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fromPeter Hanack
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Thilo Hartmann is a teacher and fights for educational equality. Maybe that’s why he has to say goodbye to school.
Thilo Hartmann doesn’t really like the pose. The newspaper photographer has placed him on his chair behind the teacher’s desk, on which a few German books are lying around as if by chance. “Too distant,” says Hartmannn, pushes the low pile of books aside and crouches on the edge of the table in front. “Fits better,” he says.
You can well imagine how the 44-year-old, who could easily be estimated to be ten years younger, also seeks closeness to his students in class, albeit without becoming too confidential. The classrooms of the Ernst Reuter School in Dietzenbach are still empty, and it’s only a few days before school starts. Hartmann has already adjusted the tables today, arranged a few documents. After all, at the start of the new school year it shouldn’t be jerky on Monday morning.
In the past 18 months since the corona pandemic reached Germany, schools have been jerky, quite violently. “Hopefully we can now work together again reasonably reliably,” says Hartmann. In any case, he looks forward to seeing everyone again. “We teachers need it, and the students need it too,” he is convinced.
Born in Reutlingen, the family moved with him and his three brothers all over Germany. The father, pastor of a free church, changed job sites every few years because of his career. “Maybe that’s why I have a very distant relationship to religiosity,” he says and laughs.
He finally passed his Abitur at the Albert Einstein School in Schwalbach (Taunus). That was in 1996. “Back then, I really wanted a job in the social sector,” he says. This was followed by a year of community service at the station mission in Frankfurt Central Station, followed by a year of volunteerism in Nicaragua, in Santa Rossa, a village of 500 people near Ocotal, not far from the Honduran border.
“We taught the children how to read and write when they came back from work in the fields in the afternoon, and talked to their parents about sending their children to school regularly,” says Hartmann. Then Hurricane “Mitch” came, devastated everything the aid organization had set up, and suddenly it was all about rescuing people from their collapsed houses, distributing food and relief supplies. “Back then I saw how bad it is when a state doesn’t care about its people,” says Hartmann.
There he met his current wife Marta, a Spaniard who was also part of the aid team. He had already learned Spanish in the months before, and that happened quickly, “although at school it was always said that I was not gifted at languages,” he reports proudly. From this experience he feeds his conviction that one must encourage children and young people instead of belittling them.
He and Marta went back to Spain, near Barcelona, where Thilo Hartmann studied languages. He earned the money for this by working in the factory during the semester break, and during the semester he worked as a German teacher in a private language school – and that’s how he got into the teaching profession.
There were no affordable rental apartments for the young couple in Spain, so the two of them moved to Germany after completing their studies. Frankfurt became her adopted home. The one planned year turned into two, then three, and now the family has lived here with their two children for 17 years.
As soon as he arrived, the Ernst Reuter School hired him as a Spanish teacher. Hartmann passed his state exams, became civil servant, and now teaches Spanish, German and German as a second language. The couple are still committed to the people in Nicaragua.
Hartmann has been a union member since he started as a substitute teacher. If you will, he quickly made a career there. Still fairly new in the staff room, his colleagues elected him to the staff council, “perhaps because I often dared to open my mouth there at the conferences,” he says.
He joins the district executive of the Education and Science Union (GEW), is district chairman in Offenbach-Land, and is a member of the union’s collective bargaining department at state level. He has been a member of the General Staff Council for ten years. At the end of September he wants to apply to the state delegates’ meeting of the GEW for the state chairmanship.
If he is chosen, the new function could cost him direct contact with his students. The GEW state chairmanship is a full-time job, the task in Corona times is perhaps bigger than ever. Associated with this would be complete exemption from teaching obligations.
“That,” he says, “would of course be a shame.” And it doesn’t sound like it was said.
Thilo Hartmann wanted to take up a social profession, he helped drug addicts after graduating from high school and prepared quarters for the homeless, wanted boys and girls to enjoy learning and their parents wanted to convey the need to give their children an education. He saved people in need and experienced how unequal goods and happiness are distributed.
As a teacher, after all that, he feels in the right place. Here he can work to give everyone a chance to strengthen them for their path in life, regardless of their parents’ income or address. The pursuit of educational equity is one of the guidelines in his life.
“I am repeatedly shaken by the conditions under which we have to try to achieve this goal at school,” complains Hartmann. There were no teaching positions, the technical equipment was inadequate, and the whole system was underfunded. Even now, at the start of school, many positions at the Ernst Reuter School have not yet been filled and colleagues who teach without formal training have to be hired. Perhaps that is the reason I want to go to the top of the union. Thilo Hartmann would probably be in the right place there too.
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