Lucie Schachne

Lucie Schachne , also Lucie Schachne-Kozuszek , later married Lucie Kaye (born January 3, 1918 in Berlin ) is a German-British journalist and author of Jewish origin. In 1939 she emigrated to England, where she looked after young concentration camp survivors after the Second World War . As a freelance journalist, she wrote on Jewish and social issues. Her best-known work is a book about the Jewish school home in Herrlingen . Schachne has meticulously researched its history and has compiled a lot of biographical material about teachers and students of the country school home.

Life

Schachne was born into a non-religious Jewish family. Her father was an active social democrat and a member of the Central Association of German Citizens of the Jewish Faith . She was strictly forbidden to speak Yiddish in her assimilated home . Her father also forbade her from joining the Kadimah, the oldest Zionist student association, and the Makkabi sports club . In 1933 Schachne joined the Communist Students' Union.

After the " seizure of power " by the National Socialists, Schachne "had to struggle with immense difficulties at her non-Jewish school in Berlin [...]". In 1934 she moved to the Jewish school home in Herrlingen. Also in 1934 the young teacher Walter Isaacson came to this school. Schachne married him in 1939 before they fled to England together. In 1936 she passed the Abitur with a special permit in Ulm . The background to this extraordinary event for Herrlingen:

“The school home had no permission to take the Abitur. On the other hand, the admission requirements of both the rabbinical seminary and the Jewish teacher training institute required this final examination. Lucie Schachne, who was preparing for the teaching profession, was accepted with the approval of the ministerial department for the higher schools in Württemberg and with the consent of the director of the Oberrealschule in Ulm, Dr. Frick, accepted into the subprima there after the Christmas break in 1935. In March 1935 she passed the entrance exam for the upper prima and the following year the Abitur at this school. Up to this date she lived in the country school home, where she was able to further educate herself in Hebrew and Jewish history through private lessons and take part in community life. "

Lucie Schachne, who described herself in a letter to Hugo Rosenthal in 1936 as "Herrlingen's first and last high school graduate", attended the Jewish teachers' seminar in Berlin between 1936 and 1938.

After getting married and emigrating in 1939, Lucie Schachne, like Walter Isaacson, worked at the Bunce Court School . “She became the housemother to the country house children and taught Bible history to the youngest.” Her marriage to Walter Isaacson came to an abrupt end when Isaacson separated and left school in 1942. There is hardly any concrete evidence of her further time in the English emigration. The publisher's text states that, in addition to working at the Bunce Court School, she also worked at public elementary schools in London and after the war looked after young Jewish people who had survived the German concentration camps and had been brought to England. In Martin Gilbert's study of these young people, however, there is no evidence of their involvement in these care activities. Schachne returned to Berlin and became a lecturer for English at the Weltbühne, which was re-established in Berlin in 1946 . In June 1949 she became the editor in charge of Der Weg. Journal for Questions of Judaism . The magazine appeared between 1946 and 1953 as a monthly supplement to the Berlin edition of the Allgemeine Wochenzeitung der Juden in Deutschland . Schachne also published articles for the RIAS , the NWDR and the Bulletin of the Association of Jewish Refugees (AJR). In 1950 she became a member of the representative office of the Jewish Community in Berlin (Liberal Jewish Group). She returned to London in January 1949 to have a daughter. Schachne later moved back entirely to the British capital, now under the married name "Kaye".

The name "Lucie Kaye" has long been in use for her work in the AJR Journal published by The Association of Jewish Refugees (AJR) . In its special 70th Anniversary Issue from January 2016 it says: "Lucie Schachne, born in Berlin in 1918 and also known by her married name Lucie Kaye, often wrote for the journal and was one of the most capable reviewers." With a review from 1958, he reaped However, she also received considerable opposition from Jewish circles: she had dismissed the German resistance against the Nazis as insignificant.

In the 1970s, Lucie Schachne was the head of administration of the Camden Committee for Community Relations in London and worked with and for racial minority groups. At the beginning of the 1980s, the idea must have arisen to write down the history of the Jewish rural school home in Herrlingen . The inspiration for this came, as Schachne writes in her preliminary remark to her book, from the former student Fritz Rosenheimer (Shlomo Elan or Ilan) , who after Herrlingen had also been a student at the Bunce Court School . The book itself was created through the collaboration of a small group of former Herrlinger teachers and students. Schachne had already presented the book project in October 1984 at a seminar at Ludwigstein Castle, which dealt with the influence of the youth movement and reform education on the rural school movement. After the book was published, she came to Herrlingen for a reading, where she helped to lay the foundation for the remembrance work there: “The memory of the history of the Herrlingen country school homes began in 1985. After older visitors often went to Erwin-Rommel - Steige 56 came to see their old school again, and Lucie Schachne, a former student, presented her book 'Education for Spiritual Resistance' at this location. Following this presentation, the working group 'Landschulheime Herrlingen' was formed. The working group opened up to people who had spent their childhood there or who worked as teachers and was able to gain their trust. These, in turn, shared their fate. In this way, a process of remembrance could get under way that was gaining more and more public attention. "

