main features of today's fields of work emerged.
Aid for the disabled, initially for children and young people, and later also for adults, became a focus of the house. In 1972, a workshop for the handicapped was added to the home care of the mentally handicapped , and from 1983 a protected living area, the Fliednerhaus, was added. For this purpose, the buildings of the Sonnenhof were rebuilt, which were no longer needed in their previous function, since the agricultural self-sufficiency had been given up in 1966. The workshop for the disabled, which started out with ten places, grew to 120 employees by 1992. In 1973 a day care center for mentally handicapped children was established.
The hospital on the site of the deaconess house took on tasks in regional health care, since 1963 it served as an internal specialist hospital. Elderly care was expanded as an area. In the 1970s, a number of new buildings were built, mostly residential buildings for employees. The previous training work of the house was continued as church training for deacons , since 1956 in the business diakonia and since 1964 in the healing education diaconia.
Since the reunification
After reunification in 1990, the framework conditions changed fundamentally again. The previous church training was transferred to state-recognized training courses as early as 1991 with the establishment of the Dietrich Bonhoeffer Technical School for Social Work. Also in 1991 the previous day care center for mentally handicapped children and young people was converted into today's Hans-Christian-Andersen-Schule, a special needs school with a special educational focus on “mental development”. In 1994, the first facility was opened outside the main area of the deaconess house with an outdoor living group for people with intellectual disabilities. In 2006, in addition to the already existing integrated daycare center Zoar, another daycare center, the Morgensonne House, was founded, and in 2009 a primary school sponsored by the Deaconess House.
From 1992 the foundation took over the sponsorship of several hospitals for the handicapped and the elderly, which had been communal until then. While some of these institutions were incorporated into the foundation, others were converted into non-profit limited liability companies . As a result, the foundation expanded its area of activity to include other locations in Brandenburg and thus became a corporate group active in many places in Berlin and Brandenburg. In addition, a number of new buildings were built, for example for age-appropriate living or workshops for the disabled.
In 2004, the previously independent deaconess mother house Luise-Henrietten-Stift in Lehnin was incorporated into the foundation, which now changed its name to Evangelisches deaconess house Berlin Teltow Lehnin. In 2007, the foundation took over another deaconess house, the Evangelical Luther Foundation in Frankfurt an der Oder , by converting it into a non-profit GmbH, of which the foundation is the sole shareholder.
The deaconess house today
The Evangelisches Diakonissenhaus Berlin Teltow Lehnin is a non-profit foundation based in Berlin. It belongs to the Diaconal Work Berlin-Brandenburg-Silesian Upper Lusatia and is an ecclesiastical work in the sense of the basic order of the Evangelical Church Berlin-Brandenburg-Silesian Upper Lusatia . The board of the foundation consists of the head, who must be an ordained pastor, the superior who is a deaconess or diaconal sister, and since 1996 the administrative director.
literature
- Gerta Scharffenorth : Sisters. Life and Work of Evangelical Sisters . Burckhardthaus, Offenbach 1984.
- Thomas Wieke : Everything can turn out differently at any time - 175 years of the Evangelisches Diakonissenhaus Berlin Teltow Lehnin . vbb, Berlin 2016
- Hans-Jürgen Röder : In the face of the wall . vbb, Berlin 2016
- Uwe Kaminsky : Wedge-shaped . Metropol Verlag 2017