Margarethe Mittell

Margarethe Mittell (born January 6, 1864 in Berlin , † November 2, 1948 in Hamburg ) was a German headmistress .

Live and act

Margarethe Mittell was the daughter of the actor Carl Mittell . She attended a secondary school for girls in Leipzig . In 1878 the Mittell family moved to Hamburg, where Carl Mittel had received an engagement at the Thalia Theater .

Margarethe Mittell, who called herself Meta, attended the teaching institutions of the St. Johannis Monastery in Hamburg for three years , where she passed the teacher examination in March 1883. Then she taught until 1885 in Margarete Schneider's school, which was located in Wandsbek . Since Carl Mittell was ill, Margarete Mittell traveled with the family via Dresden to Breslau . It was here that she passed the headmistress examination in March 1898. In 1904 she went back to Hamburg. Silvia Röver and Emma Benfey had a ten-class girls' school here in a tenement building at Graumannsweg 38, which Margarete Mittell bought from them.

As director, Mittell made the school one of the most respected in Hamburg. In 1904 the school still had 182 students, in the 1920s it was attended by over 400 girls. In 1908, Mittell acquired a larger building at Graumannsweg 47, to which the educational institution moved. In 1928 she bought a second house on Graumannsweg 13. There was a large gym here. Mittell lived there in a large apartment with her partner Meta Redlich (1877–1945). In 1930/31 she had the building at Graumannsweg 47 added due to lack of space.

Her partner Meta Redlich came from Hamburg. Her father Carl Christian Redlich (1832–1900) directed the high school in front of the Holstenthore. Redlich had passed the exam at the seminary of the monastery school in 1901. Then she entered the service of Silvia Röver and Emma Benfey. Margarethe Mittell continued to employ her after buying the school. At the beginning of 1927, Mittell appointed her official co-director, but she herself remained clearly a leader in school operations. The headmistress employed numerous committed teachers who taught here for decades. She transferred the subject lessons of the upper classes to high school teachers by the hour, and religious lessons to pastors.

Mittell arranged the lessons of the entrance classes in a playful way according to Pestalozzi's concept . In the later grades she placed emphasis on learning. Emmy Beckmann said at a memorial service in 1948 that the demands on the students were high. In 1904 Mittell established a Selekta . In 1908 she expanded the girls' school to include two women's classes. Here, girls prepared for professional life as part of a twelve-year training program. In 1909 Mittell introduced four-year humanistic high school courses. These offered successful graduates the opportunity to take the Abitur examination at Wilhelm-Gymnasium as external students . Due to financial problems caused by the German inflation from 1914 to 1923 , the headmistress stopped the courses in 1923. By then, all of her students had passed the Abitur exams. In 1930, Mittell was able to open a secondary school that was allowed to take its Abitur exams. The facility closed four years later by government order.

Mittell family grave,
Ohlsdorf cemetery, Hamburg

Life at Mittell's school followed a Christian model. The school girls remembered the daily morning prayers and Christmas celebrations so much that they even mentioned them with praise when they were old. In addition, both headmistresses adored Goethe . So in the tenth year curriculum they included a carefully planned trip to Weimar , where the poet had died.

Margarethe Mittell was considered extremely intellectual. Foreign guests and scholars from Hamburg met in her house at least every two weeks. These included the historians Erich Marcks and Max Lenz or the literary historian Heinrich Meyer-Benfey . She also supported Eduard Hallier in setting up the Hamburg library .

During the time of National Socialism , Mittell did not join the NSDAP or any other National Socialist associations. Presumably because of her annual summer trips to South Tyrol in the 1920s and 30s, she joined the Association for Germanness Abroad . She was able to continue running the school for a long time without state influence. In the summer of 1938, the school had twelve students who the National Socialists regarded as Jewish. The facility had to cease operations on September 30, 1939.

Margarete Mittell was buried in Hamburg at the Ohlsdorf cemetery in the area of ​​the Mittell family grave, grid square AF 30 ( north ring at Chapel 6).

literature

• Renate Hauschild-Thiessen: Mittell, Margarethe . In: Franklin Kopitzsch, Dirk Brietzke (Hrsg.): Hamburgische Biographie . tape 5 . Wallstein, Göttingen 2010, ISBN 978-3-8353-0640-0 , p. 264-266 .