Hildegard von Gierke

Hildegard von Gierke was born in Breslau on September 30, 1880. Her parents were cosmopolitan and Protestant, her father was a well-known legal scholar and her mother came from a Jewish publishing family.

After training as a nursery school teacher at the Pestalozzi-Fröbel-Haus in Berlin (PFH), v. Gierke passed the state teacher's examination in 1904. From 1908, she taught at the PFH and later also at the Charlottenburg Youth Home, which was run by her sister Anna (1874-1943). It was particularly important to her to include natural history in the training of kindergarten teachers. Her publications are still considered groundbreaking in nature-based education today.During the First World War, v. Gierke took over the management of the Voluntary War Aid in Berlin-Schöneberg, and from 1917 she was head of the Women's Work Center in Magdeburg, where she was responsible for the social care and occupational safety of women in weapons and munitions factories. She was awarded the War Cross of Merit. After working as a lecturer and director at the Hamburg Social Women's School in 1919, she became co-director of the PFH in 1921. V. Gierke was involved in various professional political institutions and associations, such as the Bund Deutscher Frauenvereine and the Bund der Berufsorganisationen des Sozialen Dienstes.

Initially not opposed to National Socialism - she even saw the ideas of the women's movement realized here - she was forced to withdraw from professional and political public life and leave the PFH in 1933 because she was "of Jewish descent". She moved to Osterode with her partner Gretel Magnus, where she set up a technical school for nursery school teachers in 1946. In the spirit of the GDR regime, she was now responsible for socialist kindergarten teacher training, including political education and social engagement of the pupils. She was in charge until 1950.

On April 14, 1966, Hildegard v. Gierke passed away.

Author: Filiz Çakır