La Coûme

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La Coûme is the name of an exile school for young German refugees that was set up in the Pyrenees in late autumn 1933 . It is named after the property on which it was built, Mas de la Coûme. Its founders - with the support of the English Quakers - were the married couple Pitt and Yvès Krüger, after Pitt Krüger had been dismissed from German schooling in 1933 and forced to emigrate. Initially planned as a facility to help young German refugees gain agricultural training, La Coûme was later converted into an international youth hostel and then into a school that was heavily influenced by the reformed educational rural education centers in Germany. In 1975 the Krüger couple gave La Coûme to a charitable foundation, the Krüger Foundation, which continues to run the school.

Mas de la Coume, Kruger Foundation (France)
Mas de la Coume, Kruger Foundation
Localization of France in Europe
Localization of Mas de la Coume in France.

Yvès Kruger

The following article will mostly refer to Pitt Krüger because the documents at hand mainly focus on him. The important role that Yvès Krüger not only played “as a woman at his side” is usually only hinted at. Even on the website of the “exil-archiv”, which gives a detailed account of Pitt Krüger's life data, Yvès only appears as “a French woman born in Geneva”. Precisely because the pedagogical ideas of the Krüger couple are so similar to those of the Bondy schools, it is striking how much reform-pedagogical concepts are often presented as “the works of great men” and the contributions made by wives or partners, here Yvès Krüger and Gertrud Bondy, are neglected . Therefore, in advance, some facts about Yvès Krüger's life.

Henriette Fustier (called Yvès) was born on November 9, 1903 in Yvoire in the French department of Haute-Savoie . When she was a young child, her parents died in a car accident. Yvès and her brother were then sent to an orphanage in Geneva .

After completing her studies, Yvès Fustier first worked as a secretary before she went to the Free School and Work Community in Letzlingen as a French teacher . In 1928/1929 she met Pitt Krüger, whom she married on May 17, 1929.

The direct references to Yvès Krüger are exhausted with the reference to the date of her death, January 13, 1988, and Prades as the place of her death. In the presentation of the story of La Coûme , she now plays a minor role. But her role after the arrest of Pitt Krüger by the French militia and his extradition to the Gestapo in 1944 shows that the focus on Pitt Krüger gives a rather one-sided picture.

Pitt Kruger life before his emigration

Pitt Krüger, born on June 9, 1904 in Cologne-Ehrenfeld , died on August 26, 1989 in Prades , was a working class child , “which meant that he had to sit in the back of the school: the front rows were reserved for the citizens' sons. But Pitt Kruger crawled forward. He passed the high school exam and took a special liking to the French language. At the age of fourteen he spoke it so well that after the end of the war in 1919 he interpreted for French truck drivers who met in front of Cologne Cathedral and earned his pocket money. "

From 1920 to 1924 he attended the teachers' college in Brühl near Cologne. During this time he was active in the youth movement. In 1925 he became a teacher at a private school, the country school home in Ruppichteroth , and at the end of 1926 at a private school in Potsdam . During these years his relationships with reform pedagogy and the rural education center movement intensified . "In particular, Paul Geheeb , Minna Specht , Utz (Breitenbrunn am Ammersee) and Uffrecht counts Krüger among his role models." In his letter to a Quaker friend , Krüger writes that these educators - plus Maria Montessori - are not only important to him but also for his wife, who, thanks to her work at the Free School and Work Community Letzlingen, also had the larger reform pedagogical practice.

When he moved to Potsdam (Krüger speaks of Berlin), his involvement in the young workers began. Feidel-Mertz refers to his cultural work there:

“He conducted poetry courses, practiced a choral society and played small plays. For the young workers from the Berlin suburbs, he was a trustworthy advisor on questions of sex education, about which the youngsters dared not speak to their parents. "

Krüger himself outlines the main areas of his engagement with "cultural work - pacifism - international understanding, etc." and mentions in the same breath: "I met my wife there (a French woman)." At the time he was also secretary of the "Working Group of Social Democratic Teachers ( AsL) ”in the district of Brandenburg and in 1928 got a job in the public school service. Benefiting from the marriage to a French woman, both private and official connections to France emerged in the following years, as Krüger often had to do in Paris on behalf of the AsL in the following years. A short time later, for the Nazis, he became a "French Kruger" who, through his sympathy for France, negated the welfare of the German nation.