In an exhibition entitled Continental Britons - Jewish Refugees from Nazi Europe , which opened in 2002 and dealt with the question of culture and identity, Lucie Schachne is quoted as follows on the question of her own identity: “Looking back, I would say me have no 'home'. If someone asks me: 'Are you English, German, Jew?' I would always say: 'I am a Jew born in Germany who lives in England and feels at home in Hampstead.' That's all I can say. "

Fonts (selection)

• Education for spiritual resistance: the Jewish school home in Herrlingen 1933–1939 . dipa-Verlag, Frankfurt am Main 1986, ISBN 3-7638-0509-5 . Translated by Martin M. Goldenberg, the book was also published in English in 1988:
  • Education towards spiritual resistance: The Jewish Landschulheim Herrlingen 1933–1939 . dipa-Verlag, Frankfurt am Main 1988, ISBN 3-7638-0510-9 .
• Introduction In: Barry Turner: Kindertransport. An unprecedented rescue operation. Bleicher, Gerlingen 1994, ISBN 3-88350-033-X . (also as a construction paperback, Berlin, 2001, ISBN 3-7466-8073-5 )
• as editor: Burning for the cause: [centenary celebration of] Lola Hahn Warburg 1901–1989 . Alden Press, Oxford 2001. (First published in 2001 under the auspices of the Lola Hahn-Warburg Memoir Project.)

literature

• Jael Geis: Being left - life “afterwards”. Jews of German origin in the British and American zone of Germany 1945–1949 . Philo, Berlin 1999, ISBN 3-8257-0190-5 , p. 28.

Web links

• Construction in decline: Zionism and the youth movement. In: The time. No. 27/1988. In the article Schachne's book is recognized as a contribution to the history of reform pedagogy and its expansion towards Jewish and Zionist aspects.

Individual evidence

1. ↑ ^{a b} Leslie Baruch Brent: A Sunday Child? - From a Jewish orphanage to a world-famous immunologist. Berliner Wissenschafts-Verlag, Berlin 2009, ISBN 978-3-8305-1702-3 , pp. 85-86.
2. ^ Anne Prior: Memories of a "phenomenal teacher". In: RP-online. 17th October 2015
3. ↑ Lucie Schachne: Education for spiritual resistance. Pp. 220 & 240 (note 44)
4. ↑ Lucie Schachne: Education for spiritual resistance. P. 220
5. ↑ This was probably the facility opened in 1934 at Lützowstrasse 16, which Jörg H. Fehrs described: [1934] “Opening of a primary school teacher training institute in the front building of the synagogue building in Tiergarten (religious school for eight classes) by the Prussian State Association of Jews Communities. Establishment of a retraining and training course to train male and female faculty members, study assistants and trainees to become teachers of religion. The line accepts Dr. Fritz Bamberger (born 1902), since 1926 lecturer at the University for the Science of Judaism. In 1939 he succeeds in emigrating to the United States. In New York he became a founding member and vice-president of the Leo Baeck Institute in 1955 and taught Jewish intellectual history at the Hebrew Union College from 1962 to 1978. ”(Jörg H. Fehrs: Von der Heidereutergasse zum Roseneck. Jewish Schools in Berlin 1712-1942 , Edition Hentrich Berlin , 1993, ISBN 3-89468-075-X , pp. 207-208)
6. ↑ Michael Trede: The returnee. ecomed verlagsgesellschaft, Landsberg 2003, ISBN 3-609-16172-8 , p. 108.
7. ↑ ^{a b} Lucie Schachne: Education for spiritual resistance. P. 267.
8. ↑ Martin Gilbert: They were the boys. The story of 732 young Holocaust survivors. Verlag für Berlin-Brandenburg, Berlin 2007, ISBN 978-3-86650-222-2 .
9. ↑ The way. Journal for Questions of Judaism ( Memento of the original from November 11, 2017 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. 
10. ^ The Association of Jewish Refugees
11. ↑ AJR Journal: Special 70th Anniversary Issue, January 2016 ( Memento of the original from March 28, 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. . "Lucie Schachne, born in Berlin in 1918 and also known by her married name, Lucie Kaye, wrote frequently for the Journal and was one of its most capable reviewers." 
12. ^ Germans and Jewish refugees: Some observations. ( Memento of the original from September 5, 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. In: AJR Journal. Volume 11, No. 3, March 2011, p. 2. 
13. ↑ On the task and work of the committee, see: The function of the Camden Committee for Community Relations.
14. ↑ AJR Information, January 1985, p. 7. ( Memento of the original from May 16, 2017 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was automatically inserted and not yet checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. 
15. ↑ Ruth Fichtner: Place of remembrance country school homes Herrlingen.
16. ↑ Culture and Identity ( Memento of the original from April 6, 2013 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. . "Looking back, I would say I don't have a 'Heimat'. If somebody asks me, 'Are you English, German, Jewish?', I would always say, 'I am a Jew born in Germany living in England and feeling at home in Hampstead'. That is all I can say. ”Lucie Kaye, née Schachne