Marianne Welter

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Marianne Welter (born August 28, 1907 in Hattingen ; † 2004 in California ) was a German social worker who had to leave Germany for political reasons in 1933. After years in exile in France, she was able to travel to the USA in 1941, where she was able to work as a social worker and continue her training. After the end of the Second World War she took part in the rebuilding of social services in West Germany and at the end of her professional career taught at an American university.

Origin and education

Marianne Welter's father was a German national lawyer who volunteered for service in the First World War. For reasons of age he was not used at the front, but only in military training, which is why the family lived in Ulm from 1916 until the end of the war . Back in Hattingen, Welter finished the Lyceum there and then began training as a kindergarten teacher at the Essen women's school.

Social work in Berlin

After completing her training, Welter wanted to go to Berlin, but first had to accept a job as a kindergarten teacher “on the Heuberg near Stuttgart ” for health reasons and under pressure from the family . This move was accompanied by the gradual separation from the conservative parental home.

In 1924 the company moved to Berlin. She came into contact with the Arbeiterwohlfahrt (AWO), worked in various children's homes and then began training as a youth leader in the youth home association in Berlin-Charlottenburg, which lasted until 1930 . Welter, who had meanwhile also joined the SPD , was one of Walter Friedländer's employees from 1930 onwards in the youth welfare office in Berlin-Prenzlauer Berg , a hotspot of social democratic and reformist social policy in the Weimar Republic.

From 1930 to 1933, Marianne Welter ran a city day care center for unemployed girls between the ages of 14 and 18, and it was in this work environment that she met Nora Hackel (born 1901 or 1902 in Russia), who ran a night home. From then on, Hackel and Welter were linked by a close personal partnership that went beyond professional collaboration and which they later maintained during their emigration. Feidel-Mertz evaluated this as a "survival strategy in exile", "which women in particular seem to have developed more often from educational and social professions in exile."

According to Kühnel-Goinar, the aim of the facilities managed by Welter and Hackel was to "get girls off the streets and protect them from undesirable developments" by offering meaningful courses. According to Füssl, they were also trained in cooking and tailoring.

Füssl also writes that Hackel and Welter “were trained in Vienna”, which is to be understood as an indication of additional psychoanalytic training, presumably in the vicinity of Siegfried Bernfeld and August Aichhorn .

Exile in France

Because of their union and SPD membership - Hackel was also Jewish - the two women lost their jobs in the spring of 1933 and fled to France together. At first they found work and accommodation with a Jewish newspaper publisher in Paris and then, together with other emigrants, built a home for refugee children in Plessis Robinson near Paris, which - run as a cooperative - existed until 1939. According to Füssl, this home was an institution operated by the Paris Workers' Welfare Association, whose modest funds had come from the USA and were administered by Walter Friedländer. Kühnel-Goinar mentions the International Rescue Committee (IRC) in this connection , which explains the origin of the funds mentioned by Füssl.

The home took in children of different nationalities and was not run according to specific ideological or educational principles. Nora Hackel headed the preschool department, Marianne Welter worked with the school children. It was probably during this time that they both must have become members of the Association of German Teacher Emigrants .

Work in Plessis Robinson ended with the outbreak of World War II; the home had to be closed. The two women weren't alone anymore. Hackel's mother Hedwig was able to flee Berlin in time, and Nora Hackel had become a mother around 1938. The father of daughter Nicole, a Frenchman, was missing. A family network was established and "Welter lived - at different times - for several decades with the Hackel family, which consisted of" Omi "Hedwig, her daughter Nora and Nora's girl Nicole."

The three Hackels and Marianne Welter were interned together in Camp de Gurs in the south of France . While the German troops were marching in, the French had ordered the relocation of some of the internees. In this way the four women made their way to a barn near Toulouse and later to an abandoned farmhouse, where they found support from the Quakers .

Exile in the USA

It is not known through whom Marianne Welter and the Hackels received the necessary papers for entry into the USA. They were able to leave France and reached New York via a long stopover in Casablanca on July 26, 1941. For the first time they lived with Marie Juchacz in a Quaker home, the Scattergood Hostel in Iowa , where 185 refugees from Europe found refuge between 1939 and 1943.

