Kathe Heintze

Katharina Agnes Edith Heintze , called Käthe Heintze (born October 2, 1889 in Ratibor , † October 7, 1973 in Waldkraiburg ), was a German kindergarten teacher and Froebel teacher.

Live and act

Heintze grew up in a well-to-do family background; her parents were the chief judge Karl Ernst Julius Heintze and his wife Pauline Therese Hermine geb. Selle. Due to the father's job, the family often had to move. After completing the “secondary school for girls” and a household school, she first led the life of a house daughter, waiting for the right marital match. At the age of 20, Käthe Heintze decided, against her father's will, to train as a kindergarten teacher. She completed this at the Pestalozzi-Froebel-Haus in Berlin. Then she trained as a youth leader at the same educational institution.

From 1913 to 1920 Käthe Heintze worked as a teacher at a Braunschweig kindergarten teachers' seminar and then at the “Information Center for Small Child Care” at the “Central Institute for Education” in Berlin. From 1920 to 1926 she took over the development of the kindergarten system in Jena . This activity was followed by the establishment and management of the "Friedrich-Froebel-Haus" in Schweina / Thuringia, in which a "country nursing school" was set up. The new training center trained young girls from Thuringia who had completed elementary school and completed vocational training to run rural kindergartens. Käthe Heintze, who joined the NSDAP on May 1, 1937 , ran the “FriedrichFröbel-Haus” in line with the Nazi ideology. As a result, according to her, “the kindergarten and thus also the kindergarten teacher ostensibly had to meet the requirements of the family and the state, which is why there is no longer any freedom for individual ideas and demands” (quoted in Kern 2001, p. 78). And elsewhere, for example, she interpreted the high significance of the unity of mother and child, justified by Friedrich Froebel in Christian metaphysical terms, in accordance with the "words of the Führer, who saw in the mother the pledge for the eternity of a people" (Heintze 1935, p. 54 ). After conflicts in the college and with representatives of the Thuringian government, Käthe Heintze, who “received the honorary badge for German people's care from the Führer” for her services in Schweina (Kern 2001, p. 56), left the “Friedrich-Froebel-Haus”. She went to Peter Petersen in Jena. There she ran a half-day kindergarten and a day care center for children of working mothers from the Zeiss company. Both facilities were intended as practice sites for students at the University of Jena.

After the collapse of the National Socialist dictatorship, Käthe Heintze was relieved of all her offices because of her membership in the NSDAP. In 1948 she moved to Hamburg and took over the management of the “Pestalozzi-Froebel Association”. One of her main tasks there was the development of guidelines, statutes and work programs for kindergartens and social training centers.

Works (selection)

• Friedrich Froebel sites in Schweina-Liebenstein. o. o./o. J.
• We grow into the people! Pictures from a German kindergarten. Berlin 1939.
• The Friedrich-Froebel-Haus in Schweina and its country nursery school. In: Waldemar Döpel: The village kindergarten as a place of education. Weimar n.d., pp. 64-69.
• A last witness of Froebel's last work in Schweina. In: Waldemar Döpel (Ed.): Fröbelstätten in Thuringia. Weimar n.d., pp. 140-145.
• Peter Petersen and the Thuringian Froebel Movement. In: Pedagogical Review. Jhg. 18, 1964, pp. 520-524.
• The toddler within Jena educational science. In: H. Mieskes (Ed.): Jenaplan. Call and answer. Oberursel 1965.

literature

• Manfred Berger : Women in the history of kindergarten. A manual. Frankfurt 1995, pp. 85-90.
• Herbert Kern: On the history of the "Friedrich-Froebel-Haus" in Schweina / Thuringia and the emergence of new areas of responsibility for the female sex in the rural milieu from 1926–1945. Bamberg 2001 (unpublished master's thesis)

Web link

• kindergartenpaedagogik.de