Marie Bloch

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Clara Emilie Marie Bloch (born November 27, 1871 in Berlin , † April 28, 1944 in Theresienstadt concentration camp ) was a German educator and member of the bourgeois women's movement . In 1942 she was arrested because of her Jewish descent and later murdered .

Life

Childhood and youth

Marie Bloch was born in Berlin as the fifth of seven children of the Berlin publisher Adalbert Bloch and his wife Clara Bloch. The parents, originally Jewish religious members , raised their children lovingly in the Protestant faith and were to a high degree culturally and socially oriented. Education, theater visits and travel largely determined family life. Marie - called in the Mieze family - enjoyed a carefree childhood with her siblings Hermann, Adalbert, Walter, Betty, Cläre and Willy in their parents' house at Regentenstrasse 14 (today Hitzigallee), not far from Potsdamer Strasse.

Education and professional career

Marie Bloch received the best possible education for her and initially attended the Charlottenschule zu Berlin, a municipal secondary school for girls, for nine years . Later she attended the private teachers' seminar, the head of which was women's rights activist Helene Lange . For health reasons, she had to leave the seminar after a year and a half of training. In 1890 she enrolled in a women's high school course won by the women's movement by taking English and mathematics. From April 1892 she trained as a kindergarten director at the Pestalozzi-Froebel-Haus in Schöneberg near Berlin . Due to her good educational background, Marie Bloch passed the exam in April 1893. a. entitled to run a kindergarten independently. From 1893 to 1908 Marie Bloch worked as the director of various children's facilities in Berlin. She also acted as a teacher in the Pestalozzi-Froebel-Haus and remained closely connected to the house over the years.

After the death of her parents around the turn of the century, she moved out of her apartment in her parents' house in 1908. She followed her youngest brother, the historian Hermann Reincke-Bloch, to Rostock in order to run his household and to support her sister-in-law with childcare. With the help of the mother's family estate, Marie Bloch acquired a two-story house with a garden at Paulstrasse 5 in the Steintorvorstadt district. Her original plan to take over the Paaschnische Schule failed, which is why she opened a Fröbel kindergarten with an attached nursing school in 1910 in Paulstrasse. She acquired the necessary authorization by attending the senior course at the Social Women's School in Schöneberg (today Alice Salomon University of Applied Sciences for Social Work and Social Pedagogy Berlin ) from 1909 to 1910. An institution that was founded a few years earlier by the women's rights activist Alice Salomon . For a total of two and a half decades, Marie Bloch's Rostock kindergarten was considered the most modern and reform-minded institution in Mecklenburg in the field of childcare. From 1919 to 1923 Marie Bloch was the head of the municipal child welfare department in Rostock.

Volunteering

Marie Bloch was heavily involved in the social field in Rostock. From 1908 she worked in the Rostock women's association "Social Group", which can be assigned to the moderate wing of the women's movement. Marie Bloch became an active member of the affiliated female youth group, whose members helped out as voluntary helpers in day-care centers. The aim of the charitable work was to support women who - due to the death or separation of their husbands - were forced to earn their own living through childcare. From 1910 she belonged to the advisory board of the board of the Volkskindergarten e. V. in Rostock. Marie Bloch was also involved in the youth association, the youth workshop association and the German Froebel Association.

First World War

As a member of the bourgeois women's movement, Marie Bloch was active in war welfare work. With the outbreak of the First World War in 1914, the youth group, which now operated under the name “Helfende Hand”, grew to around 150 members who were trained for almost all areas of social work. Due to the increase in the female employment rate and the associated lack of childcare, Marie Bloch was commissioned by the Altona War Office in 1918 to redesign the kindergartens and crèches in large parts of Mecklenburg.

National Socialism

When the National Socialists came to power, the boycott of Jewish shops, department stores, banks, doctors, lawyers and notaries followed a short time later. As a result of the suppression, many Rostock Jews were forced to emigrate. So u. a. Fritz Nelson and Mathilde Nelson, who were friends with Marie Bloch, went to the USA. Marie Bloch was deeply affected by the expulsion of the Jewish Steiner family. As a young student, Magarete Steiner was adopted by Marie Bloch in 1922, who at that time was already married to the mathematician and lecturer Werner Steiner. In order to avoid anti-Semitic persecution, the Steiner family went to Scotland in 1933. Marie Bloch stayed in Rostock despite the close relationship with the Steiner family in order not to be a financial burden for them. According to the Nuremberg Race Laws passed in 1935 , she and her three Jewish grandparents were 75% "Jewish". Fewer and fewer parents gave their children to the kindergarten, which was now ostracized as “Jewish”, which meant that Marie Bloch was struggling with economic difficulties. The nanny school was closed by the National Socialists in the summer of 1934.

