Marie Kahle (teacher)

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Figure Marie Kahles in the Bonn Walk of Fame

Marie Pauline Emilie Kahle , born in Gisevius (born May 6, 1893 in Dahme , † December 18, 1948 in London ) was a German teacher and wife of the orientalist Paul Kahle . She was persecuted because of her help for Jewish fellow citizens during the Nazi era . In 1945 she published her experiences during this time in a report entitled What would you have done? .

biography

Family and education

Marie Gisevius was the third daughter of the agricultural economist Paul Timotheus Gisevius (1858-1935) and his first wife Marie (1860-1920), née Stolzmann. The family came from the Polish nobility and was wealthy. In 1912 she graduated from the upper secondary school in Breslau her High School and earned a year later the teaching license of Higher daughters schools. After passing the exam, she returned from Wroclaw to casting back to where her parents lived and taught after the outbreak of World War I at the local city girls' school . At the same time, she enrolled at the University of Giessen for the subjects of Agriculture and Modern Philology , remained matriculated until 1918, but did not finish her studies. At the beginning of 1917 she met Paul Kahle, an orientalist who was 18 years her senior, a colleague of her father's. The couple married on April 8 of the same year and had seven sons over the next ten years, two of whom died as young children. In 1923 the family moved to Bonn after Paul Kahle was appointed director of the Oriental Seminary at the University of Bonn on October 1, 1923 .

In the time of National Socialism

While Paul Kahle was more of the type of a scholar who turned away from the world, Marie Kahle dealt with the emergence of National Socialism at an early age , for example by reading the relevant writings and exchanging political views with her husband's colleagues. She foresaw a dramatic political development and, as early as 1928, brought up the possibility of the family to emigrate.

After the “ seizure of power ” in 1933, Marie Kahle stood by her fellow Jewish citizens several times. So she hid a Jewish student as well as the Bonn geographer Alfred Philippson and his wife in her house in Kaiserstr. 61. On April 1, 1933, the day of the “ Jewish boycott, ” she demonstratively entered the practice of a Jewish doctor. In addition, she refused to enroll her five sons in the Hitler Youth , who were ultimately only able to attend a private school. In the same year she was denounced by her maid that she had called Hitler a “brush squeezer” and Goebbels a “slap face” . However, the proceedings against them were closed as there were no other witnesses to support them. She and her family initially remained unmolested. In 1936 Marie Kahle converted to Catholicism (her husband was a former Protestant pastor).

On November 10, 1938, during the Night of the Pogroms , Marie Kahle sent her three eldest sons to visit Jewish friends so that they could take their valuables into safekeeping. In the days to come, the sons also visited fellow Jewish citizens to help them clean up and repair their destroyed shops and premises. Even the lingerie shop Emilie Goldstein, a neighbor of the Bald, was devastated. When Marie Kahle and her son Wilhelm helped the woman clean up the shop, a police officer took her personal details and reported the incident. A week later, on November 17, 1938, a hateful article appeared in the NSDAP newspaper Westdeutscher Beobachter with the headline “This is treason against the people / Mrs. Kahle and her son helped the Jew Goldstein with clean-up work”, whereupon the family members brought up numerous reprisals - graffiti the street in front of their house, threatening phone calls and pillory posters. Wilhelm Kahle, who studied musicology , was expelled from the University of Bonn and the semester he completed was not taken into account because his behavior was "reprehensible". Marie Kahle then sought refuge with her youngest son Ernst temporarily in the Maria-Hilf monastery in Bonn-Endenich . During this time, her husband's professor colleague, Arnold Rademacher , was a great spiritual support for the family.

An acquaintance of the family, the neurologist Eduard Aigner, who was also the NSDAP's trainer, advised Marie Kahle to suicide to save her family from persecution and imprisonment, and for this purpose provided them with sleeping pills. He depicts the previous attempted break-ins, intimidation and attacks as part of an unofficial but coordinated plan by the SA and SS with the aim of driving Kahle into collapse. Her eldest son Wilhelm will be imprisoned with her, the younger sons will be raised to be National Socialists, Aigner said. The Pallottine Father Josef Kentenich advised her to prepare for her family's escape from Germany.