In 1930 Krüger joined the Quakers, and in 1931 he turned against the military drill in the lessons of a National Socialist colleague with the article Turnspiel or Kasernenhofdrill in the "Potsdamer Volkszeitung". Krüger describes these events and their consequences as follows:

“During these years I also got to know and appreciate Pastor Sonnenschein and his student work and the Quaker Corder Catchpool. From the little that has been said so far, it is clear that I was a thorn in the side of Goebbels' comrades, who at that time (30-31) were already beginning to make themselves uncomfortable. In our teaching staff (16 teachers) the brawlers and drunkards (there were also) Nazis - since I did not hold back my opinion, not even publicly - in March 1933 I was the first teacher (permanent) who left school in Brandenburg Was 'hunted'. "

On March 10, 1933, the Gestapo took Pitt Krüger out of class and banned him from his profession. The Krügers lose their official residence and, since they have no exit papers, have to camp in the woods around Potsdam. Pitt, Yvès and their two-year-old daughter Jamine live in a tent for 13 weeks and often had to change their location for safety reasons. He learned from a policeman whose son Krüger had previously taught that the police wanted him. "This policeman also helped him get a valid passport."

The worsening political situation and the worsening weather left only emigration as a way out. The deliberations on this matured in the collaboration with his befriended Quakers and led to Pitt Krüger first emigrating to Perpignan via Switzerland in October 1933 . The family followed a month later.

Between refugee aid and resistance

“Pitt Krüger never wanted to go further than the Pyrenees, but also never wanted to go back to Germany. For him everything began in a similar way to that of many other German anti-fascists, for whom the Pyrenees were only an arduous hurdle on their escape to distant America. "

The beginnings of La Coûme

While camping in the Brandenburg forests in the autumn of 1933, the aforementioned Quaker Corder Catchpool introduced Krüger to two other English Quakers, Edit Pye and Hilda Clark , who wanted to organize an aid organization for German refugees:

“The idea was to retrain the younger ones from the cities (Paris + Lyon etc.) in the countryside and then to place them in agriculture. The French Government would have issued the residence permits (important). In France, the crisis only really made itself felt after 1929. The Engl. Quakers have asked me to find a suitable plot of land here in the south between Perpignan and the Spanish border. Why here? Because many goods in the mountains were deserted, so cheap - and because a group of very helpful people (including a relative of Alfons Paquet ) was there. "

Even before the family came, Pitt Krüger had found La Coûme for this project :

“60 km from Perpignan, 15 km from Prades , 2 km from the next village Mosset , this ruin, located at an altitude of 800 m in the low mountain range, is surrounded by endless terrain, and Pitt Krüger gains the feeling there in the event of a Franco-German dispute to be able to live in security with his family. "

What Krüger had found, however, was an uninhabitable ruin that had been abandoned for 18 years, which is why the family initially stayed in Mosset. According to Krüger, it took five to six months for the tiny house and stables to be habitable. "The generous willingness to help of the villagers then strengthened the two city dwellers to persevere in their inevitable transformation from teacher to farmer." Help also came from England. As early as the summer of 1934, young people arrived to help with field work and road construction. The tradition of summer work camps, which was only interrupted by the Second World War, developed from this.

What did not succeed, however, was to realize the actual project goal, namely to offer young German refugees a perspective in agriculture through the farm. At this point the limits of the project initiated by the Quakers quickly became apparent, because the addressees were neither willing nor suitable for agricultural work:

“There were many intellectuals, office workers among them, or highly qualified specialist workers who said quite frankly: 'Better to go hungry on a big boulevard in the city than eat your fill here in the beautiful nature!' Many only stayed for 4-6 months, and a single one for 2 years. No electricity, so no radio, the village has 260 inhabitants 2 km - the small town 17 km - Perpignan 60 km away. Life was hard, very hard. "

