Stoatley Rough School

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The Stoatley Rough School was a school founded in 1934 by Hilde Lion with the help of the English Quakers , and in particular with the help of Bertha Bracey , through which children who had fled the German Reich were to be introduced to the British educational system. It belongs to the group of schools in exile founded by German refugees or by anti-Nazis living abroad . The school was based in Haslemere in southern England.

The establishment of the Stoatley Rough School

Unlike many other schools in exile that came into being after 1933, the Stoatley Rough School is not founded by German school or rural education teachers. It is based much more on the initiative of a woman who came from social work and social pedagogy and from the women's movement.

Because of her Jewish descent, Hilde Lion had to give up her work at the German Academy for Social and Educational Women’s Work in 1933 and emigrated to Great Britain. How and where the idea of ​​founding a school in England arose in this context is not documented. The website 1934 - The Founding of Stoatley Rough School only states that Hilde Lion contacted the English Quakers in December 1933 and asked them to support their plans to set up a small school that would teach German refugee children to English schools should prepare. Elsewhere it is said that Hilde Lion came to England on November 17, 1933 with the intention of doing research on comparative pedagogy. At the time, she was already in contact with the Germany Emergency Committee (GEC) and had started working for the committee as a consultant.

The GEC welcomed the idea for this school, but was not financially able to support it. The head of the GEC, however, Bertha Bracey , made Hilde Lion with “Mrs. Vernon of Hampstead ”, which in turn had offered the GEC a fully furnished house in Haslemere that was available rent-free for charity. Hilde Lion accepted the offer and started a fundraising campaign in March and May 1934 in order to finance the founding of the school.

Ms. Vernon and Bertha Bracey became members of the school council and school committee. Bertha Bracey remained closely associated with the school until it closed in 1960.

The school opened in April 1934 with the following public announcement:

"Owing to the present position in Germany many children are unable to complete their education in their own country. As the English educational system is so highly developed many parents are considering the question of sending their children to English schools. The immediate admittance of these children into English schools brings forward various difficulties, such as the lack of knowledge of the English language, and the great difference in the school curriculum. It is therefore proposed to start a temporary school in order to prepare the children for an English education. The need for such a school has been confirmed by the following societies:
Woburn House, the Academic Assistance Council, Miss Essinger (New Herrlingen, Kent), the German Emergency Committee of the Society of Friends , Dr. Lead stone, Berlin; to whom many inquiries have been made during the last months.
The school aims at making the children acquainted with English life and customs as far as possible, and at educating them without prejudice against their own country. "

The educational management team

Baumel-Schwartz points to the great dependency of the exile schools working in England on private groups and even more on religious groups such as those of the Quakers. Since the Quaker commitment was very much supported by women, she not only sees it as a question of religious commitment, but also sees a gender-specific component here. She points out that, as with many refugee organizations as a whole, women were often their mainstay - this was also the case with the schools that emerged in the vicinity of the refugee organizations. Baumel-Schwartz names as the reason for this on the one hand traditional gender-specific behaviors with regard to the roles of women in childcare and child-rearing, but on the other hand also the fact that the educational sphere was one of the few areas of women in society in the years before the Second World War offered legitimate prospects for assuming responsibility. But there were also personal traits, which Feidel-Mertz describes as: "Strong women, both as individuals and in groups, exercised an important function in the exile schools."

Christiane Goldenstedt tries to show that such strong women can occasionally lack the necessary sensitivity and are capable of slightly aggressive behavior in the arguments between Hilde Lion and Helmut Kuhn and his wife. The seven-year-old son of the Kuhns, Reinhard, attended the Stoatley Rough School for a short time around the turn of the year 1938/1939 , but could not find his way there and no longer wanted to go there. The parents accepted their child's will, but not Hilde Lion. She strongly reproached the parents, even denied the mother the ability to take responsibility for her child, and insisted on her expertise after she knew best what was good for the boy. The fact that Hilde Lion finally gave in is not least thanks to the mediation of Gertrud Bing . This paid part of the school fees for the son of the Kuhns with funds that Anita Warburg, the sister of Eric M. Warburg , had made available and was friends with Hilde Lion. If you read the documents printed by Goldenstedt, you get to know a Hilde Lion, who Hans Loeser (September 28, 1920 - May 15, 2010), a former student of the Stoatley Rough School - described - besides all admiration and gratitude - as follows: “Unfortunately Could she make life difficult for those she disliked for some reason, or - more often - those whom she had pigeonholed as, say, potential farmers, or as unsuitable - or only suitable - for them academic work. Once you had been categorized in her memory, it was difficult to break that categorization even if the categorization did not fit. ”All of Loeser's memories keep pointing out that this“ pigeonhole ”was not a minor trait of Hilde Lion , but had existential significance for many students who wanted to be accepted at the Stoatley Rough School . She conducted admissions interviews, some of which lasted several hours, with each student and then decided whether someone was suitable for the education leading to a higher school diploma or for the practical areas, housekeeping and agricultural training.