On November 19, 1938, Paul Kahle was forbidden from any further activity at the University of Bonn; he was not even allowed to enter the library or to participate in a scholarly circle, the Bonn ghost club . But he managed to get early retirement at the age of 63.

In March 1939 Marie Kahle managed to travel to London via Holland with her son Wilhelm . Paul Kahle did not want to recognize the seriousness of the situation and asked his wife to return to Germany, then he followed her to Brussels, where she was staying. At first he insisted on returning to Bonn to get his affairs in order and to put his possessions and books in safe custody. It was only after his wife threatened divorce or suicide that the sons came to Brussels under dramatic conditions, and the family traveled to England together. Marie Kahle suffered a collapse in health there. In May 1941, all family members were stripped of their German citizenship. Marie Kahle's family turned away from her, her stepmother forbade her to ever enter the family home in Giessen again.

In England, Marie Kahle's three older sons were interned as " Enemy Aliens "; months later, the parents found out that they had been brought to Canada . In the spring of 1941, however, the sons were allowed to return to England. Marie Kahle's greatest fear was that she would become homeless again, and for fear of German persecution she always had an ax by her bed until the end of the war. In fact, in August 1939 there was apparently an attempt to lure Paul Kahle to the German embassy in London under a pretext.

"What would you have done?"

Mackes Edge of the Forest (1910)

In 1945 Marie Kahle published her book What would you have done? , in which she described her experiences in Bonn and the escape of her family. It took more than 50 years for the book to be translated into German. A French edition with the title Tous les Allemands n'ont pas un coeur de pierre has been available since 2001.

Marie Kahle died in 1948 at the age of 55. Her early death was the result of Raynaud's syndrome , which was probably caused by mental and physical exhaustion during the Nazi era. "Above all difficulties, however, was the great satisfaction of having saved her sons from the Nazi regime, from ideological appropriation, military service, imprisonment in the camp and death, which Marie Kahle kept in mind in difficult times."

Marie Kahle's son John H. Kahle (formerly Hans Hermann Kahle ) († 2003) joined the German foreign service in 1950 . From 1973 to 1976 he was Secretary General of the Goethe Institute , from 1977 to 1980 Ambassador to Khartoum , Sudan and from 1980 to 1985 Ambassador to Tunis , Tunisia . He was married to the Swedish journalist Sigrid Kahle . In 2002, his name came into the public eye in connection with a picture by August Macke : The picture of the edge of the forest was found by a passer-by in the bulky waste in front of the former house of the Kahles, and the heirs of the former Jewish owner demanded that it be returned. After the house of the Kahles was sold by the Nazi authorities, the picture hung in the new owner's room for years. The value of the painting was unknown to them. Kahle stated that this picture was not one of the valuables kept by the Kahles, but was given to the family by a grateful Jewish neighbor. The picture is on permanent loan at the Kunstmuseum Bonn .

Honored by the city of Bonn

A street in Bonn's federal district is now called “Marie-Kahle-Allee”. Originally there was a proposal to rename the street named after Walter Flex in 1938 after Marie Kahle. That was rejected by the city. Then a remote road was proposed in a settlement in Ückesdorf. John H. Kahle, the last living son of Marie Kahles, and his wife Sigrid refused. Ultimately, in 2000, the former “Trajektstraße” on the back of the Bundeskunsthalle in Bonn was renamed Marie-Kahle-Allee.

By resolution of the Bonn City Council, the fourth comprehensive school in Bonn was named after Marie Kahle in the 2010/11 school year.

Marie Kahle is one of the Bonn personalities whose portrait has been admitted to Bonngasse, Bonn's "Walk of Fame" since 2005.

