Obermayer Award

“[Facts] need some help. The magic happens when you work… with senses and emotion.”

Christoph Mauny’s creative approach to remembrance inspires young and old alike.

by Toby Axelrod

Christoph Mauny uses the tools of tomorrow to bring the past to life. An educational consultant, he has inspired the people of his adopted home city — Gotha, in the former East German state of Thuringia — to learn with him about the local history of the Holocaust, and about the town’s once-thriving Jewish community.

Through learning about the past, residents have become inspired to tackle current problems in society.

He and his students, both children and adults, have literally shined a light on the site of Gotha’s synagogue, which was destroyed in the Kristallnacht pogrom of November 1938. They have raised awareness about the former Ohrdruf Concentration Camp, located about ten miles outside of town but nearly forgotten by locals. And they have pieced together biographies of some 20,000 former inmates.

Says Mauny, it is all about creating a “living culture of remembrance” that draws on local history, individual experiences, emotional encounters, and art. 

Today, Mauny is an educational consultant for the Weimar Painting and Drawing School and works with people aged two to 102. Is he an artist himself? “Absolutely not,” says Mauny, who studied philosophy and rhetoric before launching his pedagogical career. “I'm just open to it.”

His goal is to promote democratic values using art and high tech. “Why? Because I think we don't connect with general history and history books and school. Until I came across the first concrete biographies, I never connected to the fact that six million Jews died in the Shoah. You can't take it; it's too abstract.”

Of course, facts are important “these days above all,” he emphasizes. “But I think that’s not enough. [Facts] need some help. The magic happens when you work with the arts, with expression, with senses and emotion. And then we can connect with information. With biographies, with people.”

When the Wall Fell

Mauny was born in 1984 in Orlishausen, a village of 700 people — and perhaps as many sheep and cows — near Weimar. Though he was only five years old when the Berlin Wall fell, he vividly remembers how his life changed with unification of East and West Germany. One day he was riding up and down the street on his tricycle. And the next day there were cars, which he had never seen there before, he says. “I will never forget in my heart and soul the moment when my parents and I drove to the western side in our little car. We were on the highways, and everybody was waving from one car to another.”

Those were days of hope and joy. But then, as a youth he witnessed a rise in xenophobia and antisemitism in his region and felt he had to do something about it. “I could never understand how it became so normal for Nazis to show their symbols in the middle of Thuringia. It was an aggressive atmosphere at this time,” he says.

After studying in Tübingen, in former West Germany, Mauny returned to Thuringia. In 2015, he started volunteering in the research department of the Friedenstein Castle Foundation, which preserves Gotha heritage. Eventually, he was invited to take part in reshaping the foundation’s educational offerings, focusing on civil rights and democratic values. The foundation, which had highlighted noble themes in history, was rethinking its social role.

As outreach officer and deputy director of communication and education for the foundation’s museum, Mauny was committed to creating safe spaces for people to ask, to learn, and to become engaged in improving society.

Creative Remembrance

 After the death of his sister Marie in 2018, Mauny threw himself into innovative remembrance projects for and with young people, with a focus on Ohrdruf, Gotha, and the subcamp system of Buchenwald. Given the strong influence of radical right-wing parties and ideas in the area, the very act of remembrance took on political significance. There were some bumps along the way, but he persevered. 

In 2020, he worked with local youth to create the installation “Memory Walk: Ask our place about its history.” They made two videos in which young people interviewed passersby about monuments at the site of the former synagogue and at the train station, recalling the deportation of the last Jews of Gotha.

Students Antonia Kühn and Ulrike Schuppener described the project as “an opportunity to engage in a participative way with the Jewish-German history of [our] hometown, to process the memory of Jewish culture and to bring it to the public.” In a letter nominating Mauny for an Obermayer Award, they said he had inspired them “to become active in this area ourselves.”

The following year, Mauny initiated the thematic focus "Jewish Life" at the foundation. Although his family is “not Jewish, and we have no connections and families or friends who are Jews,” the subject “was always interesting for me.”

It was generally known in Gotha that the empty lot on what is now Mosslerstrasse once was home to a synagogue. Dedicated in 1904, it was desecrated and set ablaze during the state-organized Kristallnacht pogrom of November 1938. The Jewish community, which numbered about 300 at the time, was then forced to pay for the removal of the rubble.

In the postwar years, the site was used as a playground and a parking lot. Eventually, a supermarket and apartments were built there. A marker was put up in 1988, and later was incorporated into a redesigned shopping center that opened in late 2020.

Mauny and his students questioned the idea of putting a shopping center where the synagogue had previously stood. In the end, they decided to do an artistic intervention involving remembrance, linguistics, and media art. From October 27-31, 2021, their video-sound installation The Gotha Synagogue Lives was projected at night on the walls of a passageway between two parts of the new mall, as part of the Thuringian Days of Jewish-Israeli Culture. Though it was only temporary, the staging was filmed and has become a digital monument, available on YouTube or as a virtual reality experience via mobile phones.

