Career
In 1920, von Thadden's father remarried – her stepmother was Barbara Blank (1895-1972) – and von Thadden herself left Trieglaff to go to Berlin to pursue a career in education. She attended Alice Salomon's Soziale Frauenschule where she came into contact with educational progressivism. After training there, she got a job at a children's camp in Heuberg in the Swabian Jura, later also gaining experience at the Hermann Lietz and Kurt Hahn schools. Having been offered the opportunity to lease an unoccupied stately home, Schloss Wieblingen near Heidelberg, in 1926, von Thadden quickly found a use for it. At Easter 1927, after receiving government approval to do so, as well as obtaining the requisite monies, Schloss Wieblingen became the home of von Thadden's Evangelisches Landerziehungsheim für Mädchen, a private boarding school for girls incorporating the Christian ethics that von Thadden had been brought up with and held dear, and Kurt Hahn's educational ideas. The initial enrolment was thirteen girls, whom von Thadden hoped to train "strictly and fairly to (be) independently thinking, emancipated women."
The 1920s were also the time when the National Socialists were rising to prominence. By the time von Thadden founded her school, Adolf Hitler had already been released from prison after the Beerhall Putsch, and the Nazis were gaining popularity. Von Thadden herself even found a certain appeal in Nazi ideas in the beginning, but she soon decided otherwise, and came to regard the Nazis' vision for Germany as one quite at odds with her own humanitarian views. Even so, von Thadden – along with many of her contemporaries – was quite blind at this time to the threat posed by the Nazis.
Read more about this topic: Elisabeth Von Thadden
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