Windsor Mountain School

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The Windsor Mountain School is another school founded by the couple Gertrud and Max Bondy after their final expulsion by the National Socialists from the Marienau State Education Home in 1937 and the Les Rayons School, which was then founded in Switzerland .

Previous history of the Windsor Mountain School

Max Bondy is the brother of the psychologist and social researcher Curt Bondy ; his wife Gertrud (born on October 7, 1889 in Prague as Gertrud Wiener, died on April 30, 1977 in Detroit) was a doctor and psychoanalyst. The school you founded are in the tradition of German reform pedagogy .

Max Bondy's first school was founded in 1920 together with Ernst Putz, the Free School and Work Community Sinntalhof on the Sinntalhof near Bad Brückenau in Lower Franconia . This school project failed because of differences between the two partners over the management of the school, and so in 1923 Bondy went to Gandersheim in Lower Saxony with some of the students and the staff . In collaboration with his wife Gertrud, he built up the school community in Gandersheim , which moved to Marienau, a district of the community of Dahlem (Lower Saxony) in 1929, and from then on called itself the school community on Gut Marienau . This resulted in the Marienau State Educational Home, which still exists today.

After the National Socialist seizure of power, the pressure on the Bondys increased. 1936 therefore emigrated first Gertrud Bondy with two of her three children, Ulla and Heinz, in Switzerland and built in Gland VD along with former students Harald Baruschke school Les rayons on.

After the Marienau school was practically suitable and handed over to the new headmaster Bernhard Knoop , Max Bondy also emigrated to Switzerland with his eldest daughter Annemarie in the summer of 1937. As Switzerland did not seem safe enough for the Bondys in view of the threat of war, the decision was made to emigrate again. In 1939 he moved to the USA; Les Rayons was able to continue working under the direction of Harald and Hannele Baruschke until 1943 and then had to be closed for financial reasons.

The beginnings in the USA

The management of the move to the USA was again the responsibility of an old school student from Marienau, Georg Roeper, who married Annemarie Bondy shortly after the move. He went to the USA six months before the Bondys to find a new school location, and found it on the Juniper Hill Farm in Windsor (Vermont) . School operations began on October 1, 1939 with three students, one of whom was their own son Heinz, and one student was Carl Zuckmayer's daughter , Winnetou Zuckmayer. Just one year later, however, Gertrud Bondy was already certain that 15 pupils would attend school in the beginning of the 1940/41 school year.

But the 1940/41 school year already took place in a different location. The school was moved to Manchester, Vermont and stayed there for the next four years in a building called Wilburton Hall, where the Bondys, according to Chartock, could “continue their humanistic educational mission”. That this “humanistic educational mission” could only benefit a group of addressees - which is not atypical for private schools - is made clear by an excerpt from a prospectus of the future users of “Wilburton Hall” reproduced by Chartok. There it says: "During the World War II, the Wilkbur family leased the mansion to the Windsor Mountain School, a school for the children of Berlin's artists and high society who had fled from Nazi Germany." Nine American and five students from other countries attended the school, her age was between eight and 17 years. Winnetou Zuckmayer graduated from “Wilburton Hall”, and Hugo Moser was one of the students at that time, who later gained international recognition as professor of neurology and pediatrics at Johns Hopkins University.

The Windsor Mountain School in Lenox

On July 17, 1944, an article appeared in the Berkshire Eagle newspaper stating that a Lenox estate “was sold today to Dr. Max Bondy, head of the Windsor Mountain School of Manchester, Vt. The co-educational preparatory school will take possession Aug.1. “It must have been a godsend for the Bondys, because according to the article, the property was valued at $ 150,000, but was only offered for $ 90,000, and finally for about $ 50,000 has been earned. Lenox ( Berkshire County ) in the state of Massachusetts was also in a scenic area with a wide range of cultural activities and recreational opportunities, points that the Bondys sought to emphasize in advertising for their school, according to Chartock.

The previously quoted article in the Berkshire Eagle gives a few more information about the school at the time of their move. According to this, it was attended by 46 students in 1944, including ten English students who had to pay tuition fees of $ 1500 a year. There is talk of a “well balanced curriculum” comprising “elementary and high school courses”, which not only includes “special opportunities in languages” but also a wide range of sports. Gertrud Bondy's degree in medicine provided medical care for the students. Mr. Bondy is already planning for the time after the war and is planning an exchange with his former school in Switzerland in order to enable students to spend a year abroad.

The Windsor Mountain School was still shaped by a European atmosphere in Lenox. The relatively small student body, made up of multicultural groups, enabled individualized learning and individual advice - not least from Gertrud Bondy, who had studied with Sigmund Freud. The pedagogical principles included learning based on experience, combined with the offer to students to largely define the pace and structure of learning themselves. These progressive educational techniques were particularly suitable for those who had difficulty learning in traditional settings. And so it is not surprising that the "Windsor Mountain School was also a magnet for left leaning parents - some famous - who wanted their children to have a good but liberal education".