Nevertheless, the women who built up the Stoatley Rough School are proof of both the thesis of strong women and the thesis of women as mainstays, the mainstays of refugee work and related work with children and young refugees : Bertha Bracey from the Quaker side, and from the German side then those who are considered "The Five Principal Teachers at Stoatley Rough". Besides Hilde Lion these are:

  • Eleonore Astfalck (1900–1990)
    She had to leave Germany for political reasons in 1933 and first went to Switzerland with a Jewish family. There she received the offer from Hilde Lion to work at the Stoatley Rough School. She arrived there on March 19, 1934 and took over the position of a "housemother" and a housekeeping teacher. She returned to Germany in 1946.
  • Johanna Nacken (1896–1963)
    She is the least known of the five women. However, like some of the other women, she received her training in the 1920s at what were then the most reform-minded and socially committed socio-educational institutions and continued teaching there after her training. But she is probably the only one of the five women who emigrated not because of a threat of her own from the Nazis, but because of her very close personal relationship with Eleonore Astfalck, with whom she remained privately and professionally connected for decades from the late 1920s.
    In his memoirs, Hans Loeser describes Eleonore Astfalck and Johanna Nacken as "Miss-Astfalck-and-Miss-Nacken (a twosome that, as I soon understood, was more than the sum of one plus one)".
  • Emmy Wolff (1890-1969)
  • Luise Leven (1899–1983)
    She was a music scientist and teacher and got to know the school in 1934 during a "summer school". As a Jew, she had to leave her hometown Krefeld in 1939 and, through Hilde Lion's mediation, received a residence permit for England. She became the school's music teacher and later its deputy director.

Hans Loeser came to the Stoatley Rough School in 1937 , his sister Lise at the beginning of 1938, after she had previously attended the Alpine school home on the Vigiljoch for some time . Loeser later became a well-known lawyer in Boston whose activities against the Vietnam War earned him the hostility of Richard Nixon. In his memories of his school days at Stoatley Rough , he characterizes four of the "Principal Teachers" (Luise Leven had not yet arrived) as follows:

"Four German women educators were in charge. Two of them, Dr. Hilde Lion, the headmistress, and Dr. Emmy Wolff, were academicians and intellectuals, who had held leading positions in the German women's and social work movements. They had lost their jobs because they were Jewish and had emigrated. The other two, Nore Astfalck and Hannah Nacken, came from similar backgrounds in the women's movement and social work, but were more practically inclined. They were not Jewish, and voluntarily left Germany to take this job. As the idealistic but practical persons that they were, they understood that helping refugee children might be their most effective protest against what was then happening in Germany. "

Luise Leven, who came to the Stoatley Rough School as a teacher in 1939 (the years before that she had already attended “summer schools”), following this description, can confidently be attributed to the intellectual group within the “Principal Teachers”.

Other employees of the school

  • Herta Lewent (* 1921) had been Hilde Lions' secretary since 1937. She actually wanted to continue her education at the Stoatley Rough School , but Hilde Lion had appointed her as school secretary and did not allow her to attend classes. In 1944 she became the wife of Hans Loeser.

In his memoirs, Hans Loeser also mentions two English teachers at the school:

  • Miss Dove († 1997), who was called Margaret Faulkner after her marriage and who later took part in the old school meetings. Loeser describes her as a young and very open-minded teacher who had just finished her training shortly before 1937 and who was now teaching English literature and history.
  • Col. Hamilton (presumably Colonel Hamilton), the school's math teacher. Hamilton was, according to Loeser, a rigid ex-army man with a tight language. For him, mathematics was something that had to be learned by heart, but which should never be questioned. Ideas have nothing to do with her; The important thing is to read the mathematics book, listen and memorize everything.

The educational concept

In her already cited article Integration and Formation of Identity: Exile Schools in Great Britain. Hildegard Feidel-Mertz examines the similarities and differences between the Stoatley Rough School and the Bunce Court School founded by Anna Essinger . An important differentiating element for her is that Anna Essinger transferred an already existing school, the "Landschulheim Herrlingen", together with around seventy students and some of her employees to England, while Hilde Lion built her school practically from nothing and at the beginning only had a handful of students to look after. This “building from nothing” has an interesting history: In November 1933, Hilde Lion officially traveled to England for a research program. She wanted to explore the mental and psychological adaptation of children to a new environment. Less researching, however, she immediately began to test her theoretical concept in practice, namely the founding of the school. She showed a willingness to experiment, which is typical for Feidel-Mertz for people who have worked in the environment of Anna von Gierke and the youth home association . And that also applied to her colleagues from the first few hours, Eleonore Astfalck and Johanna Nacken. "The pleasure in shared discovery, dealing with unfamiliar conditions, and accepting challenges and risks became important aspects of the school program. In collaboration with an English woman who established connections with the Girl Guides and the Scouts, the teachers tried out all possible methods to introduce children as quickly as possible to the English language, and secondly to the English environment as a form of spiritual relationship. " The children had been driven from their homeland. Hilde Lion didn't want this to appear as a negative experience, but rather to gain positive aspects: "You have to make them explorers who, compared to the other children, have a great chance of seeing a lot of the world as young people."

