Margarethe Meyer-Schurz

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Margarethe Schurz

Margarethe Meyer-Schurz (born Margarethe Meyer ; after her marriage to the later US Interior Minister Carl Schurz also Margaretha Meyer-Schurz or just Margarethe Schurz ; * August 27, 1833 in Hamburg , † March 15, 1876 in New York ) opened the first German-speaking and at the same time first kindergarten in the USA .

Life

Memorial plaque for Margarethe Meyer-Schurz on the building of the 1st kindergarten in the USA
Memorial stone
in the women's garden

Margarethe Meyer-Schurz was born on August 27, 1833 in Hamburg as the youngest of eleven children of the factory owner Heinrich Christian Meyer and his wife Agathe Margarethe, née. Beusch born. The mother died just a few hours after the birth.

Her sister Bertha , who was 15 years older than her , entered into a new marriage with the excommunicated priest Johannes Ronge , the founder of German Catholicism , after separating from her first husband Friedrich Traun . As a result, Margarethe and her other older sister Amalie had contact with the Circle of Friends of German Catholics at an early age . Margarethe later attended the college for women , which was founded at the suggestion of Johannes Ronge.

After the failed revolution of 1848 , Bertha followed her husband into exile in London . When she became seriously ill in the autumn of 1851, 18-year-old Margarethe followed her to the British capital to help with the household. There Margarethe met Carl Schurz , who like Ronge had to leave Germany for political reasons. Both entered into a civil marriage on July 6, 1852 in London's Marylebone District and soon afterwards left for the United States of America. First they lived in Philadelphia, from 1856 in Watertown (Wisconsin) ; there they bought a small farm, with Margaretha's dowry providing the financial prerequisites for the purchase. Following the thoughts of the Pestalozzi student Friedrich Fröbel , she opened the first kindergarten in the USA here in 1856, in German . In 1866, after the Civil War , the couple moved to Detroit and in 1867 to St. Louis . From the autumn of 1867 Margarethe stayed in Wiesbaden for a cure .

Margarethe Meyer-Schurz had five children with her husband Carl: Agathe (1852–1915), Marianne (1857–1929), Emma Savannah (1865–1867), Carl Lincoln (1871–1924) and Herbert (1876–1900). She died of puerperal fever on March 15, 1876 in St. Louis, just three days after the birth of her son Herbert. Her body was transferred to Hamburg and buried there in the St. Petri churchyard , and in 1914 she was transferred to the Ohlsdorf cemetery . The grave existed until 1965. Since 2002 a stone of the so-called spiral of memories in the women's garden has been commemorating Margarethe Meyer-Schurz.

On May 2, 1929, a monument in honor of Margaretha Meyer-Schurz was inaugurated in Watertown.

literature

  • Greta Anderson: More than petticoats. Remarkable Wisconsin Women. Guilford / USA, 2004, pp. 37-48.
  • Hannah Werwath Swart: Margarethe Meyer Schurz. A biography. Watertown 1967.
  • Heinrich Adolph Meyer: Memories of Heinrich Christian Meyer. Collected for the family by his son Heinr. Ad. Meyer. Hamburg 1887.
  • Amalie Henriette Westendarp: My mother. Agathe Margarethe Meyer, b. Beusch. born 1794, d. 1833. Handwritten notes. Archive of the company HC Meyer jr. Hamburg 1887.
  • Dieter Rednak: Heinrich Christian Meyer (1797–1848) - called "Stockmeyer". From craftsman to large industrialist. A Biedermeier career. Hamburg 1992.
  • Helmut and Marianne Hirsch: Did Margarethe Meyer-Schurz come from an originally Jewish family? On the problems of her first biography. In: Ludger Heid , Joachim H. Knoll (ed.): German-Jewish history. Stuttgart, Bonn 1992, pp. 85-106.
  • Marie Kortmann: Emilie Wüstenfeld. A Hamburg citizen. Hamburg 1927.
  • Inge Grolle: Bertha Traun-Ronge 1818–1863. The ideal and life. In: Irina Hundt (ed.): From the salon to the barricade. Women of the Heine Age. Stuttgart 2002, pp. 377-389.
  • Inge Grolle : The free-thinking women. Charlotte Paulsen, Johanna Goldschmidt, Emilie Wüstenfeld. Bremen 2000.
  • Rita Bake : Bertha Traun (Bertha Ronge nee Meyer, divorced Traun). Co-founder of the women's association for the support of German Catholics, the social association for the equalization of denominational differences and the university for women. In: Rita Bake, Brita Reimers (Hrsg.): City of dead women. Portraits of women and life pictures from the Hamburg Ohlsdorf cemetery. Hamburg 1997, pp. 240-242.
  • Carl Schurz: Memoirs. From German freedom fighter to American statesman. With a foreword by Theodor Heuss. Zurich 1988.
  • Gerd Stolz: How kindergarten came to America - Margarethe Meyer Schurz and the “German idea”. In: Globus. H. 4, 2003, pp. 6-9.
  • Gerd Stolz: Margarethe Meyer Schurz - a pioneer of the kindergarten idea from northern Germany in the USA. In: Natural and regional studies. 111. Jg., H. 3/4, 2004, pp. 29-35.
  • Gerd Stolz: The life of Margarethe Meyer Schurz. Pioneer of kindergarten in the USA. Husum 2007.
  • James E. Haas: Conrad Poppenhusen. The Life of a German-American Industrial Pioneer. Baltimore 2004.
  • Eckhart Pilick: Lexicon of free religious people. Palatinate 2006.
  • Mrs. Follen: The Pedler of Dust Sticks. Boston 1854.
  • Elizabeth Jenkins: How the Kindergarten Found its Way to America. In: Wisconsin Magazine of History. 14, 1, 1930, pp. 46-62.
  • Manfred Berger : Margaretha Schurz: America's First Kindergarten. In: Childhood. H. 3, 1996.
  • Sylvia Paletschek : Women and Dissent. Women in German Catholicism and in the free parishes 1841–1852. Goettingen 1990.

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ In the baptismal register of St. Johannis Church in Hamburg-Eppendorf she was entered under the name Agatha Margaretha .
  2. ↑ In the literature Meyer is often portrayed as a “rich Jewish merchant” (e.g. Hannah Werwath Swarts: Margarethe Meyer-Schurz ). The Meyer family, however, belonged to the Protestant religious community and Meyer was not a merchant, but a manufacturer (see Helmut and Marianne Hirsch: Did Margarethe Meyer-Schurz come from an originally Jewish family? On the problem of her first biography ; Dieter Rednak: Heinrich Christian Meyer (1797 –1848) - called "Stockmeyer" ).
  3. ↑ [1]
  4. ↑ Women's Garden: Margarethe Meyer-Schurz , accessed on April 13, 2011
personal data
SURNAME Meyer-Schurz, Margarethe
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Schurz, Margaretha; Meyer, Margarethe
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Founder of the first kindergarten in the USA
DATE OF BIRTH August 27, 1833
PLACE OF BIRTH Hamburg-Eppendorf
DATE OF DEATH March 15, 1876
Place of death St. Louis , USA