Farewell to Pomerania


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The opportunity to do social work arose when Elisabeth von Thadden’s father suddenly intended to marry again in 1920. With her departure from Pomerania in mind, she wrote wistfully, and, after all, home, family, work, tradition are of course merely worldliness. And “when the mold is shattered for us”, then the best still remains for us! One will freeze without this mold however, without the raiment of Trieglaff! In an intangible sense, however, she took the “raiment of Trieglaff” with her, as a shield against various assaults, as armor for struggles to come.


First, she attended Alice Salomon’s interdenominational Social School for Women in Berlin-Schöneberg. Elisabeth, benefited from already having acquired experience in practical social services in Trieglaff, for instance in the Children to the Countryside program.


She earned her certification as a nationally accredited welfare worker in a transitional course. During the summer, she – recommended by Marie Baum, a director in the Baden Ministry of the Interior – went to work at the children’s village in Heuberg in 1921, at first as a director of Protestant education and then as director of finance in 1924. In 1925 she moved on to Salem boarding school on Lake Constance where she came into contact with the progressive education advocated by the boarding school’s headmaster, Kurt Hahn.


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  • © Private archive of Rudolf von Thadden, Göttingen