Intercultural education and relationships

The Stoatley Rough School was dependent from the beginning of British shooting children and need the cooperation of British teachers. That was a necessity on the one hand, but also a concept on the other. The school wanted intercultural exchange, and that also beyond the school. It opened up to the immediate neighborhood and let them participate in school events and celebrations. Sports events between the students and children from the surrounding area (e.g. English schools) were also part of the program, as were holiday courses for British students in the summer months. Conversely, the Stoatley Rough School also met with a lot of sympathy from the local population, which was particularly evident in the gifts from the neighborhood for the students at Christmas time.

As important as the exchange with the English neighborhood was for the school, it was also trying hard to win over more Jewish children from Germany (which was also a financial survival concept). Remarkably, in the years after the school was founded, Hilde Lion repeatedly traveled to Germany to advertise the school there and to convince parents to send their children to England. Noteworthy because, as a Jew living abroad, she had to expect difficulties entering and leaving the country. But that didn’t deter her or Emmy Wolff, who was also visiting Germany more often. However, her friends who remained in Germany did not have the courage they showed, as an incident on the occasion of Emmy Wolff's visit to Gertrud Bäumer at Christmas 1938 shows. Some of the other women invited to this Christmas party canceled their participation because they considered meeting an exile to be too dangerous for professional reasons. Gertrud Bäumer then canceled the Christmas party completely.

But until 1938 it was possible and important for Hilde Lion to use her relations with Germany to win children over to her school. She cultivated her connections to Berlin: The welfare department of the Reich Representation of Jews in Germany , the Jüdischer Kulturbund and their friends and former colleagues were asked by her to point out the Stoatley Rough School and recommend it.

It is probably thanks to such advertising measures that Emmy Wolff was able to bring a group of 16 children from Germany to England in January 1938, months before the start of the Kindertransporte . And the website "Emigration: 1934-1939" (see web links) contains a wealth of other reports that show how the lectures by Hilde Lion and Emmy Wolff convinced a large number of parents to send their children to England.

Until 1938, however, it wasn't just teachers who regularly traveled to Germany. As the school closed during the Christmas break for the first four years, some of the children accompanied the teachers on their visits to Germany and returned to their families during the winter break.

Maintaining religious and cultural identity

Hilde Lion was Jewish, but her relationship with Judaism was rather loose. This did not rule out that she felt a bond with the Jewish community as a community of fate. Her educational approach was not unaffected by this: On the one hand, she sought harmony with the central principles of Jewish ethics and social doctrine, but also felt obliged to an interdenominational humanitarian approach. This was also evident from the way in which the school celebrated Friday evening, the beginning of the traditional Jewish Sabbath celebration. Sometimes a Protestant or Catholic priest arranged the evening, other times a rabbi came from London. But it could also be that an outstanding artistic performance was offered on Friday evening, for example by Emmy Wolff, who pursued literary interests, or by Luise Leven, who organized musical evenings.

Eleonore Astfalck, who saw herself as a non-religious socialist, but nevertheless gave religious lessons from time to time because she considered it necessary in the interests of the children, criticized all the more attempts by Christians to influence Jewish refugee children in questions of faith. She told of an eight-year-old girl who came to Stoatley Rough School because her adoption by English non-Jewish adoptive parents failed because she insisted on being Jewish. For Astfalck, this insistence on the still unconscious Jewish identity was just as important for the development of a child's own identity as the maintenance of memories of a “German heritage”. It was her intention to protect the children from cultural uprooting or to keep them from having to deny their religious or cultural origins.

practical work

In contrast to the war years, when the pupils had to work on the farm in order to improve the school's rationed supply of food (see below), the pupils' occasional participation in doing everyday work was part of the concept the school. There were no classes on so-called “workdays”. The students appeared in work clothes and each was given a specific task: cleaning the entire house, preserving food for later use, mending clothes, repairing and making furniture, painting and much more. “Work days weren't something most of us moaned about. We want you. It was fun working as part of a team, free from academic work, and getting useful results. Those days strengthened the prevailing sense of camaraderie, and the involvement of the teachers brought them closer to us and was a great way to get to know them better. Usually the working day ended with a better than usual meal, and afterwards you sat around one of the rare log fires, talked and sang. "

