Elisabeth Rotten

In 1922, together with Beatrice Ensor and Adolphe Ferrière she founded the New Education Fellowship, becoming its vice-chair for German-speaking countries and editor of its German-language journal, which eventually came to be called Das Werdende Zeitalter.

[1] From 1922 she was associated with the school farm, Schulfarm Insel Scharfenberg, begun by Wilhelm Blume in Berlin and was a frequent visitor to the Odenwaldschule founded in 1910 by the educational reformer Paul Geheeb.

[2] She was also a friend of the anarchist, Gustav Landauer, who was Minister of Culture in the short-lived Munich Soviet (or “Council Republic”) of 1919 before being murdered after it was violently suppressed.

From 1926 until 1932, Rotten shared the editorship of the journal Das Werdende Zeitalter with Karl Wilker, an exponent of social pedagogy who transformed the Lindenhof in Berlin.

In 1930, Rotten co-founded a school at Hellerau just outside Dresden, where a garden city was established shortly after 1900 as part of a reform movement advocating modern housing.