Johanna neck

Johanna Nacken (* 1896 ; † 1963 ) was a German art and craft teacher and social worker who emigrated to England in 1934 and was one of the leading figures of the Stoatley Rough School , one of the many schools in exile founded by German teachers in Great Britain . After the Second World War she returned to Germany, first to the Odenwald School , and from 1950 to the Immenhof social and curative education facility in the Lüneburg Heath.

Life

At the end of the 1920s Eleonore Astfalck and Johanna Nacken met in Berlin . This was the beginning of a forty-year-old life and work community, which led the two women, together with Hilde Lion , to emigrate and to set up the Stoatley Rough School together . While it is not particularly difficult to find biographical data on Astfalck, Lion or Emmy Wolff and Luise Leven , all of whom are "The Five Principal Teachers at Stoatley Rough", little is known about Johanna Nacken. It seems that, due to her close relationship with Eleonore Astfalck, she is only granted the role of “woman at her side”.

Johanna Nacken was the daughter of a Protestant pastor, but was not close to religious questions herself. As a young girl she joined the youth movement and played the guitar. She worked in a bank during the inflation of the early 1920s and then went to Canada for some time to care for a sick friend.

Johanna Nacken studied art history, drawing, applied arts and handicrafts at the Kunsthochschule Kassel . She then worked as a factory teacher in the youth leader and kindergarten teacher training at the youth home association in Berlin-Charlottenburg . It was here that she met Eleonore Astfalck, from which the already mentioned decade-long partnership arose.

For a year, Nacken interrupted her work at the “Verein Jugendheim” in order to continue training in handicrafts at the Pestalozzi-Froebel-Haus . She then returned to the “Verein Jugendheim” and took over the management of the youth leader training. At the German Academy for Social and Educational Women's Work founded by Alice Salomon , she also taught social work.

It is not known whether the Nazis' neck repression was to be expected. However, she joined her partner Eleonore Astfalck and, like her, emigrated to England in the spring of 1934, where she became a handicraft teacher at the Stoatley Rough School . Nacken also took care of the practical problems of everyday life at the school and was also the school's accountant until 1945. In his memories of his school days at the Stoatley Rough School , the future Boston attorney Hans Loeser from Kassel describes Johanna Nacken and her partner Eleonore Astfalck as the more practical team within the "Principal Teachers"; for him they were the opposite pole to the intellectual women Lion and Wolff. What he nevertheless credits all of them with is that, as idealistic but practical people, they understood that their help for refugee children was their most effective protest against what was happening in Germany at the time. Elsewhere, Loeser describes Eleonore Astfalck and Johanna Nacken affectionately as "Miss-Astfalck-and-Miss-Nacken (a twosome that, as I soon understood, was more than the sum of one plus one)", which has a lot to do with his own personality development would have contributed.

In 1946 Johanna Nacken and Eleonore Astfalck returned to Germany. Both initially worked at the Odenwald School and then took over the construction of the Immenhof in the Lüneburg Heath from 1950 .

Information about her further life is not available. Although she was only four years older than Eleonore Astfalck, she died before she retired and said goodbye to the “Immenhof”.

literature

• Hildegard Feidel-Mertz (updated version: Hermann Schnorbach): The pedagogy of the rural education homes in exile , in: Inge Hansen-Schaberg (ed.): Landerziehungsheim-Pädagogik , new edition, reform pedagogical school concepts, volume 2, Schneider Verlag Hohengehren GmbH, Baltmannsweiler, 2012 , ISBN 978-3-8340-0962-3 , pp. 183-206.

Web links

• The Five Principal Teachers at Stoatley Rough
• Manfred Berger: Eleonore Astfalck - Your life and work , BHP-Info 17 2002/4, pp. 18–22.
• Hans Loeser's Stoatley Rough Memories

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Manfred Berger: Eleonore Astfalck - Your Life and Work ( Memento of the original from September 26, 2015 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. , BHP-Info 17 2002/4, p. 18 
2. ↑ ^{a b c d} The Five Principal Teachers at Stoatley Rough ( Memento of the original from June 20, 2016 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. 
3. ^ Nixon "enemy" 'Hans Loeser: admired, civic-minded lawyer
4. ↑ Hans Loeser's Stoatley Rough Memories ( Memento of the original from May 4, 2016 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. 
5. ↑ Hans Loeser's Stoatley Rough Memories ( Memento of the original from May 4, 2016 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. 
6. ↑ Manfred Wesemann: Immenhof (Hützel). Children and youth home 1910 - 1990 ( Memento of the original from December 22, 2016 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link has been inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice.