A Site of Unfracturing: The German Pestalozzi School in Buenos Aires

Histories of children in migration often reflect the polarity of their experiences. Caught between competing expectations that they forge paths of integration in new surroundings, while also maintaining commitments to a distant former home, migrant children and children of immigrants face pressures to be present at multiple spaces at the same time. This paper examines the history of the Pestalozzi School in Buenos Aires, Argentina, as an institution that attempted to collapse these pressures of simultaneous belonging within one space. The school was founded in 1934 by a group of German-speaking Argentinians and recent immigrants who opposed Fascism and protested the widespread support for the Nazi regime among German Argentinians. As a practical solution and an ideological statement, the Pestalozzi School appealed to families who wanted to educate their children in a German environment but refused to send them to schools that advocated Nazi ideology.

While the school had no official links to the Jewish community, the increase in the arrival of German-Jewish refugees during the 1930s meant that the vast majority of the children attending were Jews or had a Jewish background. For these children and their families, the Pestalozzi School became a site of everyday community crafting. It offered a German cultural education but one that was distant from German nationalism and resolutely opposed to Nazism. It offered a secular Jewish sociability that was not predicated on Zionism and maintained distinctions from other Jewish communities in the city. And it offered instruction that aimed to prepare students for a socio-economic integration into the Argentinian middle class. Exploring the history of the Pestalozzi School from 1934 until the mid-1970s, my paper will show how the school sought to reconcile the pressures of multiple belongings and consider the various challenges that it encountered in pursuing this aim.