People Who Inspire Us:
Nina Taubenreuther

Nina Taubenreuther’s life changed in 2016. 

A native of Düsseldorf, Germany, she had moved to Hamburg and had a great job in digital media working with multinational corporations. She was good at what she did, and she enjoyed it. In her spare time, she did volunteer work for various social causes. 

That year, more than a million refugees, many of them fleeing the war in Syria, arrived in Germany. “I became very involved in the work at the shelters,” Nina says. She was immediately struck by the contrast between the corporate wealth that surrounded her working life and the struggles of the immigrants.

“One day I was on a business trip and I was in my hotel room. It was very big and luxurious, and I realized it was much bigger — this room just for me — than the room that eight refugees were sharing in the shelter I had just been in a few days before. That was the moment when I decided, I can’t stand this big difference anymore.”

She quit her job and went to work on a project called Life Back Home, in which young Syrian refugees tell their stories to German high school students. For most of the students it was the first time they had come in contact with a refugee and for almost all of them, the first time they had heard such a personal story in detail.

As for the refugees, the task wasn’t easy. “They were very brave, standing in front of their peers and sharing their stories of flight and survival,” she says. 

In 2018, Nina met Ruth-Anne Damm, cofounder of Zweitzeugen (Secondary Witness), a German organization that works with Holocaust survivors to learn their stories in great detail, and then shares those stories —full life stories, not just the survival stories — with school children. These presentations are often the first time the children, some as young as 10 years old, have heard such personal stories about Jewish life and about life in the Nazi era. 

The two admired each other’s organizations and decided to hold a joint event. Zweitzeugen told the story of a Holocaust survivor, and Nina invited a Syrian woman who told her own survival story. The event was powerful, says Damm. “I had goosebumps the whole time.” 

Even though 70 years had passed and the stories were quite different, they were also very connected. “There were so many similar places they had been,” says Nina.

Two years later, Nina joined Zweitzeugen as managing director. “That (2018 event) was the first moment where we worked together quite closely. And when an opportunity came to join the team, I decided within a heartbeat that I wanted to apply.”

This year, under the leadership of Taubenreuther, Damm, and cofounder Sarah Hüttenberend, Zweitzeugen won a 2023 Obermayer Award. Also, in June, Nina joined the Widen the Circle Visiting Program, an intensive program aimed at building bridges between American and German educators and activists.

Recently, she helped Zweitzeugen launch a digital learning platform to share its work more broadly and in new ways. “I would like us to help shape the culture of remembrance, to be a permanent fixture in the educational landscape,” she says.

More: Read about Obermayer Award winner Zweitzeugen e.V. and see the short film on their work.