Ortrud Schaale

Ortrud Schaale , née Domke (born December 8, 1914 in Moshi , German East Africa , † January 1, 1986 in Groebenzell near Munich ) was a German teacher in the Azores .

Life

Schaale's parents Bruno Domke and his wife Magdalene Schönberg ran the Geraragua farm on the western slope of Kilimanjaro . After the First World War , the family had to leave the country. After a short stopover in Germany, she emigrated to Venezuela . Ortrud Schaale grew up there on a coffee farm in Los Teques with three siblings.

At the end of the 1920s she returned to Germany alone and attended the commercial school in Lübeck . She then worked as a secretary at a shipyard in Kiel, where she lived with her uncle Hans Bütow (naval officer) . In 1941 she married the Holstein farmer's son Hans Schaale, who served in Hermann Göring's Parachute Panzer Division 1 and died in 1946 while a Soviet prisoner of war.

In 1950 she moved with her only son Hartmut to live with their parents in the Azores . There she gradually gained great recognition as a teacher of German, English and sports at the Escola Industrial e Comercial de Ponta Delgada secondary school . In addition, she was the rediscoverer of the almost forgotten Azorean folklore, which she documented in decades of hard work and, with her dance group, founded in 1957, also presented it on Portuguese television at the end of the 1960s.

As a pensioner, she lived with her son in Reinbek from 1980 and finally in Douala / Cameroon from 1983 . In 1984 she went to Munich for cancer treatment and died on January 1, 1986 in Gröbenzell near Munich.

Awards

Because of her cultural achievements, she was awarded the Federal Cross of Merit on ribbon by Federal President Gustav Heinemann on December 19, 1973 . The city council of Ponta Delgada honored her posthumously with a certificate of honor in 2005.

Works

• À beira do meu caminho . Ponta Delgada, no year [1971] (considerations on Azorean folklore).

swell

• Award certificate of the Federal Cross of Merit on ribbon from December 19, 1973
• Ernest Kay: The World Who's Who of Women . 4th edition International Biographical Center, Cambridge 1978, ISBN 0-900332-47-6 , p. 1035.
• Christiane Schnurbein: The forgotten ladies . SKG-Verlag, Zusmarshausen 2003, ISBN 3-937270-03-5 .
• Camara Municipal de Ponta Delgada: Diploma de Reconhecimento Municipal . Ponta Delgada, 2005.
• Grupo Folclórico da Ilha Verde . Edição de Discos Rapsódia, Lda., Porto, 1970, EPF 5.522 and 5.523. (Records 45 rpm)