Gisela Konopka

Gisela Konopka (nee Peiper), (born February 11, 1910 in Berlin ; † December 9, 2003 Minneapolis ) was a German-American social worker of Jewish origin who was described as the “mother of group education”.

Life

Konopka spent her childhood and youth together with two other sisters in Berlin. Her father was a staunch social democrat . Despite the modest family situation - the family got their income from running a small vegetable shop - they were allowed to attend a girls' high school. The high school student joined a left-wing Jewish youth group, in whose alliance she actively participated. After graduating from high school , there was massive unemployment, she worked in Hamburg as a factory worker. This activity brought Konopka into contact with the trade union and labor movement . She joined the International Socialist Fighting League and worked with like-minded people against National Socialism . During this time she met Paul (Erhardt) Konopka, whom she married in 1941 and with whom she had a happy but childless marriage until his death in 1976.

From 1929 to 1933 she studied history , psychology , philosophy and education (including social education ) at the University of Hamburg . Because of her Jewish descent, Gisela Peiper couldn't find a job after graduating. Because of her membership in "undesirable political groups" she was arrested in 1936 and transferred to the Hamburg-Fuhlsbüttel concentration camp . Mainly opponents of National Socialism and Jews were imprisoned there, many of whom died as a result of the prison conditions. In her autobiography, she wrote about her imprisonment:

“For the first time, I felt as if I was suffocating in the locked room. Suddenly I was flooded with hatred. I fought the Nazis out of a violent reaction because respect for people was so important to me. I hated their actions, but so personally, so deeply from within and so terrible as at this moment I had not hated ... I hated, I was afraid, I was full of doubt ”.

A few weeks later she was released and fled via Czechoslovakia , Austria , where she was imprisoned again, France , Portugal to the USA , where she took citizenship in 1944.

In New York , she initially earned her living by cleaning. At the age of 31 she decided to study social work , specifically social group work, at the School of Social Work in Pittsburgh. From 1943 to 1945 she worked as a social group worker in the Cild Guidance Clinic in Pittsburgh. In 1947 Gisela Konopka was offered a professorship at the University of Minneapolis. There she also founded a center for youth education and youth research and also produced the series Girls in Conflict for the university television station, dealing with the problems of female delinquents and foster children . As early as 1947, she was appointed professor of social work at the University of Minnesota in Saint Paul, and finally in 1957 she received her Doctor of Social Welfare from Columbia University in New York.

After the collapse of the Nazi dictatorship, Gisela Konopka returned several times as a child welfare expert to the country where she and her family had been persecuted, abused and displaced, in order to introduce and disseminate social group work in many lectures and training measures . To this end, she repeatedly gave lectures in the 1960s, on the one hand for executives in social institutions for home education and on the other hand for lecturers in social group work at higher technical schools for social work / education. Gisela Konopka had influenced many important multipliers in social work / social education and its neighboring areas such as Heinrich Schiller , Elisabeth Siegel , Martha Krause-Lang , Ernst Bornemann and Gerhard Wurzbacher , Fides von Gontard , Herbert Lattke etc.

In 1968 her publication Soziale Gruppearbeit: ein Helfender Prozess [Social Group Work: A Helping Process] appeared in the Federal Republic of Germany . The publication developed into the standard work of social group work, which she defined as follows:

"Social group work is a method of social work that helps individuals through meaningful group experiences to increase their social functioning and to cope better with their personal problems, their group problems or the problems of public life".

Gisela Konopka was awarded the Federal Cross of Merit, First Class, in 1975 before she retired three years later .

Works

• About goals and values ​​in social work, especially in social group work. In: Our Youth , 1962 / H. 10, pp. 339-345.
• Group work in a home , Wiesbaden 1964
• Social group work: a helping process , Weinheim 1968 (2nd edition 1969)
• Homes for a stopgap or a life chance? Social group work in open and closed facilities , Wiesbaden 1971
• With courage and love. A youth in the fight against injustice and terror , Weinheim 1996

literature

• Manfred Berger : Women in Social Responsibility: Gisela Konopka. In: Our Youth , 2006 / H. 11/12, pp. 507-509.
• Hildegard Feidel-Mertz : Education in exile after 1933. Education for survival. Frankfurt am Main 1990.
• Gisela Mayer: Appreciation of displaced social workers - shown in selected biographies. Munich 2004.
• Gerda Otto: Emigration and Social Work - Gisela Konopka, for example. Augsburg 2004.
• Joachim Wieler / Susanne Zeller (eds.): Emigrated social work. Portraits of displaced social workers , Freiburg / Br. 1995, pp. 202-210.

Web links

• Literature by and about Gisela Konopka in the catalog of the German National Library
• Janice Andrews: gisela konopka and group work , 2004 (English language)

Individual evidence

1. ^ Gisela Peiper Konopka in the Jewish Women's Archive
2. ↑ Hildegard Feidel-Merz: Pedagogy in Exile after 1933. Education for Survival , Frankfurt am Main 1990, p. 211
3. ↑ Gisela Mayer: Appreciation of displaced social workers - shown in selected biographies. Munich 2004, p. 121.
4. ↑ Gisela Konopka: With courage and love. A youth in the fight against injustice and terror. Weinheim 1996, p. 147.
5. ^ Gisela Konopka: Social group work: a helping process. Weinheim 1969, p. 35.