For Krüger, this “re-education attempt” had failed and had to be stopped in 1936, after the Quakers had exhausted the funds for this relief operation. The failure of this project is not an isolated incident, however, and there are parallels with a similar attempt in the US that also ended in failure in the late 1930s. Ingrid Warburg Spinelli reports memories in her book . The urgency of compassion and the loneliness to say no. from that:

“In these years I have also seen other forms of relief operations that did not always lead to the results I had hoped for. As part of the activities of the International Refugee Committee, efforts were made to send young German Jews to other countries instead of to Israel so that they could learn to work in agriculture. Curt Bondy led a training group that prepared these young people for community settlement. Finally they came to America, and I drove to my friend, William Thalhimer, whom I knew from working at the Joint , to tell him about our plan to distribute these refugees and get them into new professions. "

The project came about with Thalhimer's support and in collaboration with Curt Bondy near Richmond, Virginia . But it was not a success: “The experiment failed due to the inadequate preparation of the young people who did not have the patience to set up a functioning farm themselves. They had little in common and almost all wanted to earn money quickly, probably also to help parents and siblings in Europe. So they ended up in jobs that were easier for them to find. Thalhimer employed many of them himself in his large department store. "

New start as Auberge de Jeunesse

From then on, the Krügers continued to run La Coûme on their own and turned it into an international youth hostel. It was the first youth hostel in France south of the Loire . This time support came "from the progressive teachers and the French elementary school teachers' union (SNI)", which was close to the French socialists. La Coûme became part of the mouvement des auberges de jeunesse and soon counted people from all walks of life and from many countries among its guests. In his article La Coûme: School behind the seven mountains , Gerhard Trapp quotes Pitt Krüger as follows:

“For this you have to know that the youth hostel movement in France was supported by socialist elementary school teachers and that its impetus is comparable to our youth movement at the beginning of the century. In the summer we set up labor camps attended by young English Quakers, including the future Minister of Finance and Defense, Denis Healey , a friend of our school to this day. Of course we didn't earn anything, we just managed to get by by growing our own food. Things went a little better with the hostel from 1936, when the front populaire gave workers in France paid leave for the first time and our guests became more numerous. It was then that the philosopher Merleau-Ponty , who later became famous, also came . In 1938 we were able to buy our first car with the help of an English donation, so we no longer had to cycle down to Prades to go shopping. "

This internationalism came to an abrupt end with the French mobilization on September 3, 1939. On that day, La Coûme hosted guests from nine different nations, whom the Krügers had to forbid further stay:

“The district administrator from Prades had asked me to send these people home as quickly as possible - 2 Englishmen came home via Portugal, one Irishwoman even via Turkey. We shared a brief silence - we heard Beethoven's 9th Symphony (records) and then I just said: 'Friends - from now on we should be enemies.' We were not ashamed of our tears. Several of them are still in contact with us today. "

Between Retirada and Resistance

With the victory of Franco in the Spanish Civil War , the Retirada begins , the exodus of thousands of Republicans from Spain. They flee across the Pyrenees and seek refuge in southern Spain. Pitt Krüger describes what this means using the example of the Pyrénées-Orientales department , to which La Coûme belongs: In the summer of 1939, this department had 280,000 inhabitants. In September 1939 it had to take care of around 300,000 refugees.

In September 1939 the two Quakers Edit Pye and Hilda Clark contacted the Krügers again. They tried to help the Spanish refugees and asked the Krügers for support. "And since we have had a lot of good relationships in the past 6 years, within 6 weeks in Perpignan we were able to set up an aid organization for mothers with small children, expectant mothers and a little later to do something for the older children." On La Coûme find 12 refuge:

“Refugee children whom we have taken out of the terribly lice-filled reception camps [..]. The children were neglected, starved - illiterate - small wild animals after the horror of the 3-year civil war and the escape, which often lasted months, between 3 and 14 years, half of them boys. They first had to be poorly dressed and, above all, freed from vermin and skin diseases (that took 2 years). "

Need and misery as an incentive: In this situation, Pitt and Ivès Krüger reflect on the reform pedagogy that they had got to know in their Berlin years and that Yvès had also practiced. La Coûme becomes an institution where children, young people and adults live, work and learn together. Existential security, work on the house, on the farm, self-sufficiency had priority, but:

