Alice Salomon

Alice Salomon was born in Berlin on April 19, 1872, the fifth of seven children in a wealthy, assimilated Jewish family. Her father Albert Salomon (*1832) ran a traditional leather business, while her mother Anna Salomon (*1838) came from the Potocky-Nelken banking family in Breslau. Alice Salomon grew up in an upper middle-class house on Königgrätzer Straße (today: Stresemannstraße) in south-west Berlin and attended the Zimmermannsche höhere Töchterschule, a private Protestant school at Schöneberger Straße 3, together with her older sister, where the Salomon sisters were the only Jewish pupils. Here the girls were to be prepared for their later roles as wives and mothers. Latin and science were not taught, mathematics only rudimentarily, the focus was on languages, religion, literature, handicrafts and housekeeping. When Alice Salomon left school after nine years, as was customary for girls at the time, she, like many middle-class girls from families of senior civil servants, officers and merchants, was unable to attend secondary school or pursue an apprenticeship or degree, although she would have liked to become a teacher. She suffered from the forced inactivity and boredom, and Alice Salomon described the waiting period as a young woman in a later publication as a condemnation to a "plant existence". Studying in Switzerland, which was already possible for women, was beyond her means. Her father, who had died young, had left her some money, but as a spinster daughter she was expected to stay with her widowed mother and be subordinate to her slightly older brother in all matters. Alice Salomon resisted the injustices based on the fact that she was born a woman, she wanted to continue learning and give her life a meaning that extended beyond the family household.

In 1893, when Alice Salomon was 21 years old, she received an invitation to the founding meeting of the girls' and women's groups for social aid work. She later recalled that this "piece of paper" really marked the beginning of her life. The propagated aim of the "groups" was to harness the untapped potential of young girls and women from the middle classes for social work and to give them a purpose in life beyond waiting for a husband. Alice Salomon became a member of the Berlin Girls' and Women's Group for Social Aid Work initiated by Jeanette Schwerin and Minna Cauer. She became involved in supporting young working women, founded a working women's club that offered lectures, leisure activities and lunch, worked in a girls' after-school club and in the information center for social issues of the German Society for Ethical Culture and took over the office of secretary. She became personal secretary to the chairwoman Jeanette Schwerin, who familiarized her with the aims of the bourgeois women's movement and its protagonists. When Jeanette Schwerin died very young in 1899, Alice Salomon took over the chairmanship of the "groups" and thus a leading role in the bourgeois women's movement. She systematized the loosely connected lectures into a fixed annual curriculum as the first interdenominational training course for social work. She became increasingly active in the national and international women's movement, taking part in the International Congress for Women's Work and Women's Endeavors in Berlin in 1896 and speaking at the International Women's Congress in London in 1899. In October 1899, the first annual course of girls' and women's groups for vocational training in welfare work began, marking the start of systematic training for social work in Germany. In 1900, Alice Salomon was one of the youngest members elected to the board of the BDF.

At the beginning of the 20th century, Alice Salomon was head of the girls' and women's groups for social aid work in Berlin, taught girls and women in various other institutions in the field of social practice and education and wrote articles for women's and specialist journals. She was convinced that social aid work and social change needed science. Based on this conviction, she began studying economics, history and philosophy at Friedrich Wilhelm University in Berlin in 1902 at the age of 30. She had no A-levels and had only attended school for nine years and it was a great exception that she was able to enrol as a guest student. Her publications were recognized as a prerequisite for attending university, for example two articles in the Handbook of the German Women's Movement published in 1901. Alice Salomon did not initially intend to do a doctorate; unlike most other female students, she had not even attended a teacher training seminar. Encouraged by the example of her friend Else von Richthofen and inspired by her involvement in the Commission for the Protection of Women Workers, Alice Salomon completed her doctorate in 1906 with a thesis on a controversial topic in the women's movement: The causes of unequal pay for men's and women's work. For Alice Salomon, unequal pay showed regularities that were not laws of nature and could therefore be eliminated. She considered unequal pay to be a consequence of the still prevalent division of family functions between men and women into gainful employment on the one hand and house management and education on the other. The aim should be to remove the amateurish, provisional and accidental nature of women's work and to achieve equal vocational training for girls and boys and lifelong employment for women.