According to Rick Goeld, Max Bondy tended to view Windsor Mountain School as a "friendly school", an attribute he preferred to a "progressive school". Their goal was to develop mutual recognition, respect and, if possible, friendship between everyone in the group and beyond. The Bondys had established an atmosphere in which young people were encouraged to find their own voice, to practice radical political thinking as well as self-motivated artistic endeavors.

Hans Maeder, who later founded the Stockbridge School , worked as a German teacher at Windsor Mountain School for one year from September 1944 . Both schools together with a third formed a special educational field for some time: “In the Berkshires there were three private boarding schools focused on progressive education techniques: the Buxton School in Williamstown, the Stockbridge School in Stockbridge, and the Windsor Mountain School in Lenox . Only the Buxton School is still operating as of this date. "

As Annemarie Roeper-Bondy, the eldest daughter of Max and Gertrud writes, her father already suffered in Germany from "polycythemia, a blood disease of which he later died in America". Max Bondy died in Boston on April 13, 1951. The Windsor Mountain School was continued by Gertrud Bondy and her son Heinz.

The Windsor Mountain School after the death of Max Bondy

After the death of his father, Heinz Bondy (1925–2014) was the new “Headmaster” for the next 25 years - until the school closed in August 1975. Little has changed in terms of the content of the school under his leadership, as can be seen in the obituary in the Washington Post : “During his tenure, he supported and championed racial integration of his school and schools in his community. He also helped establish the Boston-based A Better Chance program, which provided scholarships to prep schools for talented, disadvantaged students. ”Elsewhere, too, reference is made to the fact that he continued the practice of his parents, orphans or children who normally do not were able to attend a private school to enable attending Windsor Mountain School . However, to ensure the costs of maintaining the buildings and the extensive grounds, maintaining the scholarship program and paying the teachers, it was necessary to increase the number of students dramatically. Without endangering the school's political and educational philosophy, a heterogeneous student body had been recruited, and in 1970 40 of the now 250 students were of African American descent. The school was unusually democratically organized at this time with extensive self-administration rights for the student body. From 1970 onwards there was no dress code, publications by students were not censored, and there were no restrictions on their political activities. The philosophy behind it was that exercising these freedoms would help the students to develop into responsible and self-determined people. The town of Lenox was quite conservative at the time, the townspeople were concerned about the hustle and bustle of the school and what was being seen of it in the town. The students were denigrated as “hippies”, drug use was displeased, and so was interracial relationships between the students.

What the citizens of Lenox did not like met with much more approval elsewhere: “In the 1960s, the school hosted concerts by such counterculture icons as Pete Seeger , whose daughter Tinya was a student at Windsor Mountain, and Joan Baez . Other prominent parents who sent their children to Windsor Mountain, which was coeducational and had a religiously and racially integrated student body and faculty before the civil rights activism of the '60s, included singer Harry Belafonte , jazz musicians Thelonious Monk and Randy Weston , singer- actor Judy Garland , actor Henry Fonda , and civil rights lawyer Clifford Durr and his wife, activist Virginia Foster Durr. "

“By the Mid 1960's Things Had Started to Change,” reads the More on Windsor Mountain School website : Society changed, and so did the school itself and the conditions under which it worked. The financial pressure increased and as the number of students increased, a different clientele came to the school. Some of the new students were basically juvenile delinquents sent by government agencies to Windsor Mountain School in the hope that they might be offered one last chance there. The liberal school with its poorly structured environment was not prepared for this small but effective group. The behaviors emanating from this group of pupils led to impairments in school operations. Sex between students, and in some cases sex between faculty and students, created additional problems, drug use increased, and overdoses, vandalism and theft became more common. But the school's closure in August 1975 was not primarily due to this potential for conflict within the school. The oil price shock of 1973, which did not leave the wealthier section of the bourgeoisie unscathed, from which most of the student body was recruited, played an important role. A gradual change in the distribution of wealth took place, as a result of which younger parents in particular, unlike their own parents, could no longer spare the money for their children that was required to attend a private school. And private schools increasingly got the smell of being elitist institutions. A climate developed in which the school had more and more need for paying students, but it became less and less attractive for an intellectually oriented student body. It was the time when five other schools in Lenox and the surrounding area had to close in addition to Windsor Mountain School, including the Stockbridge School .

In the mid-1960s , the weaver and carpet artist Edith Reckendorf, who was trained at the Bauhaus , worked at the Windsor Mountain School . In the second half of the 1930s she worked as a weaving teacher at the Quaker School Eerde , which is also part of the schools in exile . Reckendorf's daughter, Verena Reckendorf Borton, who also works as a carpet artist, probably continued her training with her mother at the Windsor Mountain School .