“When the essentials in the house u. The garden was created or the weather was bad, then there was lessons. Everyone wanted to learn to read and write. The material for this, paper, notebooks, writing and drawing material has been given to us in generous quantities by the teachers. [...] In addition, they wanted to help me as a 'colleague'. These young people, especially workers, showed the same solidarity throughout the war in the field of clothing for the children. "

In the already quoted article on ZEIT-ONLINE from 1985 it says that through their work with the Spanish orphans, the Krügers found the school model that they always had in mind and that is still thriving today. Six years earlier, in his letter to a Quaker friend , Kruger put it this way:

“During this 'heroic' time - in the years 40-44 - we worked out the essentials of our principles that are still valid today. H. everything we can do ourselves, to do in small working groups. And that can go very far if you only have patience. To this day we have no paid staff - except for a gardener - because at my age (75) and the aftermath of the war I can unfortunately no longer do any practical work. "

French refugee children from northern France joined the Spanish orphans. The Quakers and other aid organizations provided financial support. And despite all the difficulties, help still came from Germany: "The Frankfurt Quakers also sent food and clothing parcels to Perpignan in southern France in 1940." But the main burden in the early 1940s was on the Krügers: Pitt, Yvès and their 12-year-old daughter Jamine who was also involved in the work. Then came young people from outside, volunteers who were committed to La Coûme for a few months or for a year or two . This prompted the Krügers to lay down another principle that remained valid for decades: There was no salary. All the money that could be generated flowed into a fund. If someone needed something, it was paid for from this fund.

After the end of the Spanish Civil War , La Coûme , which was developing towards Landschulheim, was not spared the changing political situation in Europe and the German occupation of France. In his letter to a Quaker friend , Krüger does not write anything about the effects it will have on everyday life , only mentions his arrest by the Gestapo on June 1, 1944 and then goes into the consequences for him. Feidel-Mertz and his daughter Jamine unanimously report that the Krügers made their property available to the French Resistance at the time. This made it possible to get many people to safety from the German Wehrmacht and Gestapo across the border into Spain. At the same time, Pitt Krüger himself was covered and protected by the Resistance and by the local population for the first five years of the war - until he was betrayed by the French Spanish village pastor of Mosset.

Pitt Kruger Odyssey in the last year of the war and the years after

In Mosset, the Catholic priest was Kruger’s downfall. He had fled to France from the Spanish anarchists and resented Krüger that Spanish children living with him did not want to take part in catechism classes. There was a good reason for this: Among the children were four siblings who had watched a priest in Teruel shoot their parents from the church tower.

The priest betrayed Krüger, and on June 1, 1944, he was arrested by the French militia and initially taken to the Gestapo headquarters in Perpignan. In the afternoon of that day, what Jamine Noack calls “the second odyssey of Pitt Kruger begins; this time backwards: via Germany, Poland and what was then Czechoslovakia to Russia ”.

Pitt Krüger only briefly touches on the stations of this odyssey in his letter to a Quaker friend , although they are hardly inferior to the martyrs of ancient tragedy. From Perpignan he came via Paris, Saarbrücken, where he was incarcerated in the Neue Bremm Gestapo camp , Frankfurt am Main and Halle “to the Potsdam Gestapo prison - a few steps away from the school where Krüger had once taught. Here he should be tried. But since the Resistance had burned the Perpignan Gestapo archive in the meantime, there was no indictment against Krüger. He himself acted as if everything was just a mistake and was actually dismissed - but to the Wehrmacht. They put him in a barracks and in the Volkssturm. ”His place of work was Berlin, which was already surrounded by the Soviet Army. He convinced the other members of his Volkssturmgruppe to surrender to the Soviets immediately, which, however, had fatal consequences: As a Russian prisoner of war, Krüger was taken to a labor camp near Leningrad via Prague and Posen, where he was held for three years.

