[1][2][3] 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.
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.
[1] Marie Wilhelmine "Tami" Oelfken was born into a prosperous family in Blumenthal [de], then a commercially flourishing separate municipality, but subsequently subsumed into Bremen as a suburb down-river of the city centre.
[2] Oelfken's mother, born Bertha Sophie Christa Heidmann (1866–1935),[1] was a gifted musician who successfully managed the household and reared seven children, of whom Tami was the second-born.
[2] 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.
[6] 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.
[6] Oelfken attended the secondary all-girls' school (Höhere Mädchenschule) in nearby Vegesack[6] and then moved on to the August Kippenberg [de] teacher training college in Bremen, passing her teaching exams in 1908, still aged only nineteen.
She later learned to joke that her handicap made it "difficult to run away",[1] 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.
)[6] 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.
[1] 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.
[6] Following qualification, Oelfken obtained her first teaching job at Ohrwege [de], a district of Zwischenahn (near Oldenburg, which was the city in which her mother had been born and grown up).
[3][4] 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.
[2] 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 Werderland [de], a large marshy area that would have provided rich pickings for her landlord, a river fisherman from an established family of local fisherfolk.
[5] 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" (Moordorf).
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.
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.
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.
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.
By the end of the year she had overcome the inevitable bureaucratic hurdles and opened the Tami Oelfken Community School in Berlin-Wilmersdorf, winning – as one commentator later wrote – immediate plaudits from artists and intellectuals.
Parents were required to spend two terms during which they attended lectures concerning the school's educational objectives and community-working approach, and including study of the in-depth theoretical and practical issues and questions arising.
[2] She had evidently learned many lessons from her brief exposure to Alexander Neill pioneering ideas on education reform which she had encountered during her time at Dresden-Hellerau.
[7] One of the core founding principles, regarded by the mainstream education establishment at the time as radical, was a holistic integration of teaching as a shared responsibility between schools and parents.
It appears that by 1935 she had relocated again, this time to London, where (again) attempts to re-establish her school for the benefit of the German expatriate community were thwarted, which at least one source attributes to the devious bureaucratic machinations of the Gestapo.
By the time it was ready for publication, the book of her war-time diaries also included, as a significant theme, a critical analysis of the language used by the authorities in Nazi Germany.
[4] In what remained of Blumenthal, the municipality/suburb where she had lived as a child, there was particular interest in "Maddo Clüver: Die Konturen einer Kinderlandschaf" (1947), a reissuance of her 1941 novel "Tine" which the National Socialists had banned.
Through its careful study of the lives of Polish workers employed – allegedly during the nineteenth century – at the town's cotton mill, "Maddo Clüver" provided the townsfolk with a vision of their own respectable municipality, viewed through Oelfken's bluntly critical yet insightful prism.
[2] The judgement appeared in a poorly researched article from the critic Paul Hühnerfeld [de] in the widely circulated West German weekly newspaper Die Zeit.