The former school building of the Windsor Mountain School now belongs to Boston University and is "used as a summer music school and also for Berkshire Country Day classes". After the school closed, Heinz Bondy took on an administrative post at the University of Massachusetts in Boston and helped found the "Elkins Mountain School" in Elkins, West Virginia. In 1989 he moved to the Washington area and worked as the director of the Canterbury School in Accokeek. From 1994 until his retirement in 1998, Heinz Bondy was the director of the Christian Family Montessori School, an elementary school in Mount Rainier, Prince George County, Maryland. He died on February 18, 2014 in the Asbury Methodist Village retirement community in Gaithersburg.

literature

  • Roselle Kline Chartock: Windsor Mountain School: A Beloved Berkshire Institution . The History Press, Charleston, 2014, ISBN 978-1-62619-443-4 . Also available as an online edition in the Google book search.
  • Eric (Rick) Goeld: People of Windsor Mountain . GGFC Properties LLC, Scottsdale (AZ), 2014, ISBN 978-0-9829453-3-9
  • Annemarie Roeper-Bondy: "Les Rayons". The Bondy School in Switzerland. In: Marienauer Chronik. 47 (1994), pp. 140-143.

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ An appreciation of the life and work of Gertrud Bondy is still pending. For more information on her, see Roselle Kline Chartock: Windsor Mountain School . Pp. 28-34
  2. ↑ George and Annemarie Roeper founded their own school in 1941, "The Roeper School", which still exists today. More information about the school can be found on their homepage: The Roeper School . A biography of Annemarie Roeper-Bondy can be found at Roselle Kline Chartock: Windsor Mountain School . Pp. 35-38
  3. ^ Roselle Kline Chartock: Windsor Mountain School . Pp. 69-70. It is unclear whether the Bondys and the Zuckmayers had known each other before, but they had mutual acquaintances who helped the Bondys found their school, as Chartock reports: the writer and journalist Dorothy Thompson and her husband, the writer Sinclair Lewis . According to Chartock, p. 75, both the Bondys and the Zuckmayers were among the refugees who Dorothy Thompson, with the help of Eleanor Roosevelt and Franklin D. Roosevelt, made entry to the United States possible.
  4. ^ Roselle Kline Chartock: Windsor Mountain School . P. 70
  5. ^ Roselle Kline Chartock: Windsor Mountain School . P. 72. Under the name "Wilburton Inn", "Wilburton Hall" later became one of the "Historic Hotels of America". Even if reference is made here to the high society bond, and thus to the fact that a private school cannot be operated without a wealthy clientele, there are several indications that the Bondys are always right to attend their school have generously provided scholarships. The More on Windsor Mountain School website states that 15% scholarships per class were the norm.
  6. ↑ Among other things, he worked on the research of Lorenzo's oil . For his biography see: Obituary for Hugo Moser in the 'Washington Post' In addition to school operations, summer camps were also run.
  7. ^ Roselle Kline Chartock: Windsor Mountain School . P. 74. The property, Groton Place, belonged to the lawyer and art collector Grenville Lindall Winthrop, who died in 1943 and who had several buildings restored in Lenox and the surrounding area. Groton Place itself was designed by the architects Carrère and Hastings .
  8. ^ Roselle Kline Chartock: Windsor Mountain School . P. 76
  9. ↑ Chartock, p. 76, even speaks of 52 students in 1944
  10. ^ Education in Lenox-Windsor Mountain School
  11. ↑ Rick Goeld: Max and Gertrud Bondy
  12. ^ Progressive Education in Lenox-Windsor Mountain School. For the Buxton School, see the article “Buxton School (Massachusetts)” in the English edition of WIKIPEDIA.
  13. ^ Obituary for Heinz Bondy in the Washington Post
  14. ^ Progressive Education in Lenox-Windsor Mountain School
  15. ^ Progressive Education in Lenox-Windsor Mountain School. This website is based on a reading by Rick Goeld in September 2014 in Lenox.
  16. ↑ Rick Goeld: Max and Gertrud Bondy . For more information about celebrities and their children attending Windsor Mountain School, visit Roselle Kline Chartock: Windsor Mountain School . Pp. 124-131
  17. ↑ More on Windsor Mountain School
  18. ^ Roselle Kline Chartock: Windsor Mountain School . P. 96
  19. ^ Loom & Lens: Weaving and Photography by Verena and Ray Borton
  20. ^ Groton Place
  21. ^ Homepage of the Elkins Mountain School
  22. ↑ All biographical data from: Obituary for Heinz Bondy in the Washington Post. For a more detailed biography, see Roselle Kline Chartock: Windsor Mountain School . P. 38ff.

Coordinates: 42 ° 21 ′ 18.6 "  N , 73 ° 17 ′ 27.3"  W.