How to speak English

In many of the reports about the Stoatley Rough School it is evident that teaching English must have been a difficult undertaking. There were a few English teachers, an English gardener and an English craftsman, and all the other adults at the school were German. English was the official language, but it was strange English that was spoken here. It was heavily accented, full of phrases that had been translated literally from German or that were a mixture of German and English. Loeser quotes examples: “I'll give it a try.” (“I want to try it”) or “I am house today.” (“I have house duty today.”). Barbara Wolfenden also pays attention to this phenomenon. Although learning the English language had always been a top priority for the school management, a mixture of German and English was predominant in everyday school life until 1941. The adults in particular mostly spoke German among themselves, which meant that it was not uncommon for the English teachers to be excluded from the conversations and cut off from information.

With the growing anti-German mood in England after the outbreak of World War II, however, Hilde Lion saw the language behavior that was previously tolerated as a danger to the school's existence and requested that from now on only speaking English. However, this also resulted in a contradiction, because the German language and cultural environment was actually one of the essentials of the school. This was supposed to give the children, who had already lost a lot, security and security. This included that the children in Emmy Wolff's lessons read the great German classics and learned to recite passages from classical German poetry. The few English children who had no idea of ​​the German language and mostly did not know what they were reciting were also exposed to this subject matter. Only the few English teachers contributed to the multicultural experience.

Wolfenden also reports on a few students, students of German descent, who left school because they thought they were "too Germanic". Others, including Hans Loeser and Herta Lewent, could not have been persuaded for anything in the world to voluntarily give up the warmth, the feeling of comfort and home that the Stoatley Rough School offered them. Gradually, however, the process of improving the students' English skills was successful. It was not an easy path, because even a native teacher like Miss Dove was not a person familiar with the methods of language acquisition. She had come to the school as a teacher of English literature and had to develop her own methods in order to reach even the children who did not yet speak English at all. New students began to become more attuned to language skills, and older students also helped newcomers learn languages. It was becoming fashionable for older students to switch between languages, and newcomers also ran into difficulties in the 1940s when their English language skills were insufficient. Linguistic misunderstandings still did not rule out. When a boy asked the youngsters digging on a slope on the farm premises whether they also had picks, he received the answer: “Ve haff two big sows and a dozen little picks.” (“We have two big sows and a dozen little pigs. ")

1936: The decision to continue the school

The lease negotiated with Mrs. Vernon was limited to two years in 1934, since at the time the contract was signed it was not foreseeable how the Stoatley Rough School experiment would develop. The increase in the number of students in 1935 therefore raised the question of the future of the school. The political situation in Germany had not changed and the increasing repressive policies of the Nazi regime in 1935 reaffirmed the need to continue school. The question was not so much whether the school should end the temporary experiment, but rather whether the school should stay in Stoatley Rough or find larger and more suitable premises.

Bertha Bracey and Hilde Lion decided that the school should continue and stay at the previous location. At the same time, a new construction for the sponsorship of the school was decided. A corporation was founded under English law, a company with limited gurarantee . This type of company, which is usually chosen in England for non-profit companies, is similar to a German association.

With the conversion of the school into a "Company with limited Gurarantee" was also accompanied by the fact that from 1937 it acted as a secondary school that led to university entrance qualifications or prepared for the Cambridge Certificate .

The different school offers

The Stoatley Rough School was not exclusively geared towards preparing for an academic education, but also offered very practice-oriented courses. These included the housekeeping courses for girls and, from 1937, the intensified agricultural courses.

The background to these branches of education, which around 1937 was attended by around half of the total number of students, cannot be clearly clarified. Possibly they were set up to circumvent the English entry regulations, in which it was announced that the courses served to prepare for emigration to Palestine, so the participants were only temporarily in England. In his retrospective, Loeser claims, on the other hand, that there was a well-intentioned but wrong concept behind it, in which it was assumed that for most refugee children the future would only lie in practical professions. In fact, many children have been robbed of the chance of a better education by training them to be household helpers in the homes of wealthy families or to become farmers. Practically none of the Stoatley Rough graduates later worked as farmers, household helpers or craftsmen.

In the housekeeping courses, the girls, who are usually 14 to 18 years old, received instruction in the care and management of a kitchen, laundry room and kitchen garden. Everything was designed to work in the household of a modern English country house. English lessons were also necessary. In 1941, the National Council for Domestic Studies even offered preparation for an examination, which some girls took part and passed.