The Protestant church districts of Bonn and Bad Godesberg-Voreifel have been awarding the Marie Kahle Prize for successful integration and refugee work in three categories since 2018.

literature

  • Marie Kahle: What would you have done? The Story of the Escape of the Kahle Family from Nazi Germany , London 1945.
  • Marie Kahle / Paul Kahle: What would you have done? The escape of the Kahle family from Nazi Germany / The University of Bonn before and during the Nazi era . Bouvier, Bonn 1998, ISBN 3-416-02806-6 .
  • Christine Schirrmacher : Marie Kahle (1893–1948): Bonn professor's wife, educator and opponent of the Nazi regime . In: Andrea Stieldorf / Ursula Mättig / Ines Neffgen (eds.): But suddenly now emancipated, science wants to drive it. Women at the University of Cologne (1918–2018) (=  Bonn writings on the history of universities and science . No. 9 ). V&R unipress, Göttingen 2018, ISBN 978-3-8471-0894-8 , p. 137-164 .
  • Uta Gerhardt , Thomas Karlauf (ed.): Never go back to this country. Eyewitnesses report on the November pogroms 1938 , List Verlag, Berlin 2011, ISBN 978-3-548-61012-2 .

Web links

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

References and comments

  1. ↑ a b Schirrmacher, Marie Kahle , p. 140.
  2. ↑ Schirrmacher, Marie Kahle , p. 142.
  3. ↑ Schirrmacher, Marie Kahle , p. 145.
  4. ↑ Schirrmacher, Marie Kahle , p. 146.
  5. ↑ Schirrmacher, Marie Kahle , p. 147.
  6. ↑ Schirrmacher, Marie Kahle , p. 147 f.
  7. ↑ Schirrmacher, Marie Kahle , p. 148 f.
  8. ↑ Schirrmacher, Marie Kahle , p. 149.
  9. ↑ Schirrmacher, Marie Kahle , p. 149 f.
  10. ↑ Goldstein, Emilie - Stolperstein Initiative Göppingen. In: stolpersteine-gp.de. January 26, 1939. Retrieved January 18, 2019 .
  11. ↑ Schirrmacher, Marie Kahle , p. 150 f.
  12. ^ The persecution and murder of European Jews by National Socialist Germany , Oldenbourg Verlag, Munich, 2009, Volume 2, p. 408, ISBN 978-3-486-58523-0
  13. ↑ Schirrmacher, Marie Kahle , p. 152 f.
  14. ↑ Schirrmacher, Marie Kahle , p. 153.
  15. ↑ Schirrmacher, Marie Kahle , p. 155 f.
  16. ↑ Schirrmacher, Marie Kahle , p. 157 f.
  17. ↑ a b Schirrmacher, Marie Kahle , p. 159.
  18. ↑ EHRI - Kahle, Hans Hermann. In: portal.ehri-project.eu. March 17, 2015, accessed January 18, 2019 .
  19. ↑ The riddle surrounding Macke's picture of bulky waste is finally solved. In: general-anzeiger-bonn.de. January 15, 2016, accessed January 18, 2019 .
  20. ↑ Lto: The August Macke Bonn Process: Who owns the art in the garbage? In: lto.de. June 28, 2010, accessed January 18, 2019 .
  21. ^ Marie-Kahle-Allee in the Bonn street cadastre
  22. ^ Walter-Flex-Straße in the Bonn street cadastre
  23. ^ LVR-Portal Rhenish History: Marie Kahle (1893-1948), Bonn professor's wife and assistant to persecuted Jews (accessed on April 28, 2015)
  24. ↑ bonn.de: 4th comprehensive school is now called Marie-Kahle-Gesamtschule (accessed on April 28, 2015)
  25. ↑ https://www.diakonischeswerk-bonn.de/unsere-angebote/erwachsene/stadtteilarbeit/koordination-fluechtlingshilfe/marie-kahle-preis
  26. ↑ The volume contains reports collected by Edward Hartshorne and others as early as 1939/40 . Report by Maria Kahle pp. 129–132 and judgment of the University of Bonn against Wilhelm Kahle pp. 233f.
personal data
SURNAME Bald, Marie
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Gisevius, Marie (maiden name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Victims of the Nazi era
DATE OF BIRTH May 6, 1893
PLACE OF BIRTH Dahme
DATE OF DEATH December 18, 1948
Place of death London