Tami Oelfken (25 June 1888 – 7 April 1957) was a German teacher who became an author and controversial (especially at that time) education reformer.
The "Tami Oelfken Community School" which she set up in Berlin-Lichterfelde in 1928 was closed down by the Nazi authorities in 1934 on account of its "pacifist, communist and pro-Jewish tendencies". Attempts to re-open it in Paris and, later, to promote her education reform ideas in France and then in England came to nothing, and in 1939 she returned to Berlin where her uncompromising approach led to professional marginalisation. The focus of her activity was increasingly on her writing, though both the novels she produced for publication during the war years were banned, in one case before and in the other case shortly after publication. After 1945 there was a modest revival of interest in her work, but the ideas on education reform that she continued to promote with characteristic fixity failed to become part of the mainstream pedagogical agenda during her lifetime.
Life Family provenance Marie Wilhelmine "Tami" Oelfken was born into a prosperous family in , then a commercially flourishing separate municipality, but subsequently subsumed into Bremen as a suburb down-river of the city centre. Oelfken's mother, born Bertha Sophie Christa Heidmann (1866–1935), was a gifted musician who successfully managed the household and reared seven children, of whom Tami was the second-born. Johann Heinrich Conrad Oelfken (1857–1927), her father, was a businessman who since 1884 had been employed as shipping manager with Bremer Woll-Kämmerei, a world-wide trader and manufacturer of wool and related products. He also served as a town councillor, which included thirty years as deputy mayor of Blumenthal. He was for many years remembered as a leading citizen of the town. The family lived in a large house at Langen Straße 54/56, next to the site later chosen for Blumenthal's new town hall, and with a garden that ran down to the Weser.
Early years and intergenerational tensions Oelfken attended the secondary all-girls' school () in nearby Vegesack and then moved on to the teacher training college in Bremen, passing her teaching exams in 1908, still aged only nineteen. The decision that she should become a teacher had come from her parents. Oelfken had resisted it. She had been born with a physical defect involving her hips which was clearly visible to observers. According to an autobiographical essay that she wrote in 1948 one of her legs had ended up 16 cm (slightly more than 6 inches) longer than the other. She later learned to joke that her handicap made it "difficult to run away", but as a young woman she seems to have found it hard to see any funny side to her physical condition. Commentators suggest that it was above all the reactions that her hip problems triggered in others that she resented, and that accounted for a sharp tongue and a stubborn streak that marked her out throughout her life. (There are also powerful indications that Oelfken may have inherited her stubbornness from her father.) The traditional career choice for young women from her social background would have involved marriage and motherhood, which was precisely what she looked forward to, but her mother told her that she would never find a man to love and care for her: she cried a lot over that. Remaining a spinster and becoming a teacher would provide her with a measure of financial independence and social status. Oelfken knew from a relatively early age that she wanted to become a writer, but accepted the decision that she should train for a teaching career. Her resentment later manifested itself in aggressive hostility against the entire schools system, and more immediately in her dislike of the "red plush" which she associated with the then fashionable furnishings of her parents' family home, and which she excoriated in poems and short stories. When she succeeded in getting some of her verses published in the Sunday edition of the Bremer Nachrichten newspaper, her father's reaction was threatening: "I completely forbid it! Love poetry – after all, it is good name!" From Heinrich Oelfken's perspective, his threats in the immediate term had their desired effect. The association between her writing and the [parental] veto was lodged firmly in Tami Oelfken's mind. Most sources are silent concerning her childhood and adolescence: in her final published book she would write simply, "I will take the secret of my loveless childhood to the grave". After the disagreement over the published poems, the parent-daughter relationship was evidently a distanced one.
Newly qualified reformist teacher Following qualification, Oelfken obtained her first teaching job at , a district of Zwischenahn (near Oldenburg, which was the city in which her mother had been born and grown up). She obtained a more permanent post in 1909 at Grohn, a northern suburb of Bremen, and very close both to the school she had herself attended a few years earlier and to her parents' family home. At the school in Grohn, where she taught between 1909 and 1917, she conducted her lessons in a child focused manner. She had familiarised herself with the psychological and pedagogical ideas of the pioneering Bremen reformers and , and from these she drew much of her inspiration. She also joined the , an association dedicated to the promotion of education reform.