The agricultural department, the Farm School, was founded in 1938 after Mrs. Vernon had given the school permission to use the fields around it. It was about seven hectares of land with a small country house. This was prepared as additional accommodation for the students, and another house was built for the farm. Loeser indicates that this branch of training, which was set up in cooperation with local authorities and also included cooperation with the state "Guilford Technical Institute", did not meet the expectations placed on it. Apparently the intention was to qualify young people for emigration to the British overseas territories, but only three boys actually did so, whereby the emigration would have offered little opportunities for the school's graduates , mainly due to the restrictive immigration policy of the Dominions . This led to a completely new situation: There were only very few regular farm students left, but after the outbreak of World War II in September 1939, students from all branches of the school had to work on the farm to obtain the now rationed food through products to be able to complement one's own agriculture.

1938 and the following years

It has already been pointed out that in January 1938 Emmy Wolff had brought a group of 16 children from Germany to the Stoetley Rough School . This was an expression of the worsening situation for Jews in Germany. The annexation of Austria , the incorporation of the Sudetenland into the German Reich and the Italian racial legislation of 1938 motivated more and more people to bring their children to safety. These waves of children, which spilled over to England throughout 1938, became even larger after the November pogroms . To clarify the situation, Feidel-Mertz quotes a circular from Hilde Lion:

"Little ones of every age, the youngest is three years old, the child of a single mother with four children who are all staying with us. The cireumstances involved us in opening our doors as wide it possible, so that sometimes something tiny crawls in and sometimes a fully-grovm man comes in as well. Our ability to accommodate such a great number of people at all on our extensive, but nevertheless limited, premises depended upon the fact that we could build, albeit in discrete form. We accommodated our people to a certain extent in bungalows that are converted military barracks . "

Mostly Austrian children were housed in these barracks because they only wanted to stay in England temporarily. In this way, it was possible to maintain everyday school life largely smoothly without constantly disturbing it through frequent arrivals and departures. When in 1940 the Bunce Court School had to be evacuated because of its proximity to the coast, a small group of children were also accommodated at the Stoatley Rough School , who had been spared the evacuation.

The outbreak of World War II had far-reaching consequences for school life as a whole. Travel had to be restricted to within five miles of the school, the school car was shut down, the school's radios were confiscated, and all private cameras had to be turned over. Children and employees of the school were checked by the "Guildford Aliens Tribunal" in October 1939, but fortunately they were not classified as enemy aliens . Except for the travel restrictions, a relatively normal school life could be continued; however, a curfew had to be observed by those residents who were over sixteen years old. The cameras were also returned and the school was allowed to use the car again.

This relatively relaxed situation ended in April 1940. The end of the “Phoney War” and the invasion of Denmark, Norway, the Netherlands and France in early May 1940 was followed by a sudden intensification of xenophobic sentiment in Great Britain. Schoolchildren were interned at times. Much of the school environment was declared a restricted military area, and an important Royal Air Force observation post was set up in the immediate vicinity.

the post war period

Whether and when the management of the Stoatley Rough School was transferred to Luise Leven after the end of the Second World War cannot be conclusively determined. What is certain is that after 1945 the meaning of the school as a “safe haven” for refugee children had become obsolete and had to be given a new purpose. According to Feidel-Mertz, this task was primarily driven by Luise Leven, who ensured that the school could continue to operate as an international school with interdenominational standards until 1960. In a sense , the Stoatley Rough School remained true to its tradition as a school for refugee children : It always kept a number of places free for children of refugees from the GDR .

Hilde Lion and Luise Leven continued to maintain close contacts with their former students. The alumni made a significant contribution to keeping the memories of their school alive and created many prerequisites for its history to be reconstructed in research. A very good impression of this is given by the websites (see links below) designed by The Stoatley Rough School History Steering Committee (later the Stoatley Rough School Association ), which has been dedicated to the preservation, cataloging and research of historical records about the school since July 1991.

The student body

“The refugee children admitted to these schools in exile were, in a sense, a privileged minority, characterized by the fact that the children were kindly introduced into them by older classmates who had previously had similar experiences. The vast majority of refugee children attended state schools as individuals, and while this ensured they learned English more quickly, it also exposed some of them to attempts at indoctrination or at least verbal abuse that led to some culture shock. "

The “privileged status” mentioned here, which is said to have ensured a “feel-good atmosphere” for new pupils, is not only an expression of an educational concept, but also an expression of the children's parents' financial performance and willingness to perform. The fact that the school held free places or scholarships were available for less affluent children does not change anything. This becomes clear in the above-mentioned dispute between the Kuhn family and Hilde Lion about the whereabouts of the Kuhn's son at the school. In a letter to Gertud Bing, Käthe Kuhn makes the following calculation: “We pay 2 1/2 pounds a month for the child; the other side pays £ 5, making £ 7½. If I send the boy to a day school where, unlike Stoatley Rough, he also has afternoon classes, I pay £ 2 a month. You will believe me that I don't need 5 1/2 pounds for his maintenance. "

