Magdalene Siebenbrodt

Magdalene Siebenbrodt, 2005

Magdalene Siebenbrodt (born May 3, 1920 in Warsleben ; † May 18, 2007 in Halle (Saale) ; née Magdalene Schaper ) was a German linguist and Germanist .

Life

Magdalene Siebenbrodt grew up on her parents' farm in Warsleben . After elementary school and middle school, she switched to high school. Then, after a year of school for rural women and the compulsory half- year of the Reich Labor Service, she went to the University of Education in Braunschweig in 1939 . After the beginning of the war, it was recognized that she was qualified for university studies, which she began in Leipzig in 1940 and continued shortly afterwards in Prague .

After that, the concentrated German -Studentin of Prague University of Prague from "the dialect The conversion on her PhD thesis Wars life over the living generations". Conversations with people of different generations produced enough material to illustrate linguistic changes from old to young. After two years, the dissertation was finished and, at the age of 22, she became the youngest female holder of the doctorate .

The young Germanist went to teach the German language at the Deutsche Akademie in Liège and Ghent . While she was teaching in Belgium , Belgian prisoners of war worked on her parents' farm in Warsleben . For these prisoners, she dared to establish forbidden personal contact with their families in Belgium. This led to a lifelong friendship with Jeanne de Geyter, the cousin of one of the prisoners of war .

After the end of the war and the collapse, she started as a new teacher at the Goethe School in Oschersleben in October 1945 . From January 1946 she also lectured at the seminar there for new teachers. The course participant and war returnees without training, Joachim Siebenbrodt from Hornhausen , was impressed by the lecturer four years older than she was by his intellectual abilities. She proposed him to study and they became a couple; They married in 1950.

They shared their first apartment in Halle , where she became a lecturer at the Institute for Teacher Education. Then they moved to Greifswald to the Ernst Moritz Arndt University , she taught at the workers and farmers faculty and her husband received a teaching post after studying psychology. Their son Michael was born in Greifswald in November 1951 and their second son Klaus was born in August 1953. The family then moved to Berlin , where Joachim Siebenbrodt became a doctoral student at the Humboldt University and she became a scientific aspirant. After she became a lecturer in German teaching methodology at the Martin Luther University in Halle in 1954 , she moved to Halle.

There a close relationship developed with the painter Conrad Felixmüller, who teaches at the university . Since the artist was not well-liked during the GDR era, neither the rector nor the dean of the Martin Luther University in Halle wanted to give him a laudation on his 65th birthday in 1962, so that Magdalene Siebenbrodt took over. Professionally, her teaching at the university remained closely linked to school practice. She took the opportunity to teach German at schools in Halle. For decades she worked on the curriculum for German lessons, the new editions of the textbook “Our Mother Language” and the magazine “Deutschunterricht”. In 1966, as a post-doctoral thesis , she presented a study of the effects of grammar lessons on written pupils utterances - using visible results to check the efficiency of what she had been concerned with for a long time as a committed pedagogue and Germanist.

She has also published numerous reviews of works such as B. “Stories from the future” and “People I know” by the author Bettina Licht. Until recently she taught German for young Mozambicans and young people of other nationalities. She has two sons and four grandchildren.

Publications

• The change in the dialect of war life over the course of the living generations , Prague 1942
• (with Gerhard Schreinert): Our mother tongue 7 exercise materials for the German class 7 , Volk und Wissen Volkseigener Verlag, Berlin 1952/1953 - 1957
• (with Gerhard Schreinert): Our mother tongue 6 exercise materials for German class 6 , Volk und Wissen Volkseigener Verlag, Berlin 1954
• A contribution to the influence of grammar lessons on written statements made by students , Halle 1966
• (with Gerhard Schreinert): Our mother tongue 8 exercise materials for German class 8 , Volk und Wissen Volkseigener Verlag, Berlin 1963
• (with Horst Müller): Our mother tongue 9/10 exercise material for German classes 9/10 , Volk und Wissen Volkseigener Verlag Berlin, 1973

Memberships and initiatives

• Member of the Georg Friedrich Handel Society (Halle (Saale))
• Member of the Goethe Society (Halle (Saale))