Women's Portraits

Elfriede Bonarius

hildhood, education and professional training

Elfriede is born in February 1924. The family has got their own house in the country. The young girl loves playing outside of the house and in the fields. The girl doesn’t attend a kindergarten. She loves the nature.
Soon the family moves to the town of Gießen where the father has his occupation. After four years of primary school Elfriede changes to the Middle School. She finishes with the certificate for professional training. The young woman wants to become a Kindergarten teacher. First she has to work with a family and practise domestic science. Only then she is allowed to study in a teachers college. She finishes studies in 1943 and immediately after the final exam she starts teaching in a Fröbel Kindergarten and in the training courses. (Friedrich Fröbel is the first to create the Kindergarten in the 19^th century.) 

War, Post-War Period, Marriage

In 1944 the Kindergarten and the seminar are bombed and lies in ruins. And so is Elfriede’s home. The family returns to their house in the country. Here they live until the end of the war.

Elfriede is asked to work as a private teacher at a baroness’ home. She has to care for a four year old girl and a one year old boy. She’ll stay with the family for three years. The manor-house is in the country. Living in a solitary environment is not gay

for the young teacher. So when ever it is possible she takes the bus to the town, where she meets young people in a Christian youth club, the Christian Endeavour Society. Here she meets her later husband, a grammar school teacher.

They marry in 1948 and have three children, two sons and one daughter.

Family Life and Activities

The family’s first flat is in the house of Elfriede’s father. The young mother helps in her father’s office and cares for her own family. The husband teaches English and German in the grammar school and once a week he is in charge of a Christian youth club, where Elfriede sometimes joins in.
The growing family needs a larger place to live in, so they go to build their own house. By the time the growing children don’t need their mother constantly, Elfriede is trained to be a lay judge. More and more drug addicted young people commit a criminal offence. Frau Bonarius remembers a young man in prison who asked her to visit him but didn’t want to get a sermon. She visits him and finally he accepts her “preaching”.
Together with some friends Elfriede opens a tea-room which they call Katakombe.

Here they receive young people, offer tea and something to eat and they discuss their problems. Some visitors learn to get off their drug problems by living in a Christian company.
After the husband’s retirement the two partners have time to make journeys to England, Scotland, the United States. Later she travels to North Africa.

“Hauskreis” and Christian Private School

Her contact to drug addicted young people, makes Elfriede acquire a knowledge in psycho-therapy. She receives not only drug addicted people in her house but also men and women with psychical problems. The experience with these people leads her to create the weekly meetings, called “Hauskreis”. People of all ages and all nationalities, students and teachers, come together, sing and pray and celebrate birthdays and other parties.
During the nineties Elfriede, her husband and some friends plan to open a private secondary school. They find financial backers and soon they start with one class. Elfriede becomes the school secretary and sometimes the “school psychologist”.
When Elfriede’s husband suffers from health problems she takes care of him. She continues receiving women and men, with problems and without, with white skin and with black skin.

Asked about her further projects. She answers: “For me it is important to see people. Because of my leg problems I can’t go on long trips into the world, so I open my house for the world.” Presently she writes down her memories.

And what does she think about her own death? She is not afraid of it. She hopes to enter into Heaven and to meet her husband.

Elfriede is a happy old lady who loves laughing heartily.

Erdmute Dietmann-Beckert, September 2011