Another example illustrates which worlds collided here. Hans Loeser, who has already been mentioned and quoted several times, traveled as a “first-class passenger” on an ocean liner from Bremerhaven to Southampton in 1937, and when he arrived in Haslemere by train, he was naturally chauffeured to school in a taxi. But he also emphatically confirms the “welcoming culture” at the school: “Upon arrival a student guide showed me through the house and took me to a room known as 'The Tin', where I met Klaus Zedner, with whom I was to share that room. [..] Over the next few days, as Klaus and I quickly became friends, he briefed me on all essential facts, such as food, teachers and other kids, particularly of course the girls. ”Loeser reflects on his better financial position - and at the same time makes it clear that Hilde Lion also followed a financial calculation when choosing her students: “To a certain extent, finances also influenced her calculation. Many thought it wasn't as much as it actually was, but the school was a financially weak company and it was their responsibility to make ends meet. Anyway, I was a paying student because my parents could afford to pay for full tuition in England, even though this was almost ten times the actual monthly payments due to German harassment. Many other children at the school weren't so happy. "

Giving an overview of the students at Stoatley Rough School would be a very difficult undertaking. However, the school links listed below reveal many student names and make them tangible as people in photos .; and there are also memories of individual students from their school days at the Stoatley Rough School .

A poetic memory

Gerda Kamilla Mayer (born June 9, 1927) is an English poet. She comes from a Jewish family from Karlovy Vary and came to England in 1939 on a Kindertransport from Prague. She first attended a boarding school in Swanage , where she did not feel comfortable. When this school threatened to end in 1942, she came to the Stoatley Rough School , where she graduated from school in 1944. In the 1970s she wrote the following poem in memory of her school days there and of her three teachers Hilde Lion, Emmy Wolf and Luise Leven.

A LION, A WOLF AND A FOX
ON LION ON WOLF AND A FOX
Stoatley Rough, Haslemere, 1942-1944
I went to school in a forest where I was taught
By a lion, a wolf and a fox.
How the lion shone! As he paced across the sky
We grew brown-limbed in his warmth and among the green leaves.

The fox was a musician. O cunning magician you lured
A small stream from its course with your Forellenlied ,
Teaching it Schubert; and made the children's voices
All sound like early morning and auguries for a fine day.

Now the wolf was a poet and somewhat gray and reserved,
Something of a lone wolf - thoughts were his pack;
There was a garden in that forest, walled with climbing roses,
Where we would sit or lie and hear the Wolf recite.

And sometimes we would listen, and sometimes the voice
Would turn into sunlight on the wall or into a butterfly
over the grass. It was the garden of poetry and so
Words would turn into flowers and trees into verse.

This morning I received the gray pelt of a wolf,
And the fox and the lion write they are growing old;
That forest lies many years back, but we were in luck
To pass for a spell through that sunny and musical land.		 I went to school in a forest where I was
tutored by a lion, a wolf and a fox.
How the lion shone! As he crossed the sky
we grew brown limbed in his warmth and under the green leaves.

The fox was a musician. O cunning magician, you brought
a small stream of its course from with your trout song ,
teaching test him Schubert; and made the children's voices
sound like early morning and the announcement of a wonderful day.

The wolf was a poet now, a little gray and reserved,
Like a lone wolf - thoughts were his entourage;
There was a garden in this forest, surrounded by climbing roses,
Where we would sit or lie to listen to the wolf talk.

And sometimes we would listen, and sometimes
The Voice would turn into the sunlight on the wall or into
a butterfly over the grass. It was the garden of poetry,
And so words turned into flowers and trees into verse.

That morning I received the gray skin of a wolf,
And the fox and the lion write that they are getting old;
This forest was many years ago, but we were lucky enough
to roam this sunny and musical land for a while.