Although she was now back in the northern suburbs of Bremen, there was evidently no suggestion that Oelfken should return to live with her parents at the spacious family home in which she had grown up. She rented a little house on the south bank of the Lesum, a tributary to the Weser on the edge of the , a large marshy area that would have provided rich pickings for her landlord, a river fisherman from an established family of local fisherfolk. Here she could work undisturbed. To the horror of her own parents and, increasingly, of the parents of pupils in her charge, she became ever more evangelical about implementing the controversial education reforms to which she had become committed. There were complaints to the school governors. During this period she acquired a lover, the third serious love of her life. He carved her initials and his in the bark of a beech tree and then left for the front. He was shot dead.
Transfer and the politics of Barkenhoff In response to parents' complaints, in 1917 the school governors arranged for Oelfken to be transferred to Tarmstedt in the flat lands north of Bremen, described in one source as a "peat village" (). It was here that she came across members of the so-called Worpswede community, a colony of artist-intellectuals based in the area who were by this time coming to be associated with pacifism and other liberal-reformist causes. She was, in particular, influenced by Heinrich Vogeler. She later confessed that his influence on her had proven more enduring than that of anyone else. Vogeler's home, the "Barkenhoff", was the meeting point for a group of like-minded artists and intellectuals. Here he set up an idealistic communist labour school. Oelfken and Vogeler would discuss together developing a primer for it, drawing their inspiration not so much from the recent (and still unfolding) October Revolution as from the beliefs and practices of the Tolstoyan movement. It was under the influence of this "Barkenhoff Group" that during 1918 Oelfken became a member of the anti-war Spartacus League, which by the end of that year had become one of the twin founding pillars (along with the Independent Social Democratic Party) of Germany's Communist Party. She was a delegate to the held at Berlin during the middle of June 1920: the backwash from the previous year's uprisings was still very much in the air, and the theme of the conference was reform of the schools system. (The conclusion was a series of compromises that disappointed the more extremist reformist factions.)
Vogeler left on the first of his several lengthy visits to the Soviet Union around 1923 (accompanied by Sonja, the daughter of Julian Marchlewski, whom he would later marry): Oelfken had probably already left Worpswede by this point. She settled for a while at Gotha where she became part of a "worker community" of young teachers. During the Kapp Putsch of 1920 she joined in on the side of those fighting to defend the new republic against right-wing paramilitaries keen to return the country to a more autocratic government structure. In Gotha she joined comrades on the barricades in order to tend to the wounds of those who had been injured. In 1922 she resigned from the Bremen schools service.
Teacher-campaigner By 1922 Oelfken was more convinced than ever that the existing state schools failed to match up to contemporary societal needs. That year she moved to Berlin-Spandau and resumed her teaching career. Towards the end of the year she became involved in the so-called "Spandau Schools Battle" (), vehemently opposing corporal punishment and the prescriptive requirements that governed school prayers. By the end of 1922 she had resigned (again) from government service, which this time meant resigning from teaching within the Berlin publicly funded schools system. From now on she was able to work as a teacher only in the (relatively small, and some would have said, quirky) private education sector.
While she continued to campaign for schools reform, she also accepted a teaching-related post at Hellerau, just outside Dresden in connection with an experimental school newly established by the Scottish education reformer, A. S. Neill. Neill's focus was on the pupils themselves. These were free to decide for themselves whether or not they wanted to attend lessons. He abolished division of pupils into conventional classes and "paradoxical sanctions", while introducing private lessons. Oelfken found herself in sympathy with many of Neill's ideas. However, the period was one of intensifying economic crisis and by the end of 1923 Neill had been driven by economic pressures to relocate his pedagogical experiments to Vienna. Oelfken returned to Berlin where she combined a succession of teaching jobs with a steady stream of newspaper articles on the subject of education reform.
In 1925 she took a teaching post with the privately funded Benario School, described as a "living community school" (). Later during the 1920s she worked for the Dahlem Communist School, fulfilling on its behalf a contract with representatives of the Soviet expatriate community. This involved applying reformist ideas to devising a two years education and training programme designed for the children of the Soviet embassy and the (already implausibly large) in Berlin. Many sources indicate that during 1926/27 she was herself teaching at Berlin's school for the children of Russian diplomats and other expatriates. In the end the relationship with the Soviets floundered, however, both in response to her pedagogical ideas and on account of her increasingly critical attitude towards Communism.
Tami Oelfken Community School