The seriously ill Kruger was then brought back to Germany on November 17, 1947 by the Red Cross . He landed in Göttingen on December 5, 1947 and went from there to his father in Cologne:

“Landed back in Cologne at Christmas 1947 with my father, who was still alive, 80% unable to work, on a crutch, two leg injuries, weight 96 pfennigs in a shabby Russian uniform. A grotesque picture, in early 1948 hobbling from authority to authority in a Russian coat, begging for ration cards and clothing - food yes - but no clothing - my poor father bombed out twice, only had the bare essentials; learned after 14 days the existence of a 'Quaker Message' in Marienburg, where I met some well-known Quakers from the 30s again (who of course first dressed me). "

At the request of the Quaker Henry van Etten, Pitt Krüger supports an aid organization for young people at risk at Ardeck Castle in Gau-Algesheim and, at the same time, fights for valid papers and, in particular, for entry papers to France. In August 1948 he was finally able to travel to Paris, where his wife was waiting for him and from where they would return to La Coûme .

Yvès Krüger's restart of La Coûme

A lot had changed in La Coûme in the meantime. Immediately after Pitt Krüger's arrest, Yvès was also forced to go into hiding with her two daughters because they were German citizens. However, they stayed in the surrounding area and had to experience on September 2, 1945 that La Coûme burned down almost completely after a landslide had already dented a house front in 1940. But Yvès got support from the Service Civil International , and so the building could be rebuilt within 18 months. A small power station could also be built.

There were also drastic changes in terms of content and pedagogy. Yvès was able to gather a group of young teachers and other volunteers, with whose help she succeeded in converting La Coûme into a functioning country school home. Progressive educational methods were to be practiced on a larger scale, which would benefit 50 disadvantaged children who were admitted without regard to their origin, skin color or religion. And so Pitt Krüger stated on his return home in 1948:

“The community life was also totally changed, while maintaining the basic principles a real school was created, my wife was surrounded by a team of four young teachers [..] 30 pupils, 6-16 / 17 years, from the first grade to the Abitur. The French Wartime children had meanwhile returned home or were taken into families; of the Spanish were still there. "

One of the basic principles cited was that children from very difficult family backgrounds continued to find a home in La Coûme , and that very many children from the former French colonies received an education here. Skin colors and nationalities were diverse, and in 1962 the Dalai Lama even sent 20 Tibetan children to La Coûme , which has been a public school since the late 1940s and is subject to the laws and regulations of the French state. In his letter to a Quaker friend (pp. 182–183), Krüger points out some other special features :

  • The “snow classes” have existed since the mid-1950s: every year, from January 15th to March 15th, teachers and students spend two months in the high mountains. They live in wooden barracks they have built themselves at an altitude of 1,600 meters.
  • Every two years, four-week study trips take place, for which the students have to work out the participation fee by helping with the grape harvest.
  • Much emphasis was placed on music, the meaning of which was deepened through personal acquaintances: “Our personal friends include (th) Pablo Casals , Wilhelm Kempff , Karl Engel , Menuhin and Igor Markevitch , who (apart from Casals) gave us their children as students had entrusted. Markowitch had us build a beautiful Blüthner grand piano in Dresden, a Swiss friend gave us a harpsichord, we lacked a second piano to practice with our quite numerous beginners. The Spanish guitarist N Yepes , whose children were here for 5 years, left us a wonderful Spanish guitar and a baroque lute. And over time a lot of recorders have appeared. So we can always start our celebrations with beautiful music. By the way, we have an hour of unity every Sunday - it used to be: morning address in which we all sit in a circle in silence and listen to classical music - albeit from a record or a band [..]. At the end of this lesson, just quote a sentence, a thought from a poet or thinker, which should serve as a guide for the older ones during the week. "

Twenty-three years after Pitt Krüger's letter to a Quaker friend in 2002, his daughter Jamine, the girl who was once described by Werner Thalheim “as a tomboy who reminds me of a predator”, takes stock of the life's work of her parents and the The realignment of La Coûme, forced by the Second World War and the first post-war years :

“For over 50 years, l'Equipe, the four-person team around Yvès Krüger, has proven itself in close cooperation with the Educationb Nationale in their educational work and in the often difficult everyday situations of boarding school, and after many years earlier the Quakers Pye and Clark to the Krüger couple In 1973 the Krügers decided to pass on this legacy to the Coûme for their tireless social commitment and their educational achievements, with the intention that this place should be passed on in the form of a state foundation may her death continue to serve the social commitment and the upbringing of children. "