The results of her dissertation, experiences from the annual courses of the girls' and women's groups and not least reform efforts in girls' education prompted Alice Salomon to found the first interdenominational social women's school on the grounds of the Pestalozzi-Fröbel-Haus in Berlin-Schöneberg in 1908, which she ran until 1925. Social work as a modern profession for women had already taken shape and gained increasing recognition, and the call for paid care work for women grew louder. In addition to the necessary knowledge, the new two-year training program was also based on practicing attitudes: "It is important to prepare female students for work that values not only performance but also attitude; for whom the state of the soul is nothing indifferent or secondary. It must therefore not only teach the methods of pedagogy, the technique of social work; it should not only impart knowledge, but become a nursery of social sentiment" (Salomon, Alice: Zur Eröffnung der sozialen Frauenschule, in: Die Frau, 16. Jg., Nr. 2, Nov. 1908, pp. 103-107, here p. 107). Just a few years after the school opened, the rooms in the Pestalozzi-Fröbel-Haus were no longer sufficient and Alice Salomon arranged for the construction of a new school building, which was opened in 1914. In the same year, she had converted to Protestantism and elements of Protestant social ethics became an important basis for her work. By the First World War, 14 more women's social schools had been founded in various cities such as Hamburg and Munich, and from 1917 they were organized in the Conference of German Women's Social Schools founded by Alice Salomon, which she headed until 1933. In 1929, she was instrumental in the founding of the International Association of Schools of Social Work, which she chaired until 1933.

"I could no longer doubt that all the reforms we had achieved would be undone if women were not appointed as leaders in the various branches of the civil service." (Salomon, Alice: Character is destiny. Memoirs, Weinheim 1983, p. 214). Following voluntary courses, the founding of schools and national and international networks, Alice Salomon developed further academic training for women with a view to the "struggle for women's education" and the "socialization of female areas of work". In 1925, the German Academy for Social and Educational Women's Work was founded in Berlin with a department for empirical research in order to establish academic training for social work managers and research activities. Alice Salomon became the first chairwoman and editor of a series of publications and research papers. The academy, where Alice Salomon was joined by Marie Baum, Hilde Lion, Margarete Meusel, Hildegard von Gierke, Siddy Wronsky, Helene Weber and Gertrud Bäumer, among others, offered various further and advanced training courses: Annual courses for trained welfare workers, youth leaders and teachers, afternoon and weekly courses for those interested in further education, scientific courses for mothers. In 1926, the academy's research department began research into the existence and disruption of the family in the present day. In 1933, the academy was dissolved in a secret meeting by Alice Salomon in order to avoid liquidation by the National Socialist government and to protect the Jewish employees. A year earlier, Alice Salomon was publicly honored on her 60th birthday. The Friedrich Wilhelm University of Berlin awarded her an honorary doctorate, Dr. med. h.c., the Prussian State Ministry presented her with the Silver State Medal and the Social Women's School in Berlin was named the Alice Salomon School.

In 1933, Alice Salomon lost all public offices in Germany, and the Nazi authorities also tried unsuccessfully to revoke her international offices. When she returned to Berlin from a trip to the USA in May 1937, she was summoned by the Gestapo and interrogated for four hours about who she had met on the way and what she had talked about. In the end, she was forced to emigrate by the National Socialists. She was given the ultimatum to leave the country within three weeks or be sent to a concentration camp. She wrote: "Of course, although I had never belonged to a political party, I represented everything that the Nazis disliked. I was of Jewish 'race'; I belonged to the militant Protestant church; I was a progressive woman, internationally minded and therefore pacifist" (Salomon, Alice: Lebenserinnerungen: Jugendjahre, Sozialreform, Frauenbewegung, Exil, Frankfurt a. M. 2008, p. 352). Three weeks was little time to break up a household and look for a place of refuge. On June 12, 1937, Alice Salomon left Germany and initially went to London, where she managed to obtain a visa for the USA. Two days before the visa expired, she arrived by steamer from New York. A press conference and newspapers reported on her arrival. However, all the welcoming greetings could not hide the fact that the "German Jane Addams", as she was called in reference to the American pioneer of social work, did not arrive as a guest, but as a refugee. In 1939, she was stripped of her German citizenship and her doctorate (1906 Dr. phil., 1932 Dr. med. h.c. from the Friedrich Wilhelm University in Berlin), which was only revoked in 1998. Alice Salomon died of a heart attack during a heat wave on August 29, 1948 in her apartment in New York at the age of 76. Only four or five people attended her funeral at Evergreens Cemetery in Brooklyn.