Gertrud Then
Gertrud Dann (born May 27, 1908 in Augsburg , † April 2, 1998 in Sharpthorne , Sussex ) was a German-English kindergarten teacher and teacher.
Live and act
She came from an old, very respected Jewish family. The father Albert Dann (born 1868) was a councilor , synagogue commissioner and benefactor of the city of Augsburg. He was the owner of a factory for short and manufactured goods and came from Frankfurt am Main , his wife Fanny, nee. Kitzinger (born 1876), from Fürth . The couple had five daughters: Sophie , Thea, Elisabeth, Gertrud and Lotte. After primary school, Gertrud first attended, like the older sisters, the Anna Barbara von Stettensche Institute , a private girls' school , which is known far beyond the city limits .
In Hellerau near Dresden , she completed the kindergarten teacher seminar from 1926 to 1928 and then worked in various children's homes in Munich and Hamburg. From 1932, Dann ran a kindergarten that was housed in her parents' house. With the beginning of the Nazi dictatorship, she was no longer allowed to take in “Aryan children” because, as a Jew, she was unable to convey German cultural values and norms, and her “bad Jewish influence in the opinion of the Nazis” would have “spoiled” the children. Finally, Dann had to move her kindergartens to an adjoining room of the synagogue. Due to the emigration of many Jewish citizens, there was a lack of children, so Dann closed the kindergarten. She then worked at the Antonienheim in Munich . Dann left Germany with her sister Sophie in 1939 and emigrated to Great Britain . There she initially earned a laborious living as a domestic servant. From 1941 she worked with her sister in the 'Hampstead Nurseries', Anna Freud's war children's home . After the end of the war she worked with severely traumatized children from the Theresienstadt concentration camp , who had to be used to a normal life. An extremely difficult task, because the children had no idea of a normal environment: “Family, household, garden, shops, shop windows, means of transport, all of this was alien to them. Only large trucks seemed to be known to them, evidently a memory of the transport trucks in the concentration camp. Except for dogs, they didn't know any animals. At first they were terrified of these, probably because of their experiences in the camp. In the first years of life they only had toys that the adults had made for them from empty rolls of thread, cans and rags ”.
Most recently, Dann worked as a librarian at the Hampstead Child Therapy Coure and Clinic . She worked there for another 20 years. She spent the last years of her life with her sister in a nursing home.
literature
- Gertrud Dann: I was the red princess. In: G. Römer (Ed.): Four sisters. Memories of Elisabeth, Lotte, Sophie and Gertrud Dann from Augsburg. Augsburg 1998, pp. 105-134.
- Edith Findel (Ed.): Augsburger Frauenlexikon. Achensee, Augsburg 2006, ISBN 3-938330-03-1 , pp. 36-37.
- Hildegard Lütkemeier: Help for children in need. On the youth welfare of the Jews in the Weimar Republic. Lambertus, Freiburg im Breisgau 1992, ISBN 3-7841-0604-8 .
- Gernot Römer: Swabian Jews. Life and achievements from two centuries. Presse-Druck und Verlag, Augsburg 1990, DNB 947275150 , pp. 200-209.
- Manfred Berger : The Kindergarten from 1840 to the Present , Saarbrücken 2015, p. 87 f
Web links
- Biography of Gertrud Dann at the Lower Saxony Institute for Early Childhood Education and Development
- Manfred Berger: Women in the history of kindergarten: Gertrud Dann , kindergartenpaedagogik.de
- Gertrud Dann in the Augsburger Stadtlexikon
Individual evidence
- ↑ cf. Berger 2051, p. 87 f.
- ↑ Then 1998, p. 109.
- ↑ cf. Lütkemeier 1992, p. 121 ff.
- ↑ Findel / Löffler / Schmucker 2006, p. 37.
- ↑ cit. n. Römer 1990, p. 209.
| personal data | |
|---|---|
| SURNAME | Then, Gertrud |
| BRIEF DESCRIPTION | German kindergarten teacher |
| DATE OF BIRTH | May 27, 1908 |
| PLACE OF BIRTH | augsburg |
| DATE OF DEATH | April 2, 1998 |
| Place of death | Sharpthorne , Sussex |