literature

  • Manfred Berger : Hilde Lion - founder of a country school home in exile in England , in: Zeitschrift für Erlebnispädagogik 2004 / H. 7, pp. 48-63
  • Hildegard Feidel-Mertz (Hrsg.): Schools in exile. Repressed pedagogy after 1933 . rororo, Reinbek, 1983, ISBN 3-499-17789-7
  • Hildegard Feidel-Mertz : Education in exile after 1933. Education for survival. Pictures at an exhibition . dipa publishing house, Frankfurt am Main, 1990, ISBN 3-7638-0520-6
  • Hildegard Feidel-Mertz (updated version: Hermann Schnorbach): The pedagogy of the rural education homes in exile , in: Inge Hansen-Schaberg (ed.): Landerziehungsheim-Pädagogik , new edition, reform pedagogical school concepts, volume 2, Schneider Verlag Hohengehren GmbH, Baltmannsweiler, 2012 , ISBN 978-3-8340-0962-3 , pp. 183-206.
  • Hildegard Feidel-Mertz : Integration and Formation of Identity: Exile Schools in Great Britain. In: Shofar: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Jewish Studies , Fall2004, Vol. 23 Issue 1, p71-84 (translated into English by Andrea Hammel)
  • Judith Tydor Baumel-Schwartz: Never look back. The Jewish refugee children in Great Britain, 1938-1945 , Purdue University Press, West Lafayette, Ind., 2012, ISBN 978-1-557-53612-9 . (In particular the chapter "Jewish Children in Hitler's Germany and School Migration to Great Britain, 1933-38", pp. 28-34)
  • Katharine Whitaker, Michael Johnson: Stoatley Rough School 1934-1960, Stoatley Rough School History Committee, Bushey Watford 1994 (in English).
  • Barbara Wolfenden: Little Holocaust Survivors: And the English School That Saved Them , Greenwood Publishing Group, 2008, ISBN 9781846450532 . An excerpt is available on the Internet: Children, speak English!
  • Christiane Goldenstedt: “You haunted me at night.” - The Kuhn family in exile , Norderstedt, Books on Demand, 2013, ISBN 978-3-7322-0766-4 . The controversy between the Kuhn family and Hilde Lion can largely be viewed on Google Books: The controversy about Reinhard Kuhn
  • Gerda Mayer: Bernini's Cat , New & Selected Poems, IRON Press, Manchester, 1999, ISBN 0-906228 69 7 (Gerda Mayer: A LION, A WOLF AND A FOX, Stoatley Rough, Haslemere, 1942-1944 , p. 48)

