Isa Gruner

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Isa Gruner (born November 14, 1897 in Wilhelmshaven ; † August 20, 1989 in Berlin ) was a German social worker.

Live and act

Elisabeth, called Isa, Gruner, like her two sisters, first attended the Queen Sophie School in Hanover and, after moving to Berlin-Friedenau, the private Roenneberg Higher Girls' School there . After completing the Städt. Lyceum Queen Luise School , she completed an apprenticeship as a kindergarten teacher at the renowned Pestalozzi-Froebel-Haus . She was motivated to do this by Erika Janensch , who was employed at the Charlottenburg youth center from 1913 to 1916. After her kindergarten teacher training, she worked for a year in a war orphanage in Legefeld , followed by a year in a municipal kindergarten in Mülheim an der Ruhr with a teaching position at the local nursery school. In 1918 she took over the position of a school nurse in Berlin-Charlottenburg and at the same time graduated from the welfare school of the social pedagogical seminar of the Jugendheim e. V. From 1920 to 1929 Isa Gruner worked in the welfare and youth welfare office of the city of Guben , where she and her colleague Idamarie Solltmann introduced and developed the social work concept of family welfare. When she returned to Berlin, she taught at the welfare school run by the Jugendheim association and was also a senior executive in the association's management. In 1934 she was removed from all her offices by the Nazis. Ingrid Roeder, social secretary at the seminar for social work in the Pestalozzi-Froebel-Haus , wrote about this in a certificate in 1953:

Isa Gruner (was) a staunch opponent of National Socialism. I witnessed how in March 1934 she raised an open protest against insults against Anna von Gierke in a general assembly called by the new National Socialist leader, Mr. Spiewok, of all employees of the Youth Home Association and clearly declared herself against the new National Socialist leadership of the Youth Home Association ... When Anna von Gierkes was unlawfully dismissed from her work, the Jugendheim association, on November 3, 1933, Miss Gruner moved with her out of the youth home and shared her apartment in Charlottenburg, Carmerstrasse, until Anna von Gierke's death. 12 .

From then on, Isa Gruner worked illegally to protect persecuted people, especially Jewish children. She took over responsibility for the Finkenkrug youth home belonging to the youth home association , which Anna von Gierke and Martha Abicht established in 1921 . The two women bought a few acres of land in Finkenkrug. In the summer of 1922 a spacious barrack was erected and just one year later the recreation center was able to start operations, initially for employees and students of the youth home association .

During the Nazi dictatorship, at least 15 Jewish children found shelter in the Finkenkrug youth home, some of which were brought to a country education home in southern England, Sweden and the USA in collaboration with the Quakers . Isa Gruner himself accompanied children to England in 1938 and 1939, some of whom found accommodation in the Stoatley Rough School , founded and directed by Hilde Lion . She also took over the guardianship of a Jewish girl, Christa Schmey, whose mother was killed in the Ravensbrück concentration camp . In order to earn money in addition to illegal work, Isa Gruner worked for a few weeks in a bank in Königsberg and took over the management of a fast soling facility (with a master craftsman, three journeymen and the master’s wife) in Potsdam , one of which she emigrated to the USA Girlfriend was left.

During the years of the Nazi dictatorship, Isa Gruner was also active as a pedagogical consultant and writer, particularly in parenting training courses for children to play. Your "training sheet" mothers, let your children play , received positive feedback at the time, as the following review from 1935 shows:

This call 'Mothers, let your children play!' wants to make every parenting child aware of the need for the right toy, wants to show the importance of play, which is educationally and tastefully valuable toy, for a healthy development of the child, if it is selected according to the age of the child and if it is the child's needs after doing it by itself, after redesigning it, if it contains the rich application possibilities through which the playing child can expand its world of experience and imagination .

In September 1943 the well-known tea took place in her apartment in Berlin's Carmerstrasse , which was started by Anna von Gierke, who had since passed away and now run by Isa Gruner. During this gathering, as Isa Gruner reports in her unpublished autobiography,

Elisabeth von Thadden and her circle of friends from a National Socialist spy Dr. Reveal Reckzeh . A short time later, all participants came to the Otto Kiep concentration camp and Elisabeth von Thadden was executed. Since I was away, I escaped this fate .

After the collapse of the Nazi dictatorship, Isa Gruner headed the refugee children's home in the Finkenkrug country youth home , which Anna von Gierke left her in her will in her will . She reported on the plight of the uprooted children at the time:

1945 came - and into a rural youth home, far away from the rubble and rubble of sore Berlin and yet only 25 km away, a crowd of pale, homeless children in need of rest moved into. Mostly without any possessions, often without shoes and stockings, washed up from the great stream of refugees on the East German country roads, they arrived pushed from camp to camp, physically and mentally exhausted. They had all lived in the adult world for far too long, in the darkest part of the adult world that feared and confused them. There were children with poor nutrition, severely underweight and emotionally overloaded with experiences and impressions that they should never have had as children. Children who stuttered because they had lost confidence and equanimity, because the rushing, too strong, horrible experiences had taken their breath away, and children who did not speak for weeks because the horror of the bombing nights silenced them. Children came who had to keep telling the same misunderstood, terrible impressions over and over again in order to free themselves from them .

