Katharina Petersen

Katharina Petersen (born November 3, 1889 in Kappeln , † July 23, 1970 in Hanover ) was a German teacher and university professor .

Career

Katharina Petersen was the daughter of a school principal. After attending the teachers' seminar at Augustenburg Castle in North Schleswig , Germany, she then became a lecturer and later a school councilor in Kiel . As early as 1922 she had been appointed rector of a training school at what would later become the Pedagogical Academy in Kiel . In 1931 Petersen was appointed professor there. Before the seizure of power of the Nazis she became the first woman in Prussia, the site of a school and Councilor in Frankfurt (Oder) . According to the law for the restoration of the civil service of April 7, 1933, however, she would have had to take a new oath of office. “She refused him, like many others. Faced with the alternative of going into early retirement or accepting a graduation as school principal [..] she achieved a third route: long-term leave - apparently until March 1938. "

At the suggestion of Rudolf Schlosser , Katharina Petersen was asked by the Quakers in mid-March 1934 whether she wanted to take over the management of the newly built Quaker School Eerde at Schloss Eerde near Ommen in the Netherlands . Katharina Petersen accepted on March 16, 1934 and started her work there at the beginning of April. Eerde Castle was made available to the Dutch Quakers as a school and as a refuge for German and Jewish children persecuted by the Nazi regime. It was run as a boarding school in the spirit of the German state educational institutions until it had to be closed in 1943 under pressure from the German occupiers.

Katharina Petersen returned to Germany exactly four years after the school was founded, in March 1938, and after good work had been confirmed by everyone. The reasons for this are unclear. She herself asserts health reasons in an open letter in the Eerder report sheets from April 1938. Budde, on the other hand, sees the end of the leave of absence from the Prussian civil service and the possible impending loss of pension entitlements as the main reason for Petersen's return to Germany. The German-American historian Hans A. Schmitt sees this as certain, but cannot provide any evidence for it: “The Nazis made her pension contingent on a return to Germany, and as she had no other source of income, she was forced to comply. ”However: In an earlier book, Schmitt had already given a completely different version:“ I already mentioned the head of the school, Katharina Petersen, an energetic humanitarian who came from Schleswig-Holstein. She had left Germany in disgust to help the persecuted, but in the late thirties pressure from a brother, whose civilian career threatened her demonstrative exile, forced her to give up and return home. "

Whatever the reasons for Petersen's return to Germany: According to Budde, there is no evidence that she tried to get reinstalled in the state school service afterwards. She first worked at the Christian Elise Averdieck School in Hamburg , was bombed and moved to Berlin. There she became a private tutor for the son of a lawyer and his friend and looked after the two boys during the turmoil of the last years of the war. After several stops - from Berlin to the vicinity of Breslau and back again, then to Hamburg - Petersen finally landed in Hanover.

In January 1946, Katharina Petersen became ministerial advisor under the first Lower Saxony minister of education, Adolf Grimme, and was responsible for elementary and secondary schools in the school department under Günther Rönnebeck . There she campaigned for the loosening of the frontal teaching that was common at the time and, among other things, for the formation of school working groups. During that time, she received another request from Eerde, where after the end of the war an attempt was made to tie in with the traditions of the International Quaker School :

“An attempt was even made to receive the heroic past when Katharina Petersen was asked to return as director. But she did not think a German should head a Dutch school so soon after the occupation, nor did she want to leave a post in Germany where competent individuals, unencumbered by a Nazi past, where in short supply. "

In 1947 she earned services for founding the city ​​partnership between Hanover and Bristol . From 1951 Petersen was a member of the education committee of the German UNESCO Commission . Here she worked with Minna Specht , whom she had met in February 1946 at a meeting with Adolf Grimme in Hanover. After 1945 she was a member of the SPD, but resigned because of the rearmament in the 1950s.

In 1954 Katharina Petersen retired. In 1966 she co-founded the first group of Amnesty International in Hanover.

Honors

• 1958 Member of the Order of the British Empire
• 1963 Great Cross of Merit of the Federal Republic of Germany
• The Katharina-Petersen-Weg in Hanover has been a reminder of the teacher since 1989