La Coume continues to be a place of encounter and cultural openness.

literature

  • Hildegard Feidel-Mertz : Pitt Krüger, La Coûme and the principle of "balance". In this. (Ed.): Schools in Exile. The repressed pedagogy after 1933. rororo, Reinbek 1983, ISBN 3-499-17789-7 , pp. 167–177.
  • Pitt Kruger: Letter to a Quaker friend. In: Hildegard Feidel-Mertz (Hrsg.): Schools in Exile. The repressed pedagogy after 1933. rororo, Reinbek 1983, ISBN 3-499-17789-7 , pp. 177-183
  • Hildegard Feidel-Mertz: Education in exile after 1933. Education for survival. Pictures of an exhibition. dipa publishing house, Frankfurt 1990 ISBN 3-7638-0520-6
  • Y. Grangeon, C. Haller: La Coume across the years: une experience humaine et educative - a school that discovered how to live. SCIE, Bully-les-Mines, 1997, ISBN 2-9511686-0-8
  • J.-B. Joly: Le Catalan de Potsdam: Karl Pitt Kruger. In: Gilbert Badia et al .: Exilés en France: souvenirs d'antifascistes allemands émigrés (1933–1945). Maspero, Paris, 1982, ISBN 2-7071-1327-1
  • Werner Thalheim: Une communauté d'antifascistes allemands dans les Pyrénées orientales, 1934–1937: La Coûme-Mosset. Editions L'Harmattan, Paris, 2014, ISBN 2-343-03403-6 . The book co-edited by his daughter, Barbara Thalheim , reports on Thalheim's involvement in setting up La Coume . Werner Thalheim, who held leading positions in the GDR, is included by the filmmaker Joachim Tschirner in a documentary about Barbara Thalheim: “Between the songs of Barbara Thalheim in concerts, on tour and during rehearsals, Tschirner assembles passages from interviews that he has with led her father. Werner Thalheim, communist, anti-fascist and prisoner in the Dachau concentration camp, expresses thoughts about discipline and spiritual adjustment in this century. “ Born to see - Barbara Thalheim
  • Gerhard Trapp: La Coûme: School behind the seven mountains. In: concerns education. No. 17, April 1984, pp. 43ff.
  • Ingrid Warburg Spinelli: Memories. The urgency of compassion and the loneliness to say no. Luchterhand Literaturverlag, Hamburg and Zurich, 1991, ISBN 978-3-630-71013-6 .

