Born to Swiss parents and raised in Berlin, Elisabeth Rotten is among the first generation of women to graduate and gain doctoral degrees from German universities. She came into contact with education reformers such as Hermann Lietz and Gustav Wyneken when studying in Marburg. During World War I, she was active in developing an international information and support centre (Auskunfts- und Hilfsstelle) to aid both Germans abroad and foreigners in Germany. After the war ended, she involved herself in a wide range of educational organisations seeking to spread the reform ideals of „New Education“ (Neue Erziehung) both at the national and international level. Among other things she was a founding member of the reformist „Bund Entschiedener Schulreformer“ (1919), headed the education department of the German League for the League of Nations (Deutsche Liga für Völkerbund, 1921), held a senior position in the New Education Fellowship alongside Beatrice Ensor and Adolphe Ferrière, and was co-director of the Geneva-based Bureau International d’Education founded in 1925. Alongside these functions, she published writings of her own and gained recognition as co-editor of the journal Das Werdende Zeitalter, the German-language publication of the New Education Fellowship. Rotten was among the women in the education reform movement who, though they had access to publications and international networks of communication and used them to further their cause through great personal effort, failed to receive recognition in historiography. This contribution will look into Elisabeth Rotten’s transnational activities, her role and function as a transmitter between different international and national discourses and practical approaches in school reform from the New Education movement on the basis of cultural transfer studies.

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