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ a b c 1934 - The Founding of Stoatley Rough School  ( page no longer available , search in web archives )  Info: The link was automatically marked as defective. Please check the link according to the instructions and then remove this notice.@1@ 2Template: Dead Link / www.geo.brown.edubrownnasadatacenter  
  2. ↑ a b The Five Principal Teachers at Stoatley Rough ( Memento of the original from June 20, 2016 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / www.geo.brown.edu
  3. ↑ Appeal in German translation: “Due to the current situation in Germany, many children are not able to complete their education in their own country. Because the English education system is so sophisticated, many parents consider sending their children to English schools. The immediate entry of these children into English schools brings with it various difficulties, such as the lack of knowledge of the English language and the large difference in the school curriculum. It is therefore suggested that, on a temporary basis, start with a school that helps prepare children for the English education system. The need for such a school has been confirmed by the following associations:
    Woburn House, the Academic Assistance Council, Miss Essinger (New Herrlingen, Kent), the German Emergency Committee of the Society of Friends, Dr. Pencil, Berlin, which has received many inquiries in the last few months.
    The school aims to familiarize the children as much as possible with English life and customs and to educate them without prejudice against their own country. "
  4. ↑ For the history of the "Academic Assistance Council" see: The rescue of refugee scholars . “Woburn House” is in the appeal for the “Jewish Refugee Committee” in London.
  5. ↑ Judith Tydor Baumel-Schwartz: Never look back , pp. 32–33
  6. ↑ Hildegard Feidel-Mertz: Integration and Formation of Identity , p. 75. "Strong women, both as individuals and in groups, performed an important function in schools in exile."
  7. ↑ Christiane Goldenstedt: "You haunted me at night." , Pp. 41–62. The richly documented controversy can largely be traced via Google Books.
  8. ↑ a b c d e f g h i j k l Hans Loeser's Stoatley Rough Memories
  9. ↑ In the original: "She was unfortunately also able to make life hard for those whom she didn't like for some reason or - more often - those whom she had wrongly pigeonholed as, say, potential farmers, or as not suited - or only suited - for academic work. Once one became classified in her mind, it was hard to break out even though the classification didn't fit. "
  10. ↑ There is no separate article about Emmy Wolff in the German Wikipedia. Her biography is presented in detail on the website of the "Kölner Frauengeschichtsverein eV": Emmy Wolff .
  11. ^ Nixon "enemy" 'Hans Loeser: admired, civic-minded lawyer
  12. ^ Translation: "Four German female educators were responsible. Two of them, Hilde Lion, the director, and Emmy Wolff, were academics and intellectuals who had accompanied leading positions in the German women's and social work movements. Because they were Jewish, they had lost their jobs and emigrated. The other two, Nora Astfalck and Hannah Nacken, had similar backgrounds in the women's movement and social work, but they were more practical. You were not Jewish and left Germany voluntarily to take on this job. As the idealistic but practical people they were, they understood that being able to help refugee children would be their most effective protest against what was happening in Germany at the time. ”However,
    Loeser overlooked the fact that Astfalck's departure from Germany was not quite either it happened voluntarily: for political reasons she had to expect persecution by the Nazis.
  13. ^ Nixon "enemy" 'Hans Loeser: admired, civic-minded lawyer
  14. ↑ Hildegard Feidel-Mertz: Integration and Formation of Identity , p. 75
  15. ↑ Hildegard Feidel-Mertz: Integration and Formation of Identity , pp. 76-77. “The joy of shared discovery, dealing with unfamiliar conditions and accepting challenges and risks have become important aspects of the school program. Working with an English woman who made connections with the Girl Guides and the Boy Scouts, the teachers tried all possible means to introduce the children to the English language as quickly as possible and, secondly, to the English environment to to build a spiritual relationship. "
  16. ↑ quoted from Hildegard Feidel-Mertz: Integration and Formation of Identity , p. 77
  17. ↑ Angelika Schaser: Helene Lange and Gertrud Bäumer: A political community. Böhlau, Cologne, Weimar, Vienna, 2010, ISBN 978-3-412-09100-2 , p. 298
  18. ↑ a b Emigration: 1934-1939 (student portraits)
  19. ↑ Hildegard Feidel-Mertz: Integration and Formation of Identity , pp. 77-78
  20. ↑ Hildegard Feidel-Mertz: Integration and Formation of Identity , pp. 78–79
  21. ↑ Hildegard Feidel-Mertz: Integration and Formation of Identity , p. 79
  22. ↑ Original: “Workdays were not something most of us moaned about. We liked them. It was fun to work as part of a team, to be free from academic work and to produce useful results. Those days added to the prevailing sense of camaraderie and, since the teachers also pitched in, it brought us closer to them and was a good way to get to know them better. Usually Workdays ended up with a better-than-ordinary meal and then sitting by one of the rare fires in the fireplace, talking and singing. "
  23. ↑ a b c children, speak English!
  24. ^ A b c The Development of the School and Site, 1935-1939
  25. ^ A b The Household Course, The Farm Course and General Education
  26. ↑ That should roughly correspond to what is considered a "state-certified housekeeping manager" in Germany . See also: National Council for Domestic Studies and National Council for Home Economic Education . This website briefly outlines the background of the National Council for Domestic Studies.
  27. ↑ Hildegard Feidel-Mertz: Integration and Formation of Identity , p. 79. “Small children of all ages, the youngest is three years old, the child of a single mother with four children who all stay with us. Circumstances compel us to open our doors as wide as possible, so that sometimes a tiny bit crawls in, and sometimes a full-grown man comes in. Our ability to accommodate such a large number of people in our extensive but limited space depended on our ability to build, albeit in a discreet manner. We have housed our people to a certain extent in one-story houses that had been formed from former military barracks. ”An impression of these barracks can be found on the website The War Years: 1939-1945
  28. ↑ Hildegard Feidel-Mertz: Integration and Formation of Identity , p. 79
  29. ↑ Hildegard Feidel-Mertz: Integration and Formation of Identity , p. 82
  30. ^ The War Years: 1939-1945
  31. ↑ Hildegard Feidel-Mertz: Integration and Formation of Identity , p. 83
  32. ↑ Hildegard Feidel-Mertz: Integration and Formation of Identity , p. 73. “The refugee children admitted to these exile schools were to a certain extent a privileged minority, in that they were gently initiated into a new milieu in the company of fellow pupils who had been through similar experiences. The great majority of refugee children went individually to state schools, and while this ensured that they learned English more quickly, it also subjected some of them to indoctrínation attempts, or at least verbal insults, which caused a degree of culture shock. "
  33. ↑ Christiane Goldenstedt: “You haunted me by night” , p. 56. The “other side” mentioned in the quote, of whose real existence Käthe Kuhn apparently did not know anything, was Anita Warburg, for whom Gertrud Bing awarded the scholarships in trust .
  34. ↑ Even after he traveled back to Germany three months after his first arrival during the summer holidays: “I traveled in style, first class on the liner 'New York' from Southampton to Hamburg, and on the 'Europa', the fastest ship then, on my return. I remember the luxury of those journeys so clearly because they stood in such great contrast to the almost total lack of money, let alone luxury, we lived with in England. A Pound Sterling in those days was worth over $ 4, and to us it represented a huge sum seldom seen and rarely spent. “ Hans Loeser's Stoatley Rough Memories
  35. ↑ Original: “To some extent finances also entered into her calculus. Many thought it should not have to the extent it did, but the school functioned on a financial shoestring and it was her responsibility to make ends meet. Anyway, I was a paying student, because my parents could afford to deliver full tuition in England though this meant forfeiting to German chicanery almost ten times the actual monthly payments. Many other kids at the school were not so lucky. "
  36. ↑ So above all on the page Emigration: 1934-1939 (student portraits)
  37. ^ Gerda Mayer: Bernini's Cat , p. 48

Coordinates: 51 ° 6 ′ 21.1 ″  N , 0 ° 43 ′ 21.5 ″  W.