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Homepage of Mas de la Coume (in French)
  2. ↑ Karl Pitt Kruger
  3. ↑ Pitt et Yvès Krüger in the French Wikipedia. The reference to the Free School and Work Community Letzlingen comes from the above-cited article by Jamine and Pierre Noack. While Jamine and Pierre Noack claim that Yvès and Pitt Krüger met in Letzlingen, Pitt Krüger suggests that this happened while working in the “Working Group of Social Democratic Teachers (AsL)”.
  4. ↑ A conference at the end of May 2016 in the library for research on the history of education in Berlin, entitled: “Stepping out of the shadows, will show what gaps in research are still there and what changes in consciousness are still necessary here . Women alongside learned men from science and art. ” According to the organizers, the focus of the conference is“ Women especially from the 19th and 20th centuries who, regardless of what is socially accepted for women, are independently scientific alongside a well-known researcher or artist or pursued artistic questions and tasks or added their own share to the scientific / artistic work of their learned men, male caregivers or mentors. The interest is therefore directed towards women who have interpreted the historically prevailing gender model with their own meaning and therefore do not stand up in the usual way limited the role of wife, mother or representative of the family. ” Stepping out of the shadows ( memento of the original from May 17, 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. @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / bbf.dipf.de
  5. ↑ Unless other sources are cited, all of the following biographical information comes from: Pitt Krüger: Letter to a Quaker friend . The exact date of birth comes from the article already quoted in the French WIKIPEDIA.
  6. ↑ a b c Those who tormented him are dead
  7. ↑ Hildegard Feidel-Mertz: Pitt Krüger, La Coûme and the principle of “balance” , p. 169
  8. ↑ Krüger speaks of the “Soz.dem. Workers Youth ”, by which the Socialist Workers Youth was meant.
  9. ↑ Hildegard Feidel-Mertz: Pitt Krüger, La Coûme and the principle of 'balance' , p. 169
  10. ↑ Karl Pitt Krüger in exilarchiv.de
  11. ↑ Hildegard Feidel-Mertz: Pitt Krüger, La Coûme and the principle of “balance” , p. 169
  12. ↑ Hildegard Feidel-Mertz: Pitt Krüger, La Coûme and the principle of “balance” , pp. 168–169
  13. ↑ Pitt Krüger: Letter to a Quaker Friend , p. 178
  14. ↑ Barbara Thalheim , whose father Werner also lived at La Coûme for some time between 1935 and 1939, describes her encounter with Jamine (with her: Janine) in autumn 2010 in a very sensitive way . She first quotes from her father's diary, “… Already in 1934 drove Pitt and Yvès Krüger were the first outposts on the "Mas de la Côume" in the Pyrenees and began the hard, reluctant work on the farm, which had been abandoned for a generation. Her daughter Janine, just three years old, is a tomboy who reminds me of a predator. Raised an anti-authoritarian upbringing, she roams freely with her dog Maroûf, a horrible village promenade mix, through the huge area every day and does a thousand stupid things ... "and then goes on:" It is in an unpublished manuscript by my father in which his emigration in France, which also took him to the Pyrenees between 1935 and 1939, takes up a lot of space. The 'three-year-old tomboy Janine', the child who was holding the arm by a German emigrant who became my father thirteen years later when the photo was taken, was now standing in front of me as an eighty-year-old woman. One is not ashamed to use the term 'the coat of history that blew' for such a moment. ” Barbara Thalheim's memories of“ Mas de la Coûme ” . The unpublished manuscript by Werner Thalheim mentioned in the quote was published in French in 2014 (see literature).
  15. ↑ Hildegard Feidel-Mertz: Pitt Krüger, La Coûme and the principle of “balance” , p. 170
  16. ↑ a b c d e f g Jamine and Pierre Noack: Yvès and Pitt Krüger. Exile and founding out of conviction.
  17. ^ Quakers in the World: Corder Catchpool
  18. ↑ The papers of Hildo Clark . These papers also contain "Letters to her close lifelong friend, Edith M. Pye (1875–1965)"
  19. ↑ Pitt Krüger: Letter to a Quaker friend , p. 178. The mentioned relative of Alfons Paquet is his niece Yvonne Paquet (see the website Histoire Mas de la Coûme ). Yvonne Paquet was a close friend of Madeleine Rolland, Romain Rolland's sister . Madeleine Rolland and Yvonne Paquet by Roger Vieillard
  20. ↑ The land acquired was so cheap to buy because - something Krüger did not know at the time - it had been given up by the previous owners due to a lack of water. Pitt Kruger: Letter to a Quaker friend. P. 178
  21. ↑ Pitt Krüger: Letter to a Quaker friend. P. 179
  22. ↑ What is probably meant is the International Rescue Committee
  23. ↑ What is meant here is Bondy's work at the Groß Breesen training estate
  24. ↑ The story of Thalhimer and his attempt to create a successor for Groß Breesen in the USA is the subject of the book by Robert H Gillette: Escape to Virginia: from Nazi Germany to Thalhimer's farm , Charleston, SC, The History Press, 2015, ISBN 9781626199125 .
