Marie Bernays

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Marie Bernays

Marie Elise Hermine Bernays (born May 13, 1883 in Munich ; † April 22, 1939 in Tuttlingen ) was a German politician and women's rights activist. She was one of the first female students at Heidelberg University and women in Germany did her doctorate.

Live and act

Marie Bernays, baptized Protestant, came from a highly respected and important Jewish family. Her grandfather Isaak Bernays was a rabbi and one of the pioneers of Jewish Orthodoxy . Cousin Martha Bernays was the wife of Sigmund Freud , and Uncle Jacob Bernays was a renowned classical philologist. The father, Michael Bernays , who converted to the Protestant faith in 1856, held the first chair for literary history at the University of Munich and was an important Goethe and Shakespeare researcher. As she reported in her unpublished memoirs, the father was a reader of King Ludwig II of Bavaria and lived only in the world of literature and theater . Family life to the particular social spirit, non-profit helpfulness and effectiveness . Marie Bernays' mother, Louise Johanna Bernays, b. Rübke, daughter of a wealthy Hamburg shipowner, was married to the journalist and theater scholar Hermann Uhde , who died early. Together with her half-brother, Hermann Uhde-Bernays (who was not adopted by his stepfather and who took the name Bernays out of admiration for his stepfather), and her brother, Ulrich Bernays , born in 1881, she grew up in Munich, Karlsruhe and Heidelberg on. Until 1901 she was a student at the Victoria boarding school in Karlsruhe and Baden-Baden. Marie Bernays then trained as a teacher in Munich, where she passed her exams (for English and French) in 1904 at the “Königliche Kreisbildungslehrerinenanstalt”.

In 1906 she passed the Abitur as an external student at a humanistic grammar school in Heidelberg and then matriculated as one of the first women with the subjects of economics, philosophy and theology at the University of Heidelberg . In 1908 Marie Bernays began her doctorate on "The history of a cotton mill, its production process and its workforce". The work was created in the context of a large research project by Max Weber , whose favorite student she was. In 1910 the dissertation was published in book form. She dedicated her publication to Marianne Weber , wife of her doctoral supervisor. In the foreword, Marie Bernays noted the creation of her 417-page work:

I obtained the material for this inquiry in two ways: through personal questioning of the workers and through my own experience. After Professor Dr. Alfred Weber ... had given more precise information about the aims of the inquiry, I was convinced that an adequate treatment of the problems posed here would only be possible on the basis of a more precise knowledge of the workers and their work. That is why I tried to find work in the 'Gladbacher Spinnerei und Weberei' in September 1908, undetected. I succeeded more than expected, I was accepted as a winder and for a few weeks had the best opportunity to observe factory life up close and to share the life and goings-on of the workers as one of their own .
Doctoral thesis by Marie Bernays in book form
Advertisement from the Mannheim Social School for Women, archived in the Ida-Seele archive

The scientific investigation is divided into the following two major chapters:

The first part presents the provenance and fate of the workers as selection factors in the textile industry and tries to give a picture of the cultural level of the workers. In the second part of the thesis the attempt is made to establish connections between provenance, life's fate and cultural level of the workers on the one hand and their profitability for the company on the other hand on a numerical basis and to explain them rationally .

When the discussion about obtaining higher education for children of destitute parents flared up, Bernays questioned the need and necessity to lead talented children of the lower class to academic careers. She took the view that the understanding of the task of the humanistic grammar school was to a certain extent the "inheritance of families with an old tradition".

During the First World War she was involved in the national women's service of the city of Mannheim, with a particular interest in the war day home for unemployed girls and women , which was built in 1915 . A year later, together with Elisabeth Altmann-Gottheiner , Alice Bensheimer and Julie Bassermann , also in Mannheim, she founded a social women's school (also known as welfare schools) that offered “social vocational training for paid and voluntary work”. Marie Bernays headed the training facility, which received state recognition in 1921. The headmistress herself taught the subjects: social literature , social technology , economics , the social significance of civil law as well as law and administration of justice . Marie Bernays fought vehemently for the recognition of the women's social schools as higher technical schools . She noted:

The struggle of the German welfare schools for their character as higher technical schools and for the closely related professional position of welfare nurse can only lead to a good end if, in all welfare schools, as in other higher schools, the teaching of certain knowledge and a formal education is required and one finally refrains from making suggestions for reflection or discussion of practical cases or theoretical problems as part of the content of the lesson .

Furthermore, they were committed to the qualified expansion of welfare schools. For example, when the “Catholic Welfare Association” set up a social training center in Münster in 1917, Bernays criticized its training concept, which focused on health, economic and professional welfare, and looked for allies for their opinion among those at the time Welfare school directors (e.g. Alice Salomon , Rosa Kempf , Marie Baum etc.). She said the new institution would be “not a fully developed social women's school in which, as is always demanded at the conference of social women's schools in Germany, provides general social vocational training and only specializes in the three main subjects.” Bernays also criticized "That the Catholic welfare association, a leading organization in the field of social welfare, has not created a fully developed welfare school". and took the view that "the future caregiver must be given a broad basis in her education".