There were many relationships between the guests at the Scattergood Hostel and Friedländer, who lived in Chicago and at the time taught at the School of Social Service Administration at the University of Chicago . Welter studied at the University of Chicago on Friedländer's recommendation. The summer of 1942 she spent as a house mother in Ridge Farm Preventorium near Deer Park ( Illinois ), a 1914 originally for tubekulosekranke established facilities for children. Nora Hackel also worked there in the same position and looked after a house with 28 children; her mother Hedwig worked here as a cook. After Kühnel-Goinar, however, the paths of the two friends had already separated due to Welter's move to Chicago. According to Feidel-Mertz, however, this separation only related to professional paths.

After studying in Chicago, Marianne Welter moved to Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland , where she focused her training on social group work and casework . At the School of Applied Social Sciences there , she finished her studies in 1944 with a double Master of Science (M.Sc.) in Casework and Groupwork .

After graduating, Marianne Welter started working for the Riverdale Children's Association in New York. This facility was an orphanage for black children founded by Quakers in 1836, the character of which changed from 1944. The majority of the children in care were no longer orphans, but neglected and dependent children, but still predominantly black. Marianne Welter was the first non-black person to be hired as a social worker at this facility.

Due to the Second World War, other tasks quickly arose for Welter. As a senior caseworker and acting supervisor , she worked in New York for the US Committee for the Care of European Children (USCOM) in a reception center for orphans from European concentration camps . This fit in with Welter's focus on child care and foster care , because the primary goal of these reception centers was to restore the health of the children and then to refer them to foster and adoptive families .

For the Unitarian Service Committee (USC) Welter took over the management of a home in Boston in 1948 , in which abducted children from 13 nations were looked after. The peculiarity was that the majority of the employees here had a similar fate as the children to be looked after, and consequently a training program had to be developed for them too. For the care of the children, on the other hand, the same tasks arose as in Welter's previous position.

Social work in and for Germany

Through her work for the USC, Welter had established many contacts with other aid organizations, and this also resulted in connections to Germany. Social democratic friends asked her to help rebuild social institutions. After she had received the American citizenship, she took on this new task and worked from 1948 to 1952 mainly in northern Germany.

On behalf of the USC, she worked in the Auermühle near Dedelstorf in Lower Saxony in 1948/49 . In this device, it was originally from the UNRRA furnished and operated DP - children's home for orphans taken up, foreign children, many of them children of deceased forced laborers.

Also in 1948, Marianne Welter was one of the initiators of the Education and Child Care Institute in Germany, in which the USC cooperated with the Arbeiterwohlfahrt . The idea for this institute, which later became known as the summer institute , arose in May 1948 in a conversation between Welter, Helen Fogg (USC), Lotte Lemke and Emma Schulze (AWO Hannover). The starting point of the conversation was the consideration that the kindergarten teachers and social workers who are now working for the AWO again after the stagnation period caused by the Nazi regime “needed fresh human contacts and new ideas and insights in order to effectively cope with all the difficulties of their work”. A year passed before this idea became reality, in which the approval of the American military authorities had to be obtained to procure the equipment and organize its transport from America to Germany. In February 1949 Welter, Fogg, Lemke and Schulze worked out the program, paying attention from the outset to equality between Americans and Germans - also with regard to further work. Since the potential participants could only attend the planned courses during their vacation, it was agreed to offer courses of a maximum of three weeks each. They were supposed to take place in the Marie-Juchacz-Heim of the AWO in Vöhl and had to be limited to 25 participants per course due to capacity reasons.

Several courses took place in Vöhl between July and September 1949. The management team consisted of 9 Americans (including the Welter and Fogg mentioned above) and 7 Germans (also the Lemke and Schulze mentioned above and Marie Juchacz). The success of the first year meant that the courses were also held in 1950, 1951, 1952 and 1953. The courses were then to be continued year-round from 1954 onwards with the social training working group founded by AWO and USC .

