Elfriede Kaun
Elfriede Kaun Rahn ( born October 5, 1914 in Wolfenbüttel (Elbe ); † March 5, 2008 in Kiel ) was a German track and field athlete. At the Olympic Games in Berlin in 1936, she won the bronze medal in the high jump.
Life
Kaun, the youngest of four children, in 1921 came from the niederelbischen constable with her family to Kiel, where her father had found a job as a crane operator at the former imperial shipyard. Elfriede Kaun visited in 1921 the primary school, then middle school. In 1930 she began a two- year course in nanny, she successfully graduated in 1932 and immediately found a job in a Kiel kindergarten.
In 1933 she joined the gymnastics club Kieler, where she first tried his hand at cross-country running and long jump. Because of her lack of speed, they finally came to the high jump. In 1934, she was in this discipline North German champion, second in the IV Germans fighting games in Nuremberg in July 1934, Fifth. During the Women's World Games in London in August 1934 and champion in athletics meet against Japan with 1.56 m On July 22, 1935 in Wuppertal Kaun increased the German record by one centimeter to 1.60 meters. In the same year she won the German Championships and the international match against Poland. At the 1936 Summer Olympics she skipped like their competitors Ibolya Čák from Hungary and Dorothy Odam from the UK again 1.60 m, reached the jump-off but only the Bronzemedaille.Zu its relation to the high jumper Gretel Bergmann, who was Jewish, although part of the German Olympic team, but was not in the OS was allowed to start, she gave an extensive interview.
Elfriede Kaun also acted in Leni Riefenstahl's Olympia with the first film. Because of their sporting achievements, she was 1936, a position in the sports department of the city of Kiel offered and allows training as a kindergarten teacher. After the outbreak of the Second World War, she had to give up their sporting ambitions gradually. Now she sought a job as a governess in Berlin, where she also worked as a kindergarten teacher since 1943. In the same year she married the graphic artist Heinz Rahn, whom she had met in Kiel. From the union of son Kai Rahn (1946-1992) revealed the marriage was divorced in 1964.
As part of the evacuation of Berlin Elfriede Rahn was against the war with a group of children to Timmendorfer beach, where she headed until 1948 a kindergarten in the district of Niendorf. In 1952 Elfriede Rahn with Georg von Opel's employment with the German Olympic Society. Between 1952 and 1954 she lived with her son in Stuttgart, but then returned back to Kiel. Between 1964 and 1972 worked Elfriede Kaun Rahn, as they called themselves since the divorce, in a Timmendorfer sauna bath. When she was dismissed this point, she lived as a shareholder Editha Marwitz von Stephani (1905-1986), the Duke of Anhalt in Garmisch -Partenkirchen widow.
After Elfriede Kaun an Honorary Award of the Committee of Women is named in the National Sports Federation Schleswig -Holstein, which is awarded every two years. With her died the last surviving German medalist of the Olympic Games of 1936.