Quaker Efforts to Rescue Children from Nazi Education and Discrimination: The International Quakerschool Eerde

Abstract

Quaker Efforts to Rescue Children from Nazi Education and Discrimination: The International Quakerschool Eerde Hans A. Schmitt* On Thursday, October 14, 1993, 25 pre-World War II alumni and two teachers ofthe Quakerschool Eerde gathered at an Ommen hotel under an unseasonably cloudless sky to observe the 60th anniversary ofthe school's founding. The conferees looked cheerful and affluent. They came from as far away as Canada and the U.S., but alumni from the United Kingdom, the Low Countries, and Germany predominated. Professionally the assembly ranged from a retired bank president and two retired owners ofsubstantial enterprisestoacademics, archivists,journalists, aswell asoneofGermany's most renowned stage designers. Amazingly, these senior citizens, who in many cases had not seen one another in more than half a century, easily resumed a dialog that had ended at various points between 1936 and 1942 when war and holocaust had scattered them across the Atlantic world. They were friends again, and the spouses who accompanied them and for whom this was in some instances the first visit to the site oftheir loved one's most important formative years readilybecame apart ofthis gathering, as ifthey, too, had shared in that chapter oftheir past.1 Without Quakers taking a stand against tyranny and violence, the lives celebrated last October would have taken a different course. Still, the school whose founding was being celebrated did not merely owe its existence to Nazism. Eerde stood at the confluence of two unrelated, yet kindred pedagogic traditions, both antedating Hitler's rise to power. The first had to do with efforts to establish Quaker schools on the continent dating back to the eighteenth century. In 1796 Ludwig Seebohm began instructing 25 children at his home near Pyrmont in the German principality of Waldeck. In 1 804 Friends established in the same area a boarding school for girls. But the wars of the French Revolution and the refusal ofFriends to do military service led to the emigration ofmost from the area, and the school died in 1818.2 Its demise coincided with the vigorous struggle of the Quaker community in Minden to provide an education that harmonized with their moral and religious principles. Their *Hans A. Schmitt retired from the history department ofthe University ofVirginia in 1991. His publications include: The Path to European Union (1962); Charles Peguy: The Decline of an Idealist (1967); European Union from Hitler to DeGaulle (1969); editorship of Neutral Europe between War and Revolution, 1917-1923, and Lucky Victim: An Ordinary Life in Extraordinary Times (both 1989). He is past president of the Society for French Historical Studies. 46Quaker History educational goals included the teaching ofreading and writing, inculcating respect for God and his "holy commandments," helping children understand the physical world around them, and turning them into "sensibly thoughtful human beings." The teachers chosen to transmit this knowledge "maintained friendly intercourse with the children, thus developing an instructive dialog with them." This was a far cry from the compulsory Prussian system of Frederick the Great, largely run by retired and/or disabled army sergeants.3 By 1848 the Minden community suffered the same attrition that had earlier extinguished the Pyrmont meeting, and by the middle ofthe century Quaker education in Germany had become a memory. But before the century ended there began in Germany a second and larger educational reform effort, the rural schoolhome movement (Landschulheimbewegung), whose principles and practices resembled to a remarkable degree the goals and methods ofQuakerpedagogy, although I have nowhere found any trace of contact between them. The German Landschulheim was pioneered by Herman Lietz and his sometime associates Gustav Wyneken and Paul Geheeb. The schools they successively created retained certain commonalities: Academic preparation with training in crafts, trades, farming, and household management; emphasis on the development of children's creative faculties (music, fine arts, and theater); and the insistence that teachers not only "maintain friendly intercourse" with their charges but that schools constitute a functioning community, and in that community students and teachers assume joint responsibility for service as well as governance. These schools exemplified the same trinity that activated Quaker education: competence, good sense, and service. It is worth adding that two members ofthe Eerde faculty served apprenticeships at German...