Bonhoeffer in London: the German Girl's School

As I recall my recent visit to Bonhoeffer's "parsonage" in London, I wonder more about the German Girl's School that occupied the first two floors of his house. It's impossible for a place not to enter the imagination as more "real" once one has visited it. This trope animates Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice, for the "light, bright and sparkling" Elizabeth Bennett cannot really imagine other people's homes until she visits them, after which, her views, not surprisingly, change--and this reality continues to drive our  tourism and pilgrimage. We can google earth endlessly, but that fails to recreate what it is like to actually physically be in a place.

One of my frustrations after landing back home was that although workmen were in front of the house, I didn't ask to go inside! It never once occurred to me at the time. What a treasure it would have been had I asked, and they had let my husband and me go up to the attic!

That can't be now, but at idle moments since returning, I've entertained more and more questions about this setting: what was the name of the German girl's school in the parsonage? Who ran it? How many students did it have? Did Bonhoeffer, who had a knack at youth pastoring, interact with the students at all? Were some of them in his Forest Hills congregation, as one could only imagine was likely? Were all of them? Did Bonhoeffer enter his attic parsonage through the front door of his house and up a main staircase, thus seeing students? Or did he slip in a back door and up a back staircase for privacy? Was the school a boarding school or a day school? I assumed a day school, but even if so, wouldn't the school's principal--and possibly some teachers--live in the house? If so, were they bothered by the late night talk, laughter, mock arguments and piano playing in the attic? Who was the principal of the school? What were the names of the teachers who taught there? Was it because of financial restraints--lack of being able to afford a gardener--that the large garden in the back of the house was reverting, as reported, to a "wilderness?"

I looked through "likely suspect" books to try to find some answers: Life in Pictures, Bethge's biography and Mary Bosanquat's biography. Unfortunately, I borrowed from the library both Keith Clements' Bonhoeffer in Britian, and the Works volume he edited that covers Bonhoeffer's time in England, both of which may offer answers, but which have since gone back to their homes. None of the books on my shelf shed light on my questions.

Researching this school represents one of the places where the Internet comes to its limits, but I did find some information in a book called Germans in Britain Since 1500 by Panikos Panayi, thanks to Google Books. According to Panayi, children "who were living with their families in London" could attend St. Mary's School, on Cleveland Street, founded by the Evangelical Lutherans in 1708-- or the Forest Hills School at Manor Mount. The Forest Hills School opened in 1893 as "both a preparatory and a secondary school, Realschule, for boys and girls." During World War I, "classes for upper-level boys were suspended and never revived, although the rest of the school functioned throughout the 1930s."

Clearly, this was the school with which Bonhoeffer had at least a glancing acquaintance. A day school rather than a boarding school, one can surmise it closed at the end of the 1930s due to the tensions brought on by World War II, although I also imagine it was struggling financially by Bonhoeffer's time.

Panayi's book suggests that younger boys may have been attendance in the 1930s, but from what all the Bonhoeffer sources say, it must have been overwhelmingly, if not entirely, a girl's schools by late 1933.

Bonhoeffer doesn't have as much to say about London as a backdrop as he does about Rome, Barcelona or Manhattan, probably because England was not as "exotic" or different from Germany as the other three locales. Biographies indicate the grimness of Bonhoeffer's London surround: from rain to drafty windows and doors,  from a mice infestion to lack of hot water to  a sense that the house lacked the "graciousness" of the Bonhoeffer family's Grunewald home. Bonhoeffer, as has been much repeated, had frequent colds while there, and also flew to Germany often, something not at all a part of his other foreign adventures (of course, he couldn't have flown back and forth across the Atlantic at that time.)

Most of the primary source material from Bonhoeffer during his stay in London concerns his intense involvement in the church struggle and the work of pastoring two parishes. It would be interesting to learn more of his thoughts about Britain itself as he encountered it in its last days as the preeminent world power, its last gasp as empire. So much would change soon after he left--and yet much would remain the same.

Does anyone know more? Other information about the girl's school would be most welcome.