Sybille Volkholz is a German educationalist and a former Berlin senator.
Life and works
Sybille Volkholz was born at Dramburg (as it was known before the frontier changes mandated in 1945), a small manufacturing and market town in Pomerania, positioned at the edge of the marshy flatlands east of Stettin. Her birth coincided with the start of an eighteen month period of intensive ethnic cleansing. She grew up and, till 1963, attended school far to the west, in Essen. She went on to study Sociology at Bonn, Cologne and the WWU (university) at Münster, from where in 1967 she received her first degree. That was followed by a three year stint between 1967 and 1970 as a research assistant at the (subsequently expanded and in 1971 rebranded) Max Planck Institute for Human Development in Berlin, while studying for a career in the teaching profession. Then came a period of study in schools-level teaching at the College of Education (“Pädagogische Hochschule”) in West Berlin. Between 1972 and 1979 she taught at a secondary school in Berlin-Charlottenburg. Between August 1979 and March 1989, she attended a Teachers’ Training college (subsequently redesignated as a “Fachschule für Sozialpädagogik”) in the city.
As a teaching student and during her “Lehramtsreferendariat” (period of in school training) Volkholz involved herself in the political aspects of the profession, principally through her involvement in the West Berlin branch of the ”Gewerkschaft Erziehung und Wissenschaft” (GEW), West Germany's principal Teachers’ Union. She served as deputy regional chair between 1979 and 1989.
The state election conducted in March 1989 was the last state election to be held in West Berlin before reunification took effect. The two leading parties received an identical number of seats in the Berlin parliament, which was widely reported as a defeat for the centre-right CDU (party) which up till this point had secured the largest number of votes and seats in every Berlin state election since 1975. Following difficult negotiations a new coalition administration was agreed under the leadership of Walter Momper of the centre-left SPD. The “junior partner” in the coalition was West Berlin's Alternative List for Democracy and Protection of the Environment“ (‚‘“Alternativen Liste für Demokratie und Umweltschutz“‘‘ / AL), a grouping with many of the features of a traditional party that had rapidly gained electoral support in West Berlin since its relatively recent creation in 1978. Under the terms of the coalition agreement, e of the 14 members of the Berlin Senate (governing council) were nominated by the AL. For the first time in history, there were more women than men in the senate. All three of the AL senators were women, including the senator for schools, professional education and sports. This portfolio went to Sybille Volkholz. Like her fellow senator Anne Klein She was formally described as a "non-party senator for the AL”. Volkholz would later recall Mayor Momper's decision to appoint more females than males to his senate as a “clever move”. He was certainly “no feminist” and there was a sense in which some of the senators “felt used”, but it enabled the mayor to avoid appointing a number of potentially troublesome male colleagues, and the move was viewed favourably by a number of influential commentators. In other respects, relations between the coalition partners remained uneasy. Volkholz found herself repeatedly blocked in her attempts to open up mainstream schools to disabled children: “I went through many battles for a wider acceptance of handicapped children”.