How long Marianne Welter was involved in the Education and Child Care Institute's program is not known, although Kühnel-Goinar suggests that it could have been until 1951. She also says that Welter had good contacts with Bremen's mayor Wilhelm Kaisen and helped build a neighborhood house there. This institution, which today bears the name Neighborhood House Helene Kaisen , pursued goals similar to those of the Education and Child Care Institutes : “The first thing to do was to set up an" institute "for further training of German welfare workers. This happened in the summer of 1949, others followed between 1950 and 1953. These included courses on child care, questions of youth and welfare work, psychiatry, and "modern methods" of social work, and combined this with "basic courses in democracy" and practice new forms of conviviality and communication. The city owes the fact that Bremen was chosen as the location of the neighborhood house to the friendly contacts that Adolf and Ella Ehlers had made with the German representatives of the USC in 1947. "

Return to the USA

Marianne Welter returned to the USA despite her good contacts and her many years of work in post-war Germany. Practically and theoretically, she dealt with applied social work and researched it. In 1965, she received her doctorate from her previous training facility, Case Western Reserve University , as a Doctor of Social Work . In her dissertation, she looked at the comparison of adopted older foreign and American children. That same year, she became a faculty member at the School of Social Work at Adelphi University in New York. After retiring in 1975, she moved to La Jolla, California, and continued to teach at institutes in San Diego and Los Angeles .

In 1970 Marianne Welter was awarded the Marie Juchacz plaque by the Arbeiterwohlfahrt .

Works

  • Aaron Rosenblatt, Marianne Welter , Sophie Wojciechowski: The Adelphi experiment: accelerating social work education , Council on Social Work Education (Published in cooperation with the Adelphi University School of Social Work), New York 1976.
  • Comparison of adopted older foreign and American children , Dissertation, Western Reserve University, Cleveland 1965.

literature

  • Hildegard Feidel-Mertz: Partnerships of women as strategies for survival in exile , in: Inge Hansen-Schaberg (ed.): “Tell something”. The biographical dimension in education. Bruno Schonig on his 60th birthday , Schneider Verlag, Hohengehren, 1997, ISBN 3-87116-898-X , pp. 107–112.
  • Ingeborg Kühnel-Goinar: “It is not easy to go back to the past so unprepared.” , In: Joachim Wieler, Susanne Zeller (ed.): Emigrierte Sozialarbeit. Portraits of displaced social workers , Lambertus Verlag, Freiburg 1995, ISBN 3-7841-0773-7 , pp. 278–285.
  • Sara Fieldston: Raising the World. Child Welfare in the American Century , Harvard University Press, Cambridge and London 2015, ISBN 978-0-674-36809-5 .