The installation raised awareness about the synagogue and Jewish life as part of the story of Gotha. It was supported by state funders, including the official “Nine Centuries of Jewish life in Thuringia” program. The chairman of the Jewish Community of Thuringia, Reinhard Schramm, led the presentation.

Mauny, who managed this “urban intervention,” also invited all local schools to take part in a sub-project called “Vocabulary for Jewish Culture.” Pupils created stickers with words of Yiddish or Hebrew origin that have made their way into the German language, including Schmonzes (nonsense), vermasseln (luck), and Knast (jail, from the Yiddish word for fine or punishment). The list of words was printed out as stickers and distributed back to the schools as a decentralized urban sticker campaign to educate people or to stick over hate messages in the city. The list of words can also be downloaded.

“For me, all these actions are basically about creating publicity and addressing the social relevance of our cultural institutions,” Mauny says.

“At the end of each project, Mauny praised the participants many times; he conveys to everyone that they are an important part of something very big,” says student Viktoria Lang. Lang has participated in many projects designed by Mauny. He “has positively influenced many people with his work, including me,” she says. 

Though the synagogue projection was a big success, it also drew unwanted attention from neo-Nazis, says Mauny. “We kind of hit a nerve there. There were a lot of antisemitic disturbances,” from vandalism (a swastika was carved into the oversized Star of David on the monument) to racist harassment of participants. On one occasion, a drunken neo-Nazi loitering nearby “went to a police car and made the Hitler salute,” which is illegal in Germany. He was arrested.

Such harassment did not deter Mauny. In 2021, he worked with students on an interview project, “Ear to Ear with Another Life,” in cooperation with the Anne Frank Center in Berlin. For the project, young people spoke with local seniors about their memories of Jewish neighbors in prewar Gotha. The project was turned into a podcast.

“Teenagers were talking to people who were themselves children in 1945,” says Mauny. “I love the moments when they built connections with the seniors they were visiting.”  

In April 2023, Mauny launched an educational project for the Friedenstein Castle Foundation marking the 78th anniversary of the liberation of the Ohrdruf concentration camp complex. The project, called “German Memory Gap: Concentration Camp Ohrdruf,” aims to raise local awareness of the camp, which opened in November 1944 and was the first to be liberated by the U.S. Army. The Friedenstein foundation already has released two video biographies of survivors on YouTube.

Over the next several years, participants — youth, artists, witnesses, and experts — will digitize names (#everynamecounts), compile biographies, and create objects and sketches for an "unfinished memorial"— the progressive memorial project is designed to be intergenerational up to the year 2100. It seeks to address the questions of what we want to remember and why; how we can remember appropriately; and how we want to live as a society.

“For me, conveying the European dimension and in particular the regional density of the Nazi concentration camp system, which comprised over 1,000 camps, is key,” says Mauny. “Buchenwald was everywhere.”

Mauny has invited schools, youth clubs, and local businesses to take part in the project, which includes art workshops and public commemorations. It is cosponsored by the Arolsen Archives International Center on Nazi Persecution, the Buchenwald and Mittelbau-Dora Memorials Foundation, and the Weimar Painting and Drawing School, where Mauny started his new job in August 2023.

“I gained a completely new approach to German memory culture,” sculptor Carolin Borchard of Gotha wrote of her participation in a film-sound workshop as part of the Memory Gap project. “Mr. Mauny left a lasting impression on me and inspired me to deal with this topic even more consciously, both privately and professionally, and to advocate all the more vehemently for those affected.”

Mauny’s work “is a win for Gotha, democracy, and humanity. This is so important in view of the increased support for right-wing radical circles in Thuringia,” says local educator Judy Slivi.

“Before Christoph Mauny's work, the discussion in the Gotha museum landscape with Jewish topics and democracy education was rather marginal,” says Slivi, who met him through his work with the Friedenstein Castle Foundation. “With his creative projects he touched me and the people who were able to take part in his projects. He made a lot of people think.”

Mauny has just started his new job but already he has another plan, which he hopes to realize with the many volunteers. “I want to publish obituaries of all those names that we are finding out together,” he says. These notices would appear daily in the local newspaper, starting in November 2024, 80 years after the establishment of the Ohrdruf camp, and continuing until the 80th anniversary of its liberation in April 2025.

“Right where all the grandmothers and grandfathers are looking for the names of their neighbors,” they will see the names of former prisoners, says Mauny. “It brings the history into the public view again. It is about connecting people, bridging years, and going into your own environment. It seems really negative, of course, but I think it also brings a little dignity for those people.”

— Obermayer Award recipient 2024