In the course of the November pogroms against the Jewish population on the night of November 9th to 10th, 1938, the synagogue in Rostock not far from the kindergarten on Augustenstrasse was burned down. 64 Jewish men were arrested and numerous houses, apartments and businesses of Jewish residents were demolished. The kindergarten remained undamaged. However, Marie Bloch's mortgage for the house was canceled a short time later , which is why she was forced to sell it. The ban on forwarding the kindergarten prompted Marie Bloch to hand it over to a former employee. With the ban on Jews, theaters, cinemas and concerts, etc. decreed by the National Socialists on November 12, 1938, Marie Bloch was also denied participation in cultural life. Due to the nocturnal curfew for Jews imposed at the beginning of the war , Marie Bloch was no longer allowed to leave the house after 8 p.m. In addition, there were only a few people left who kept in touch with her. In her previous life, a sociable woman who cultivated many friendships through intensive correspondence, Marie Bloch now lived withdrawn and almost completely alone in the attic of the house in Paulstrasse.

When the Nazis forced her to wear the so-called Star of David in 1941, Marie Bloch, who was baptized as a Christian as a child, wore a brooch with the image of Christ next to it in protest.

Marie Bloch was arrested on November 11, 1942. After several transports to other prison camps, she was deported from Berlin to Theresienstadt concentration camp on December 15, 1942 . The transport of mostly elderly people was cynically referred to as relocation. Those affected by this transport included a. Jenny family, Bertha Josephy, Louis and Johanna Simon, Simon and Martha Schoeps, Ida and Abraham Marchand, Regina Michaelis, Ina Levy, Richard and Hedwig Schlomann and their grandson Harry Schlomann. Marie Bloch met her sister Clare again in the Theresienstadt concentration camp. When she became seriously ill, Marie Bloch cared for her until her death. In the spring of 1944, relatives received the encrypted message that Marie Bloch had died of typhus .

Commemoration

Marie Bloch has been the namesake of the Am Beginenberg 10 daycare center since 1989
A stumbling stone at Paulstrasse 5 in Rostock reminds of the fate of Marie Bloch

Marie Bloch has been the namesake of the Rostock kindergarten on the Beginenberg since August 1989. The historian Yaakov Zur , who emigrated to Israel from Rostock at the beginning of 1939 , unveiled the nameplate and expressed the hope that the kindergarten “will become a living tombstone in the spirit of the excellent educator.” He wished the children: “May it never again Give children a time to take away their childhood. "

In the southeastern part of Rostock, Brinckmansdorf , a street is named after Marie Bloch.

Since October 2004 a stumbling stone has been remembering the fate of Marie Bloch in Paulstrasse 5 . In cooperation with the graphic artist Rando Geschewski and based on the project by the artist Gunter Demnig for the Hanseatic city of Rostock, the Max-Samuel-Haus developed its own variant of stumbling blocks : a green-gray dolomite slab , much larger than a paving stone, the information about name, place of residence and type and place of death. The “memorial plate” was financed exclusively from donations.

Also on the Rostock Jewish cemetery in Lindenpark Marie Bloch is thought. The memorial site consists of a stele in the form of a menorah and a roughly 60 cm high square, on the surface of which the names of the Jewish Nazi victims from Rostock, known until 1988, can be read. On the memorial stone, designed by the stonemason Thomas Scheinpflug, a Star of David is depicted and an inscription in Hebrew and German can be read: “Remember - never forget!”.

literature

  • Christine Gundlach: The world is a narrow bridge. Yaakov Zur - an Israeli from Rostock, memories and encounters. Berlin 2003.
  • Birgit Jürgens: Aunt Mieze - A life for children, the fate of the Jewish kindergarten director Marie Bloch (1871-1944) in Rostock. Rostock 2002.
  • Max-Samuel-Haus, Foundation meeting place for Jewish history and culture (ed.): Leaves from the Max-Samuel-Haus. No. 30, Rostock 2006.
  • Frank Schröder: 100 Jewish personalities from Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania. Rostock 2003.

Web links

Commons : Marie Bloch  - Collection of pictures, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Manfred Berger : The kindergarten from 1840 to the present. A (fictional) letter to Friedrich Froebel on the 175th birthday of his preschool institution. AV Akademikerverlag, Saarbrücken 2015, ISBN 978-3-639-79277-5 , pp. 89 f., Urn : nbn: de: 101: 1-2015020320660 .
  2. ↑ Quoted from: Birgit Jürgens: Tante Mieze - A life for children. The fate of the Jewish kindergarten director Marie Bloch (1871–1944) in Rostock. Rostock 2002, p. 13.
  3. ↑ Quoted from: Christine Gundlach: The world is a narrow bridge. Yaakov Zur - an Israeli from Rostock, memories and encounters. Berlin 2003, p. 179.
personal data
SURNAME Bloch, Marie
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Bloch, Clara Emilie Marie (full name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German educator and member of the bourgeois women's movement
DATE OF BIRTH November 27, 1871
PLACE OF BIRTH Berlin
DATE OF DEATH April 28, 1944
Place of death Theresienstadt concentration camp