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Unless other sources are named, the following biographical information is based on the article by Barbara Louis (see web links ) and the essay by Ingeborg Kühnel-Goinar based on an interview with Marianne Welter (see: Literature ).
  2. ↑ this women's school was probably the Luisenschule Essen , which “as a lyceum, in addition to the secondary school for girls, also included a seminar for teacher training and a women's school in which technical teachers and kindergarten teachers were trained”. ( Transcript (point 8) from: Time is iron and fate is mighty )
  3. ↑ Ingeborg Kühnel-Goinar: "It is not easy" , p. 279. This location does not allow a more precise localization.
  4. ↑ “In 1921 Friedländer was elected full-time city councilor in the Berlin district of Prenzlauer Berg and took over the management of the youth welfare office and the department for welfare. At the age of 30 he was faced with the task of transferring the social administration from the authoritarian structures of the empire to a democratically controlled and constitutionally legitimized republican authority. Based on left majorities, political-administrative windows of opportunity and a network of socially politically committed citizens (among them Ella Kay, who has already been presented in this series ), Friedländer succeeded in setting up a modern youth welfare office as a specialist authority for all questions of youth welfare, its offer and Organizational structure today as future-oriented for the development of youth welfare in the later Federal Republic. ”( SOCIAL WORK. Journal for social and socially related areas , 62nd year, September / October 2013, p. 418)
  5. ↑ This information is based on the database of Ellis Island , where she was registered on arrival on July 26, 1941 with the age of 39 years and 7 months. ( Passenger list of the ship Nyassa from July 26, 1941 ) St. Petersburg is entered as the place of birth , the handwritten addition above it is illegible. According to Kühnel-Goinar, Hackel was a Jew and fled Russia with her parents. (Ingeborg Kühnel-Goinar: "It's not easy" , p. 280)
  6. ↑ a b Hildegard Feidel-Mertz: Partnerships of women as survival strategies in exile , pp. 108-109
  7. ↑ Ingeborg Kühnel-Goinar: “It's not easy” , p. 279
  8. ^ Karl-Heinz Füssl: Walter A. Friedländer: Social Democracy and Social Work in the Weimar Republic , in: Yearbook for Historical Educational Research , Volume 11, Verlag Julius Klinckhardt, Bad Heilbrunn 2005, ISBN 3-7815-1439-0 , p. 242
  9. ^ Karl-Heinz Füssl: Walter A. Friedländer , p. 240
  10. ^ Karl-Heinz Füssl: German-American cultural exchange in the 20th century. Education - Science - Politics , Campus Verlag, Frankfurt am Main 2004, ISBN 978-3-593-37499-4 , p. 162
  11. ^ In Plessis Robinson there were several facilities for refugee children before the occupation of France by the German Wehrmacht ; a more detailed definition of the home referred to here is still pending.
  12. ↑ Hildegard Feidel-Mertz / Hermann Schnorbach: teachers in emigration. The Association of German Teacher Emigrants (1933–39) in the traditional context of the democratic teachers' movement , Beltz Verlag, Weinheim and Basel, 1981, ISBN 3-407-54114-7 , pp. 230 & 237
  13. ↑ According to the passenger list of the ship Nyassa from July 26, 1941 , Hedwig Hackel was 62 years old at the time of entry into the USA and was born in Königsberg . Nicole Hackel was born in Paris and was three and a half years old.
  14. ^ "Welter lived-at various times-for several decades with the Hackel family, which consisted of" Omi "Hedwig, her daughter Nora and Nora's girl, Nicole." Michael Luick-Thrams: "Creating 'New Americans': WWII-Era European Refugees' Formation of American Identities " , Philosophical dissertation at the Institute for History of the Philosophical Faculty I of the Humboldt University of Berlin , Berlin 1997 (in English), p. 198
  15. ↑ Ingeborg Kühnel-Goinar: “It's not easy” , p. 281
  16. ^ Karl-Heinz Füssl: German-American cultural exchange in the 20th century , p. 164
  17. ^ A b Walter Friedländer / Eva Pfister: Encounters with Marie Juchacz while emigrating
  18. ↑ See the article in the English WIKIPEDIA: en: Scattergood Friends School and the section Part II: Documentation and Analysis of Scattergood Hostel in: Michael Luick-Thrams: "Creating 'New Americans' , p. 97 ff.
  19. ↑ Lake Forest-Lake Bluff Historical Society: Historical Society Celebrates Centennial for Ridge Farm (Grove School) and Local Families , April 29, 2014
  20. ↑ Michael Luick-Thrams: "Creating 'New Americans" , pp. 174-175.
  21. ↑ For the history of this university see: History of the Case Western Reserve University .
  22. ↑ Brief History of the Riverdale Children's Association (English)
  23. ↑ There is only a short article about USCOM in the English WIKIPEDIA: USCOM . For more information on the work of USCOM see: Gertrude Samuels: Children who have known no childhood , New York Times, March 9, 1947 (in English on Google Books)
  24. ↑ For more on this home see: Iris Helbing: “Poland's lost children. The search and repatriation of kidnapped Polish children after 1945 ” , dissertation at the Faculty of Cultural Studies at the European University Viadrina , Frankfurt (Oder) 2015, p. 154 ff. A report related to Welter's work is quoted by Sara Fieldston: Raising the World , p . 252 (Note 16)
  25. ↑ There is an extensive online archive of the work of this institute and its programs: materials about the Education and Child Care Institute of the USC (see web links ). A brief overview of the program Marianne Welter participated in can also be found at Sara Fieldston: Raising the World. Child Welfare in the American Century , Harvard University Press, Cambridge and London 2015, ISBN 978-0-674-36809-5 , p. 34 ff.
  26. ^ A b Helen Fogg: International Cooperation
  27. ↑ This home consisted of workers' barracks built under the Nazis, in which, after the war, homeless children (DP children) were initially housed. Then the home went to the AWO, which initially housed children evacuated from Berlin because of the Berlin blockade .
  28. ↑ All information about the history of this training project according to the Education and Child Care Institute Germany, Report 1949 , in: Materials about the Education and Child Care Institute of the USC (see web links )
  29. ↑ Ingeborg Kühnel-Goinar: "It's not easy" , p. 284
  30. ^ History of the Bremen neighborhood house
  31. ↑ On this institution see: School of Social Work at Adelphi University.
personal data
SURNAME Welter, Marianne
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German-American social worker and political emigrant
DATE OF BIRTH August 28, 1907
PLACE OF BIRTH Hattingen
DATE OF DEATH 2004
Place of death California