Hans Maeder

Hans Karl Maeder (born December 29, 1900, Hamburg, Germany, died, September 8, 1988, New York, New York) founded the Stockbridge School in Stockbridge, Massachusetts, with his wife Ruth in 1948, and served as its director and headmaster for 23 years.

Biography

Maeder was born in Hamburg at the Turn of the Century, the third child in a prosperous family. He described his father as an authoritarian nationalist and anti-Semite who embraced Hitler's message. Maeder left home at 18, refusing to go into business as his father had had wished, and deciding instead to become a teacher.

Maeder eventually joined the anti-Nazi underground, and fled Germany in 1933 to avoid arrest. He went to Denmark, where he continued his studies and remained active in the underground. But in 1937, Maeder was forced to leave Denmark and was subsequently pursued by the Gestapo and other Nazi sympathizers in Kenya, Singapore and the Philippines. Maeder arrived in Hawaii in 1941, where he was arrested on suspicion of being a German spy on December 8, the day following the bombing of Pearl Harbor.

Released from a prison camp in Texas on Feb. 23, 1943, he soon obtained a position as the organizer of a store-front youth center in New York City affiliated with the YMCA. In September 1944, Maeder took a teaching job for a year at Winsor Mountain School in Lenox, Massachusetts, several miles from the site of the future Stockbridge School.

Maeder then moved to the Walden School, a private day school in Manhattan, teaching German and the history of languages and briefly serving as the school's director in 1947 and 1948. It was at Walden that he met his wife Ruth, a widow at the time, through her son David, a Walden student whom he later adopted. Maeder left Walden in 1948 to found Stockbridge School. The Maeders paid $60,000 to acquire the 1,100-plus acres of the former estate of Daniel Rhodes Hanna, son of Mark Hanna. Their purchase of what became the site of Stockbridge School occurred shortly after the failure of Liberal Arts, Inc. to establish a Great Books-based college associated with St. John's College, Annapolis, Maryland, on the same site. The property had been vacant since the Great Depression and extended from the summit of West Stockbridge Mountain to the shore of the Stockbridge Bowl. Only a portion became the school campus, with the Maeders retaining title to the remainder.

As a progressive private boarding school for adolescents, Maeder intended that Stockbridge School's educational philosophy be interracial, nondenominational and international. The school was notable for being completely racially integrated from its inception and Maeder made successful efforts to recruit an international student body.

To help express Maeder's philosophy, and in light of his experiences as a German refugee and expatriate, the school flew the United Nations flag just below the American flag beginning in 1948, three years after the U.N. came into existence. For some years, its curriculum included a junior year abroad, and Stockbridge briefly operated a branch in Corcelles, Switzerland.

Maeder retired as headmaster of Stockbridge in 1971, and the school closed in 1976 as a result of declining enrollment and debt. The campus later became the site of the DeSisto at Stockbridge School, a wholly unrelated organization that is also now defunct.

The best-known Stockbridge School alumnus is Arlo Guthrie, whose arrest for littering by Stockbridge police shortly after graduation in 1965 inspired the song "Alice's Restaurant". Alice Brock had been the school librarian before opening a lunch counter in Stockbridge. Among other notable alumni are Chevy Chase and Benjamin Barber.

External Links

* [http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=940DE7DE1F3BF932A2575AC0A96E948260&scp=1&sq=hans%20k.%20maeder&st=cse "NY Times"] , September 11, 1988
* [http://www.teqjournal.org/backvols/2001/28_3/v28n304.pdf "Teacher Education Quarterly"] , Summer, 2001
* [http://www.newschool.edu/searchresults.aspx?cx=012693106714645627845%3Ad47rqpn2cag&cof=FORID%3A11&q=hans+k+maeder#162 The New School, Annual Hans K. Maeder Memorial Lectureship]
* [http://stockbridgeschool.org/ Stockbridge School Web site "Stories" page; introduction to Gunter Nabel's "A Fight For Human Rights - Documents of The Stockbridge School."]