Obermayer German Jewish History Award

“I know that we cannot change the world, but we can teach...”

Michael Imhof

Petersberg, Hesse

As a teacher and researcher in the Hesse town of Fulda, Michael Imhof has passionately dedicated the past three decades to educating young people and town residents about his region’s rich Jewish heritage. He has led tours through Jewish Fulda, given countless school and community lectures, inaugurated a memorial to local students murdered in the Holocaust, and established successful college partnerships between the University of Fulda and multiple colleges in Israel.

He has also written two monumental books. The 440-page tome Jews in Germany and 1,000 Years of Judaism in Fulda (Juden in Deutschland und 1000 Jahre Judentum in Fulda) was published in 2011. And 400 Years of Jews in the Rhön (400 Jahre Juden in der Rhön) was published in 2017 and has since become a traveling exhibition.

Throughout, Imhof has been guided by a deep motivation to capture young people’s interest and curiosity in a subject he continues to make relevant to them today.

“I know that we cannot change the world, but we can teach students and make them… sensitive to discrimination, to their humanity, to their feelings about others—to people who are searching and who need help,” he says. “We can give them new ideas about Jewish history and motivate them to deal with their local history. I think in this way I try to make them immune to certain [right-wing] tendencies. I always show pupils what may happen if we’re not engaged against anti-Semitism and racism against minorities.”

A retired educator who still leads student workshops about Jewish history three or four times a month, Imhof is expert in the art of the slideshow presentation as a way of engaging young viewers. “I don’t only talk but I let them see. I explain many things through pictures, and I combine this with biographies of people. I always try, behind the documents, to show living people,” he says. It’s an approach that captures students’ attention while educating them at the same time. “When they stay for the great pictures of their streets and villages, they also get the information that there was a synagogue, and they say, ‘I never knew this [history]. My grandfather told us about the Jews. I’ll ask him again,’” Imhof says.

Born in Fulda in 1947, Imhof grew up in a family that was openly and courageously opposed to the Nazis. Imhof’s mother had forbidden his older brother from joining the Hitler Youth and had successfully hidden a relative who deserted from the Wehrmacht, keeping him alive through the remainder of the war. Imhof’s father, a teacher in a nearby village, ran afoul of the Nazis for his Catholic religious views. The Frankfurt Auschwitz trials happened while Imhof was in high school and impacted his views of German culpability. “It was shocking for me,…and it made me think,” he says.

He later taught high school in a town in Northern Hesse and at a comprehensive school in Marburg before returning to Fulda in 1980, where he worked as a teacher at the vocational Ferdinand-Braun School and then organized a teacher training service for the region. There, with a handful of other teachers, he dove into research about the region’s Nazi past as well as its Jewish history. He began leading students to Jewish sites, including cemeteries, synagogues, and former Jewish homes, and organized concerts featuring Yiddish songs. Then, in 1987, the mayor of Fulda, Wolfgang Hamberger, energized Imhof’s work when he invited Jewish survivors to visit the town with their families.

Working with his group of teachers, which called itself the History Workshop (Geschichtswerkstatt), Imhof interviewed some 30 of the 150 survivors and their descendants who had come from as far away as Australia, South America, France, the United States, and Israel. “I said, ‘This is a possibility we won’t get later,’” Imhof recalls. “Some had survived the concentration camps.”

He made an especially interesting connection that week with two sisters whose family had formerly owned the house that Imhof’s in-laws bought in the 1950s. “Through our research, we found documents of what [became of] their brother and how their house was stolen in the Nazi time. I didn’t think that I would ever meet them,” he says. A second important encounter took place with Michael Cahn, the son of the last rabbi from Fulda, who later helped Imhof establish an exchange program between his training school and colleges in Jerusalem, Haifa, and Herzliya in Israel.

The conversations they had with survivors that week, which Imhof’s team transcribed and translated for the Fulda archive, inspired him to create a traveling exhibition in the late 1980s about Fulda’s experience during the Nazi period, prior to which some 1,000 Jews had lived in the town. Imhof continued to educate young people while organizing events, excursions, and discussions around Jewish themes.

His interviews with former residents became material for the book he painstakingly researched and wrote about Fulda’s thousand-year Jewish history. The story spans the accusations of ritual murder leveled against Fulda’s Jews in 1235, through the town’s apogee in the Early Modern Period (when it became a center for Jewish learning, home to a famous yeshiva and legendary 17th century Talmudic scholar Rabbi Meir Schiff), and finally to its destruction during the Holocaust.

In his second book, about Jewish life in the Rhön, Imhof focused on 20 rural Jewish villages scattered throughout the region. “My desire was to make people aware of the importance of Jewish communities in the Rhön villages for the economic, social, and political development of our era,” he says. “Even in [the 1600s] they had new commercial ideas, and in the 19th century they were the motor of modernism in our area—in the countryside especially. They brought a new economy, they were engaged in the development of transportation infrastructure and school systems, they were in the parliament and political groups of the villages, they were founders of sporting clubs and banking movements.”

The Rhön book became the basis for a traveling exhibition that began in the small town of Tann, where there had been a thriving Jewish community prior to the Nazi time. Later, in 2014, Imhof created another exhibition, this one chronicling 200 years of emancipation of the Jews in the Fulda region. It was shown at Fulda’s Vonderau Museum and at 15 or more schools across the area. The two exhibitions, now combined into one, are still touring the region.

In 2016, based on his own research and discoveries, Imhof installed a school memorial plaque dedicated to Jewish students from Freiherr-vom-Stein-Gymnasium who were murdered by the Nazis. Prompted by the headmaster, he discovered that of the 615 pupils who attended the school between 1870 and 1936, 104 were killed by Nazis while another 250 survived because they escaped. The fate of the rest is unknown.

The plaque includes where and when the children were born, when they attended school, when and in which concentration camps they died, as well as short biographies about their lives. “We gave them their names [back] when we mounted the plaque at a prominent place in the school,” he says.

For Imhof—who has built relationships with the Anne Frank Educational Centre in Frankfurt as well as other organizations dedicated to fighting racism and anti-Semitism, and who is continually working to strengthen ties between Fulda and learning institutions in Israel—the work is never-ending.

“We must not be discouraged and [must] keep teaching about the crimes committed against the Jews. We must fight against the danger of repression, oblivion, and denial,” he says. “We do this step by step, and the small steps [take] the longest, but they also show results. What we need in our schools and societies is to implant the spirit of humanity, human rights, and solidarity. The respect for each other and the responsibility for these values must be ingrained in our society and in our schools.”

— Obermayer Award recipient 2019