The “Social Women's School”, which she co-founded, still exists today as a technical college for social affairs, which (since 2006) has been part of the Mannheim University of Applied Sciences.

In 1921 Marie Bernays, succeeding Marianne Weber, was elected to the Baden state parliament for the DVP , to which she belonged until 1925. The focus of her parliamentary work was in the social area of ​​child and youth welfare, but above all in the women's issue. She campaigned for the expansion of women's schools, for better career opportunities for women and for their admission to the judicial service.

With the beginning of the Nazi era , although she was employed as head of the Social Women's School for life in 1928, she was first given leave of absence because of her “Jewish infiltration”, then finally suspended from school work and defamed by the Nazi press . At the end of July 1933, Marie Bernays left Mannheim and went to Munich for a short time. Finally she found refuge in Beuron . There she dealt intensively with the Catholic faith, gave English lessons to the Benedictine fathers, also headed the parish library and was responsible for building up her father's library (from whom she had inherited the modern-language part of his library), which Bernays owned for the Beuron monastery donated.

On October 11, 1933, Marie Bernays was baptized in the Archabbey of St. Martin, Beuron, according to the Roman Catholic rite. On April 22nd, 1939, after suffering from uterine cancer , she died unexpectedly in the hospital in Tuttlingen . The deceased was buried in Beuron.

A street in Mönchengladbach and a square in Mannheim reminds of Marie Bernays.

Fonts

  • The history of a cotton mill, its production process and its workforce . Heidelberg 1910, OCLC 681741277 ( hathitrust.org ).
  • Selection and adaptation of the workforce in closed large-scale industry. Leipzig 1910.
  • Studies of the fluctuations in work intensity during the working week and during the working day. A contribution to the psychophysics of textile work. Leipzig 1912.
  • Training workshops and schools in the textile industry. Leipzig 1914.
  • Studies on the connection between women in factory work and the birth rate in Germany . W. Moeser, Berlin 1916, OCLC 612930059 ( archive.org ).
  • The rise of the gifted from the standpoint of economics , in: Bayerische Lehrerinnenzeitung 1918, p. 99 ff.
  • The German women's movement . BG Teubner, Leipzig 1920, OCLC 12678307 ( archive.org ).
  • About the practical training of the pupils of the welfare schools , in: Journal for School Health Care and Social Hygiene 1928, pp. 113–117.
  • Again “The practical training of schoolgirls in welfare care and social hygiene” , in: Journal for School Health Care and Social Hygiene 1928, p. 270
  • Selection and adaptation of the workforce of the closed large-scale industry represented on the conditions of the Gladbacher Spinnerei und Weberei AG to Munich-Gladbach in the Rhineland. Edited new edition of the dissertation printed Leipzig 1910. Mönchengladbach 2012

literature

  • Manfred Berger : Who was ... Marie Bernays? In: social magazine. H. 12, 1999, pp. 6-8.
  • Lore Conzelmann: The pedagogical ideas in the writings of the Verein für Socialpolitik. An investigation into the history of business education. Dissertation. Frankfurt am Main 1962.
  • Konrad Exner : Marie Bernays - one of the first Baden parliamentarians in Mannheim . In: Badische Heimat 3/2003
  • Ina Hochreuther: Women in Parliament. Southwest German MPs since 1919. Published by the State Center for Political Education on behalf of the State Parliament. Theiss, Stuttgart 1992, ISBN 3-8062-1012-8 .
  • Marion Keller: Pioneers of empirical social research in the Wilhelminian Empire , Stuttgart: Franz Steiner 2018, ISBN 9783515119856 , pp. 285-350.
  • Gundula Pauli: Marie Bernays (1883–1939) and the “Social Women's School” in Mannheim. A contribution to the history of social work in Germany. Unpublished thesis. Freiburg 2004.

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ cit. n. Neufeldt 2002, p. 8
  2. ↑ Neufeldt 2002, p. 34
  3. ↑ Bernays 1910, p. XVI
  4. ↑ Bernays 1910, p. XVII
  5. ↑ Bernays 1918, p. 99
  6. ↑ Berger 1999, p. 7
  7. ↑ Pauli 2004, p. 4
  8. ↑ cit. n.Berger 1999, p. 8
  9. ↑ on the dispute between Marie Bernays and the then head of the welfare school in Münster, Anna Schulte, see Neufeldt 2002, p. 122 ff.
  10. ↑ Bernays 1928, p. 113 f
  11. ↑ Bernays 1929, p. 270
  12. ↑ cf. Pauli 2004
  13. ↑ cf. Neufeldt 2002, p. 35 ff
  14. ↑ cf. Neufeldt 2002, p. 40; Beuron is often incorrectly given as the place of death

Web links

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personal data
SURNAME Bernays, Marie
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Bernays, Marie Elise Hermine
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German politician and women's rights activist
DATE OF BIRTH May 13, 1883
PLACE OF BIRTH Munich
DATE OF DEATH April 22, 1939
Place of death Tuttlingen