Jewish country school homes

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Jewish country school homes existed in Germany predominantly between 1933 and 1938. They were created as a result of the increasing exclusion of Jewish children, young people and teachers from the German school system by the National Socialist rulers.

history

According to Hildegard Feidel-Mertz's system , there were only three Jewish country school homes in National Socialist Germany :

Feidel-Mertz also mentions the Samson School in Wolfenbüttel, which had defined itself as a Jewish rural school home in the 1920s, but had to close in 1928. The Kristinehov boarding school could also be understood as a Jewish rural school home , but Feidel-Mertz only runs it among the schools in exile she has researched .

All of the aforementioned institutions play no or only a marginal role in Joseph Walk's book Jewish School and Education in the Third Reich , in which he also assigns the Kaliski private forest school to the rural school homes, in the context of his brief account of private Jewish higher schools. He also met them with a certain skepticism: “Since they were largely dependent on the school fees of their pupils - only Herrlingen and Caputh received financial support from the Reichsvertretung [...] - they were essentially reserved for the children of wealthy parents. [..] In the journalistic discussion: ›Community school or private school?‹ The moral right stood on the side of the advocates of a school system subject to public control, which was ready to put the interests of the Jewish community and the needs of Jewish education ahead of all other motives . “The fact that the Jewish country school homes - like their non-Jewish counterparts - are primarily something for children of wealthy parents was a perfectly understandable accusation that schools in exile were often exposed to.

The Jewish country school homes only found more attention in research and a different emphasis in dealing with them through the work of Feidel-Mertz, who first learned of the existence of these country school homes through an interview with Kurt and Alice Bergel in 1981 .

According to Feidel-Mertz, the three institutions mentioned all started before 1933 and only then developed or had to develop into specifically Jewish institutions. They were educational institutions for children from predominantly assimilated Jewish homes, who were only forced to deal more and more with their Jewishness after the National Socialists came to power - due to the constantly increasing discrimination in everyday life and the early displacement of Jewish children and young people from the public schools. The same applied to the Jewish teachers, who had been banned from practicing their profession in state schools due to the law to restore the civil service . As a result, Jewish schools, whether day schools or rural school homes, inevitably became reception facilities for Jewish students and Jewish teachers.

Like the schools in exile , rural school homes were also particularly suitable for cushioning the social upheavals to which Jewish families were exposed under the pressure of external conditions.

"In addition, with the growing compulsion to emigrate, increasingly disintegrating, sometimes broken family relationships created an increasing demand for home schools in which the children were taken care of when their parents separated or when their parents separated or tried everything in various ways to prepare for their emigration."

The Jewish country school homes were predominantly oriented towards educational reform ideas and practices and anchored in German culture. This basic orientation had to be reconciled with an introduction to Judaism, which was still foreign to many children (and many of their teachers). From this, Hugo Rosenthal derived an educational mandate for the Jewish country school homes , which in fact all institutions had to face:
“1. Making children feel at home in German and Jewish cultures.
2. Your linguistic preparation for a possible emigration.
3. Preparation for craft, horticultural and housekeeping training as part of the professional redeployment of Jews. "

When it was implemented in everyday school life, this meant that the Jewish rural school homes had to offer more than just teaching; they were required to be “a second home 'for a while', which placed unfamiliar demands on the teachers in many cases, which they, as housemothers and fathers, also claimed educationally 'around the clock'”. For Feidel-Mertz, there is no question that this could only succeed by resorting to reform-pedagogical approaches "in the tradition of the liberal wing of the rural education movement ". But the Jewish rural schoolhouses went beyond their classic elements .

“Rather, they developed and practiced quite independent conceptual variants of a successful synthesis between the reform pedagogical approaches emanating from the child and the education required by the circumstances to become a self-confident member of the persecuted Jewish community. This happened in the three country school homes in partly different, original ways, which not least - as in general also in the country schools - was dependent on the personalities who shaped them and the landscape and social environment. "

Feidel-Mertz even went so far as to regard the Jewish country school homes as places in which the reform pedagogy, which had been ousted from the educational system in National Socialist Germany , could continue to live in a kind of internal emigration for a limited time. At the same time, however, she turned against the view that the schools in exile were the seamless continuation of the Jewish country school homes.

“It is true that there were proven personal contacts between the Jewish rural school hostels and the exile schools through the change of teachers and children from one to the other, as well as comparable approaches in terms of content and method. But the conscious and intensive examination of Judaism, which children and adults first had to reappropriate as part of their 'double identity', was primarily carried out by the Jewish country school homes - as well as by the renewing Jewish education system in general - in National Socialist Germany . "

literature

  • Hildegard Feidel-Mertz: Jewish country school homes in National Socialist Germany. A suppressed chapter of German school history , updated version by Hermann Schnorbach, in: Inge Hansen-Schaberg (ed.): Landerziehungsheim-Pädagogik , Reformpädagogische Schulkonzepte, Volume 2, Schneider Verlag Hohengehren GmbH, Baltmannsweiler, 2012, ISBN 978-3-8340-0962 -3 .
  • Joseph Walk : Jewish school and education in the Third Reich: Verlag Anton Haun Meisenheim GmbH, Frankfurt am Main 1991, ISBN 3-445-09930-8 .
  • Ruth Röcher: The Jewish School in National Socialist Germany 1933-1942 , dipa-Verlag, Frankfurt am Main, 1992, ISBN 3-7638-0173-1 .
  • Lucie Schachne: Education for intellectual resistance: The Jewish country school home in Herrlingen 1933-1939 , dipa-Verlag, Frankfurt am Main 1986, ISBN 3-7638-0509-5 . There is also an English edition of the book: Education towards spiritual resistance: the Jewish Landschulheim Herrlingen, 1933 to 1939 , dipa-Verlag, Frankfurt am Main 1988, ISBN 978-3-7638-0510-5 .
  • Hildegard Feidel-Mertz, Andreas Paetz: A lost paradise. The Jüdische Kinder-Landschulheim Caputh 1931-1939 , dipa-Verlag, Frankfurt am Main, 1994, ISBN 3-7638-0184-7 . This book not only contains a description of the history of the Caputher Landschulheim and its educational work, but also brings together a large number of documents about the history of essays and memories of former employees.
    • The book was published in 2008 under the title Das Jüdische Kinder- und Landschulheim Caputh (1931–1938). A revised new edition published a lost paradise : Verlag Julius Klinkhardt, Bad Heilbrunn, ISBN 978-3-7815-1648-9 .

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Hildegard Feidel-Mertz: Jewish country school homes in National Socialist Germany. A repressed chapter of German school history
  2. ^ A b Joseph Walk: Jewish School and Education in the Third Reich , pp. 111–112
  3. ↑ Hildegard Feidel-Mertz: Jüdische Landschulheime , p. 163
  4. ^ Hugo Rosenthal, quoted from Lucie Schachne: Education for Spiritual Resistance , p. 64
  5. ↑ Hildegard Feidel-Mertz: Jüdische Landschulheime , p. 164
  6. ↑ Hildegard Feidel-Mertz: Jüdische Landschulheime , pp. 164–165
  7. ↑ Hildegard Feidel-Mertz: Jüdische Landschulheime , p. 179