Johanne Kippenberg

Johanne Katharine Friederike Kippenberg , née Koch (born February 9, 1842 in Jever ; † November 2, 1925 in Bremen ), was a German teacher and headmistress ( Kippenberg-Gymnasium ).

biography

Gravestone in the Waller cemetery

Johanne Kippenberg came from a craftsman's household. Her father Gerhard Koch (1803-1880) was a master carpenter and building contractor in Jever. Her mother Anne Christine Koch, b. Oetgen (1813–1887), operated a sewing school for a time.

In 1862 she came to Bremen to begin her training at August Kippenberg's (1830–1889) seminar for teachers . She then took over the management of a simple school in Bremerhaven together with her brother Anton Koch. In February 1864 she passed her exam as a director in Bremen.

She married her trainer August Kippenberg, whose first wife had left him three small children after an early death, in 1865 in Jever. In 1868 she and her husband were able to expand the seminar, which he had privately founded in 1859, into a training institute for adult daughters and teachers' seminar for August Kippenberg and his wife Johanne Kippenberg .

In 1868 Johanne Kippenberg wrote the treatise Teaches for Life and Not Just for School . In it, she called for girls “equal rights with men in terms of education” and demanded “thorough education for life, for the profession, as it is for men”. She condemned the overloading of the teaching with mere details and rather demanded real-life teaching, which should in particular make the connections clear.

In 1872 August and Johanne Kippenberg received the concession to set up a secondary school for girls, which in the following years became the largest private secondary school for girls in Germany. At times she had her sister Berta Koch substitute for her at the school, since she had given birth to seven children of her own and was constantly changing between school management and seminar on the one hand and children and kitchen on the other.

After the death of her husband in 1889, she did not hesitate to run the school herself for another 15 years and, at considerable risk, to drive the extensive expansion of the Am Wall school at the beginning of the 1890s. At the same time, she continued the publication of the multi-volume (Kippenbergschen) German reading book for higher girls' schools founded by her husband, which at the turn of the century was the standard reading book for German lessons at almost all higher schools in Germany. In 1893, she reworked the school's curriculum extensively, which was available in bookshops in a 64-page booklet.

It is thanks to Johanne Kippenberg that the school continued to exist successfully after the death of her husband and that the Kippenberg grammar school emerged from it. In 1904 she handed it over to her son Dr. Hermann August Kippenberg took over the management of the school, whose further development she pursued with her large family until her death in 1925.

In the Bremen district of Schwachhausen , the Johanne-Kippenberg-Weg was named after her as a souvenir.

literature

• Elisabeth Hannover-Drück : Kippenberg, Johanne, b. Cook . In: Women's history (s) , Bremer Frauenmuseum (ed.). Edition Falkenberg, Bremen 2016, ISBN 978-3-95494-095-0 .
• Georg Bessel: 100 years of the Kippenberg School 1859-1959 . Bremen 1959
• Festschrift for the 125th anniversary of the Kippenberg-Gymnasium . Bremen 1984
• Monika Lentz: Johanne Kippenberg, b. Koch - a biographical sketch .