Web links

• History International School Eerde

literature

• Claus Bernet :  Katharina Petersen. In: Biographisch-Bibliographisches Kirchenlexikon (BBKL). Volume 28, Bautz, Nordhausen 2007, ISBN 978-3-88309-413-7 , Sp. 1228-1231.
• Annegret Bruhn: Petersen, Katharina Dorothea Marie . In: Hans-F. Rothert (Hrsg.): Kiel CVs from six centuries (= special publications of the Society for Kiel City History Volume 55). Wachholtz, Neumünster 2006, ISBN 3-529-02749-9 , pp. 259-261.
• Peter Budde: Katharina Petersen and the Quaker School Eerde. A documentation collage. In: Monika Lehmann, Hermann Schnorbach (Hrsg.): Enlightenment as a learning process. Festschrift for Hildegard Feidel-Mertz , dipa-Verlag GmbH, Frankfurt am Main, 1992, ISBN 3-7638-0186-3 , pp. 86-101
• Bernd Dühlmeier: And the school is still moving. Unknown reform pedagogues and their projects in the post-war period. Klinkhardt, Bad Heilbrunn, 2004, ISBN 3-7815-1328-9 , p. 47. Partly also available under: And the school moves
• Anna Sabine Halle : "The thoughts are free ...". A youth group of the Berlin Quakers 1935–1941. Edited by the German Resistance Memorial Center. Contributions to the resistance 1933–1945, issue 14/1990, p. 13 ( https://www.gdw-berlin.de/fileadmin/bilder/publikationen/beitraege/B14.pdf )
• Inge Hansen-Schaberg : Return and new beginning. The effectiveness of the pedagogues Olga Essig, Katharina Petersen and Minna Specht in western Germany after the war . In: Yearbook for Historical Educational Research , Volume 1 (1993), pp. 319–338.

• Berthold Hegner: The international Quaker School Eerde - a school meeting 60 years after the school closed. In: Exil, Volume 22, 2002, Issue 2, pp. 73–77
• Klaus Mlynek : Petersen, Katharina . In: Hannoversches Biographisches Lexikon , p. 283 ( limited preview in the Google book search)
• Klaus Mlynek: Petersen, Katharina . In: Klaus Mlynek, Waldemar R. Röhrbein (eds.) U. a .: City Lexicon Hanover . From the beginning to the present. Schlütersche, Hannover 2009, ISBN 978-3-89993-662-9 , p. 500.
• Lower Saxony Life Pictures , Vols. 1–9, Hildesheim, Leipzig 1939–1976; here: Volume 9 (1976), ISBN 3-7848-2509-5 , pp. 245-253.
• Hiltrud Schroeder (Ed.): Sophie & Co. Important women of Hanover. Biographical portraits. Torch bearer, Hannover 1991, ISBN 3-7716-1521-6 , p. 252 f.
• Hans A. Schmitt: Quaker Efforts to Rescue Children from Nazi Education and Discrimination: The International Quakerschool Eerde. In: Quaker History, Vol. 85, No. 1 (Spring 1996), pp. 45-57
• Hans A. Schmitt: Lucky Victim. An Ordinary Life in Extraordinary Times 1933-1946. Louisiana State University Press, Baton Rouge, 1989, ISBN 0-8071-1500-2 .

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Klaus Mlynek: Petersen, Katharina (see literature)
2. ↑ Peter Budde: Katharina Petersen and the Quäkerschule Eerde , p. 93
3. ↑ Her calling and her work in Eerde is documented in detail by Peter Budde: Katharina Petersen and the Quäkerschule Eerde
4. ↑ For the history of the school, see History International School Eerde ( Memento of the original from May 14, 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. . There you can also read that the International School Eerde is at best in the tradition of the International Quaker School Eerde in terms of space and type of school (boarding school) . For the history of this school in exile, compare: Berthold Hegner: The international Quaker school Eerde . This essay also shows that the school, despite being founded by the Quakers, was anything but a religious institution. 
5. ↑ Compare the Quakers' regret about Petersen's departure, quoted by Peter Budde: Katharina Petersen and the Quaker School Eerde. P. 100.
6. ^ Hans A. Schmitt: Quaker Efforts to Rescue Children from Nazi Education and Discrimination: The International Quakerschool Eerde. P. 52.
7. ^ Hans A. Schmitt: Lucky Victim , p. 83: "I have already mentioned the head of the school, Katharina Petersen, a two-fisted humanitarian who hailed from Schleswig-Holstein. She had left Germany, in disgust, to serve the persecuted, but in the late thirties pressures from a brother, whose civil-service career her demonstrative exile endangered, forced her to resign and return home. "
8. ^ Hans A. Schmitt: Quaker Efforts to Rescue Children from Nazi Education and Discrimination: The International Quakerschool Eerde. P. 54. Schmitt's statement does not allow a precise determination of when exactly this offer was made to Petersen, only the period is clear: 1946 - 1948.
9. ↑ Katharina Petersen describes this first meeting with Minna Specht in her contribution to Specht's eightieth birthday: Katharina Petersen: Geistige Konsequenz. In: Hellmut Becker, Willi Eichler, Gustav Heckmann (eds.): Education and politics. Minna Specht on her 80th birthday , Verlag Public Life, Frankfurt am Main, 1960, pp. 341–343.