Marta Fraenkel

Marta Fraenkel 1929 on a photograph by Genja Jonas

Marta Fraenkel (born December 19, 1896 in Cologne ; died August 9, 1976 in New York , USA ) was a German doctor. The scientific director of the German Hygiene Museum was involved in the organization of numerous exhibitions that served to provide health education.

Life

Fraenkel studied medicine from 1916 at the universities in Frankfurt am Main and Bonn . She received her doctorate in Frankfurt in 1922. In 1924 she worked as a research assistant to Albrecht Bethe at the Physiological Institute in Frankfurt. From 1925 to 1927 she worked as a scientific manager at the Great Exhibition for Health Care, Social Care and Physical Exercise (GeSoLei) in Düsseldorf . After that she was the managing director of the Reich Museum for Social and Economic Studies , also in Düsseldorf, until 1929 .

In 1929 she went to Dresden , where she was the scientific director of the Second International Hygiene Exhibition . In 1930 she was a clerk in the hygiene department of the League of Nations in Geneva, after which she moved back to Dresden, where she married the editor-in-chief of Dresdner Neuesten Nachrichten , Theodor Schulze, in 1931 . Until 1933 she was director of the women's department of the International Health Service at the German Hygiene Museum in Dresden. Because of her Jewish origins, she was dismissed from her position in 1933.

Their marriage was divorced on July 27, 1935. In the same year she fled to Brussels, where she worked as a research assistant at the Free University of Brussels until 1938 . Fraenkel emigrated to the United States in 1938, where she worked at the Welfare Council in New York until 1944 and then for three years as a medical advisor to the US government in Washington. She retired in 1965 and died in 1976 in her adopted home.

Positions as scientific director of the hygiene exhibition

As scientific director of the International Hygiene Exhibition 1930/1931, Marta Fraenkel had a strong influence on the women-specific topics presented there. This was expressed, for example, in the inclusion of a thematic section on women in family and work . In 1931 Fraenkel wrote in retrospect about this area of ​​the exhibition : "[...] it should have actually been possible to summarize what had to be shown once together."

With the thematic statements it was intended to make the visitors aware of everyday issues as concise theses. This included the “job of housewife as a profession ” in order to contradict the “long outdated” separation of women in the household versus women in work . Within this department, the hygiene exhibition showed career opportunities for women, ways of their training and the limits of professional stress. In this context, Marta Fraenkel pointed to the untenability of those opinions that were circulating under the impression of the global economic crisis , which "saw the causes and sources of economic hardship!" In working women. She argued that only two percent of working women could be replaced by male workers.

Marta Fraenkel exercised further conceptual influence in the exhibition groups industrial and industrial hygiene , physical exercises and in the responsibility for the overall processing in the field of theoretical-statistical department of the hospital system. In the foreword to the exhibition catalog she commented on questions of hygienic lifestyle with regard to the “low health of a people who went through war and the post-war period” . She referred to an open space policy appropriate to the settlement sector , to relate the new results from health research to the reduced living index , to the need for a fashion design based on hygienic and rational aspects or the decline in the number of births and their consequences for health care and Social legislation. For the demographic situation at that time with a “decline in the birth rate and an increase in the elderly”, she forecast new “socio-hygienic and socio-political” problems and points to upcoming “soul-hygienic” tasks for the “people of the elderly”.

Honors

• Marta Fraenkel Hall in the German Hygiene Museum in Dresden
• Marta-Fraenkel-Str. in the Leipzig suburb of Dresden

Web links

• Literature by and about Marta Fraenkel in the catalog of the German National Library
• Street names in Dresden - a man's business? (Biographies of Dresden personalities, p. 13, PDF file; 184 kB)

Individual evidence

1. ^ Albrecht Scholz: Jewish Doctors in Dresden in the 20th Century . In: Dresdner Hefte 45: Between Integration and Destruction. Jewish life in Dresden in the 19th and 20th centuries . Dresdner Geschichtsverein, Dresden 1996, pp. 63–71, here p. 67.
2. ↑ Marta Fraenkel: The International. Hygiene exhibition 1930/31. Highlights on content and presentation . In: Georg Seiring (ed.), Marta Fraenkel (compiled, edited): 10 years of exhibition work in Dresden. Dresden 1931, pp. 221-272
3. ^ Carlwalter Straßhausen (management, ed.) Et al .: International Hygiene Exhibition Dresden 1930. Official guide . Verlag der Internationale Hygiene-Ausstellung, Dresden 1930, pp. 81–86
4. ^ German Hygiene Museum: Marta-Fraenkel-Saal . on www.dhmd.de
5. ↑ OSM: position .