In March, April and May 1948 Isa Gruner was at the invitation of the American Friends Service Committee, Philadelphia, in the USA to take part in the International Conference of Social Work at Atlantic City and to get to know the social work there. In this context she also visited the founder of female social work Alice Salomon, who emigrated to the USA . Both women remembered the small village church in Berlin-Dahlem , where, as Isa Gruner reported, we had so often heard Pastor Hildebrandt together during the great need for the Confessing Church . We remembered very clearly those hours that gave so much strength back then . Regarding social work in America, she went on to comment on her three-month stay:

It is done much more from a psychological basis than ours. Case-work, as individual care work is called in America, has had a tremendous impact on social work training and practice over the past few years. It works more psychoanalytically on the basis of Freud and Rank. Perhaps it is comparable to our special care that we have in parenting or marriage counseling centers .
Gruner's children's home in Berlin-Zehlendorf

Isa Gruner left the Finkenkrug youth home in October 1950 because the communist administration of the community and the Nauen district refused to tolerate their apolitical and Christian attitude. With over 10 children from the rural youth home, she found accommodation in a villa in Berlin-Zehlendorf , Schweitzerstraße 24. She looked after the children's home, which was built and maintained thanks to donations and grants from Elly Heuss-Knapp and Marie Elisabeth Lüders as well as American friends 18 children from mostly broken families. Home child Michael fondly remembered Isa Gruner in a fictional letter:

Every time I saw your car drive up, I immediately stopped playing and then ran across the lawn that was trampled by our children's feet to the old iron entrance door of the garden fence and happily called out to you 'Isa!'. You always got out of your car, locked it and waved to us children with a smile. Then we were very happy that you were with us again! Well, we had missed you very often, because you were our light and support at a time when we, each and every one of us, had to leave home and come to your home. You loved us children very much and were a great example of maternal warmth that we had never known before ... You really let us be children and protected us ... Your upbringing wasn't just about taking care of limited us ... This was enveloped by understanding as well as that love that you had given us every day, because we were your children! .

In 1956 Isa Gruner founded an alcohol-free lunch in the Mittelhof neighborhood home in Berlin-Zehlendorf. At the age of 64, she moved to the Albert Schweitzer Children's Village , where she held a leading position until the early 1970s.

In addition to her professional activity, Isa Gruner u. a. still member of the German Professional Association for Social Workers , member of the German Paritätischer Wohlfahrtsverband , co-founder and sponsor of the Berlin Women's Association 1945 e. V. , Chairwoman of the Board of Trustees of the Agnes and Martha Bluhm Foundation , member of the Board of Trustees of the Albert Schweitzer Children's Village, Berlin-Gatow , the Pestalozzi-Froebel House and the Viktoria-Studienhaus eV, Berlin-Charlottenburg .

Isa Gruner was buried in the Wilmersdorf cemetery.

Awards

Works (selection)

  • Pedagogy behind the counter, Berlin 1934
  • Mothers, let your children play !, Berlin 1935
  • What does the toy seller need to know about the quality of the toy in: Kind Family State. Thuringian papers for people care, 1935 / H. 4, pp. 31-32.
  • The individual and his fate. Kindernot, Berlin / Hanover 1950
  • Children's houses in Berlin-Gatow ?, In: Kinderland 1962 (special edition)
  • Anna von Gierke to the memory, in: News from social work 1949 (special edition)
  • Ceremony for the 90th birthday of Anna von Gierke, in: Blätter des Pestalozzi-Froebel-Verband 1964 / H. 3, pp. 68-74.

literature

  • Hans Muthesius (Ed.): Alice Salomon. The founder of the women's social schools in Germany, Cologne / Berlin 1958
  • Peter Reinicke : Gruner, Isa , in: Hugo Maier (Ed.): Who is who of social work . Freiburg: Lambertus, 1998 ISBN 3-7841-1036-3 , p. 216f.
  • Christa Leiser: Anna von Gierke (1874–1943) and her country youth home in Finkenkrug, in: Association of Friends and Patrons of the Heimatmuseum Falkensee e. V. (Ed.): Falkenseer Heimatjahrbuch, Potsdam 2000, pp. 47–49.
  • Luise Schröder: On the history of an important but forgotten socio-educational institution in Berlin-Charlottenburg: the Verein Jugendheim e. V. , Berlin 2004 (unpublished diploma thesis)
  • Manfred Berger : Alice Salomon. Pioneer of social work and the women's movement, Frankfurt 2005
  • Michael Jahnke: Dear Isa! Letter to Isa Gruner, undated, undated
  • Erika Paul: Between social history and place of refuge. The Finkenkrug youth home and its brave women, Hentrich & Hentrich Verlag Berlin, Berlin 2013, ISBN 978-3-942271-84-4

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ cf. Schröder 2004
  2. ↑ cit. n. certificate of July 16, 1953 from the Pestalozzi-Froebel-Haus (document archived in the Ida-Seele archive )
  3. ↑ cf. Leiser 2000, pp. 47-49.
  4. ↑ http://www.dzi.de/wp-content/uploads/2013/11/13_SozArb_11_paul.pdf , with photo of the pedagogue p. 468
  5. ↑ cf. Children's list created by Isa Gruner under Landjugendheim Finkenkrug
  6. ↑ Schröder 2004
  7. ↑ ISA GRUNER (1897-1989) - Social Work 11.2013
  8. ↑ cit. based on the Isa Gruner file (archived in the Ida-Seele archive )
  9. ↑ cit. based on the curriculum vitae of Isa Gruner (document archived in the Ida-Seele archive )
  10. ↑ Gruner 1950, p. 11
  11. ↑ cf. Muthesius 1958, p. 120 f u. Manfred Berger 2005, p. 87 f
  12. ↑ cit. Based on Isa Gruner's travel report How I saw America for three months (document archived in the Ida-Seele archive )
  13. ↑ cit. n. Michael Jahnke n.d., p. 2 ff.
  14. ↑ cf. Schröder 2004
  15. ↑ http://www.berliner-frauenbund.de/
  16. ↑ cf. Schröder 2004
personal data
SURNAME Gruner, Isa
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German social worker
DATE OF BIRTH November 14, 1897
PLACE OF BIRTH Wilhelmshaven
DATE OF DEATH August 20, 1989
Place of death Berlin