  25. ↑ Ingrid Warburg Spinelli: Memories , pp. 136-137
  26. ↑ Ingrid Warburg Spinelli: Memories , pp. 136-137. There are references to this project in the book by Michael Schwelien: The husband of my mother's sister. A German-Jewish family story. dtv, Munich, 2015; ISBN 9783423280587 .
  27. ↑ Hildegard Feidel-Mertz: Pitt Krüger, La Coûme and the principle of “balance” , p. 170
  28. ↑ Pitt Krüger: Letter to a Quaker friend. P. 179
  29. ↑ Pitt Krüger: Letter to a Quaker friend. P. 179
  30. ↑ Pitt Krüger: Letter to a Quaker friend. Pp. 179-180
  31. ↑ Pitt Krüger: Letter to a Quaker friend. P. 180. Minna Specht was already mentioned by Krüger as an educational reference. It is not known whether he knew anything about their activities in Denmark or Wales in the late 1930s. The description of his school and work practice suggests parallels to the Walkemühle Landerziehungsheim and its successor institutions.
  32. ↑ Petra Bonavita: Quakers as saviors in Frankfurt am Main during the Nazi era , Butterfly Verlag, Stuttgart, 2014, ISBN 3-89657-149-4 , p. 85
  33. ↑ Hildegard Feidel-Mertz: Pitt Krüger, La Coûme and the principle of “balance” , p. 170
  34. ↑ The difference in the representation is based only on the fact that Feidel-Mertz says "Krüger made his property available to the French Resistance, while Jamine Noack says that" the Krügers make their property "available to the French Resistance.
  35. ↑ Jamine Noack reports how her father often fled from class to the approaching French militia or the Gestapo in the mountains, where he slept in the forest and only came home when there was no longer any danger.
  36. ↑ The following remarks on Krüger's betrayal are based on the web links Yvès and Pitt Krüger. Exile and founding out of conviction. and those who tormented him are dead
  37. ↑ The priest met his fate when the Americans moved in: “On the day the Americans moved into the village, he was hiding in the church tower. But the men of the village found him, took him to the woods and hung him up. He had betrayed people from the village to the Gestapo in Perpignan - for a kilo of coffee. ”In 1985, Krüger's résumé of this betrayal was:“ It all cost me […] me five years - but his life. ”Both quotations according to the web link who tormented him are dead.
  38. ↑ The following remarks on this odyssey are again based on the web links Yvès and Pitt Krüger. Exile and founding out of conviction. and those who tormented him are dead
  39. ↑ Pitt Krüger: Letter to a Quaker friend. P. 181. Marienburg should have meant the Cologne district of Marienburg .
  40. ↑ Compare the article Henry van Etten in the French Wikipedia
  41. ↑ Ardeck Castle in Gau-Algesheim : The period under French military administration after the Second World War does not appear in this history of the castle.
  42. ↑ Landerziehungsheim Schloss Ardeck. A focus of modern pedagogy by Henri Van Etten was first discussed in: Reviews of Books. The Howard Journal of Criminal Justice, Volume 8, Issue 1, pages 57-75, July 1949, and is now also available online through the Wiley Online Library page . A book was published by Panama-Verlag in Berlin in 2016 that critically examines the three state youth welfare homes that existed in Rhineland-Palatinate between 1945 and 1975 and also examines the influence of the French military government on the state educational institutions: Sabine Imeri, Christian Schrapper and Claudia Ströder: Managed and forgotten. Memories of state home education in Rhineland-Palatinate 1945 to 1975 , Panama-Verlag, Berlin, 2016, ISBN 978-3-938714-50-8 . Even if the French Wikipedia article about Henry van Etten points out that the institution he founded, in which Pitt Krüger worked for a short time, was continued as a German state institution, which was recognized by the German government It can hardly be assumed that this German “welfare education” could be reconciled with Krüger's pedagogical intentions. At La Coûme , people were always cared for from difficult backgrounds and with behavioral problems. But they were part of the group and not problem cases that received special treatment. Kruger practiced what is now called inclusion. ( Letter to a Quaker friend. Pp. 181–182) And under no circumstances can the term “rural education homes” be used for these welfare homes to establish a reference to the tradition of educational reform educational rural education homes , which also included La Coûme .
  43. ↑ Pitt Krüger: Letter to a Quaker friend. P. 181
  44. ↑ Pitt Krüger: Letter to a Quaker friend. P. 181
  45. ↑ This is somewhat reminiscent of the “School on Wheels” study tour program, through which the students at the Stockbridge School were supposed to learn about foreign countries.
  46. ↑ Barbara Thalheim's memories of "Mas de la Coûme"
  47. ↑ This letter of July 9th and 10th 1979 is a very concentrated autobiography in which Pitt Krüger outlines the most important stages of his life

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