Obermayer Award

Students learn for themselves why the history matters 

In a center of right-wing ideology, year-long Erich Zeigner House programs teach research skills and civil courage

Holocaust education is mandatory in German schools, and many students have visited a concentration camp or Holocaust memorial. But few have met survivors, researched what happened to a local Jewish family during the war, or looked into how and why non-Jewish Germans helped their Jewish neighbors escape. 

The Erich Zeigner House is intent on changing that. 

The nonprofit was founded in 1999 in Leipzig, a city in southeastern Germany known to classical music fans for the Gewandhaus Orchestra and its former conductor Kurt Masur. Before 1933, Leipzig was home to Germany’s sixth-largest Jewish community, and its Jewish residents thrived in the professions, business, and the arts. Today, the region around Leipzig is a center of far-right politics and neo-Nazi activity. 

The group is named after a lawyer and politician who was briefly the prime minister of the southeastern German state of Saxony, where Leipzig is located. Zeigner was also Saxony’s Justice minister and, after the war, Leipzig’s mayor. He helped the Leibels, a local Jewish family, get out of Nazi Germany. And he was imprisoned for his opposition to the Nazi regime. 

The nonprofit is located in Zeigner’s former home, from which he organized the family’s escape. The group has about 70 members and a half-dozen employees. Zeigner’s life and work is an example to today’s young people, says the group’s director, Henry Lewkowitz, because it shows them what civil courage can accomplish.

One of the group’s key projects is working with local schools, some 13 by now, both in the city and the surrounding area. The group helps interested students research a particular family or individual, either a victim of the Holocaust or a “silent hero” —someone, like Zeigner, who helped a Holocaust victim.

The research involves reviewing historical documents and locating and interviewing eyewitnesses and others. Organizers are aware that Holocaust eyewitnesses are dying out so they are looking for so-called second-level witnesses, like children of eyewitnesses, neighbors, or even people abroad. 

Once all the research is done, students create a flyer and raise money so that a memorial plaque or a brass stumbling stone (Stolperstein) can be installed in honor of the person they researched. This involves approaching people in a house or neighborhood where the person lived and asking for contributions. The project lasts a full year. 

“I personally found that what was very interesting or very attractive about the project is that you simply could deal with a family. In history class it’s about a group of people,” says Theresa Ahnert, a student at the New Nikolai School (Neue Nikolaischule) in Leipzig. “It’s really special to just focus on someone and learn something about people,” she says.

Both Ahnert and Anna Eulitz, a fellow student, learned about the project through their history teacher, Carola Pracht, who has been very involved with the Erich Zeigner House.

“If it weren’t for Mrs. Pracht, I never would have known about such projects,” Eulitz says. The personable, well-spoken teenager was very excited to talk about her research experiences in an interview on a frosty Leipzig morning. Eulitz visited a Leipzig synagogue and learned the Nazis had burned it and destroyed the lives of many of its worshippers. When you hear directly about this “it doesn’t let go of you,” she says.

Pracht agrees that the Erich Zeigner House offers students something she cannot within the four walls of her high school classroom. “For one, there is no time during the lessons,” Pracht says. “I am bound by a curriculum, and I have little time to conduct research work [with the students] on the side.”

There have been occasions where the students’ research has yielded astonishing results. In one project in 2015, students found relatives of the family, which was involved in the fur trade before the war. The students discovered that some of the family now lives in Israel and others in New York, but they didn’t know about each other.

“It was only through this research project with the students that we were able to unite both parts of the family in 2016,” says Lewkowitz. They came together for the ceremony in Leipzig at which the group installed 14 stumbling stones.

Apart from these successes, there have been numerous challenges too.

Lewkowitz remembers one student in eighth grade who told her father about the project during dinner. He didn’t want her to get involved. The dad, a die-hard supporter of Alternative for Germany (AfD), a nationalist right-wing party, told his daughter that remembering that past—especially Jewish history—was no longer important. The student stayed with the project and invited her father to the stumbling stone commemoration ceremony, the event at which the stone is actually installed.

“And the father came,” Lewkowitz says. “The confidence that this student had developed in this year through engagement with a concrete victim biography and also by standing up to her father in discussions —that was a rare example, really, where we had a concrete case that showed our work’s sustainability.”

Many of the group’s difficulties come when they work outside of urban Leipzig. 

Last year some students believed the documents they were reviewing were fake. So Lewkowitz took them on a trip to the state archives in Leipzig to show them the original documents. And even then there were students who told the archivist they believed she and the (World War II) Allies had prepared the documents.  

“There was a fundamental doubt about the authenticity of the documents and about what happened in the Holocaust,“ Lewkowitz says, noting five years ago he was not confronted with these types of revisionist sentiments. Instead of focusing their energy on worrying, staff at the Erich Zeigner House decided to double down and push harder for their programs aimed at preventing right-wing extremism. 

In other cases, neo-Nazi classmates try to intimidate curious students and prevent them from participating in the stumbling stone research project. Some take pictures of the list of students who sign up for the project. To combat this, organizers hold the sign-up in the teacher’s lounge, and project meetings are not advertised but held “more undercover so to speak,” says Lewkowitz. 

Sometimes the tactics are more threatening. In Geithain, a town of 6,000 nearly 30 miles (47km) south of Leipzig, a group of neo-Nazis held a car parade on the day the group was installing stumbling stones. In a “coincidence of timing,” someone had poured concrete over the newly installed stumbling stones by the next day.

The group regularly gets hate mail, including one Lewkowitz remembers in particular that he describes as being “especially below the belt”—a photo collage of the gates of Auschwitz, accompanied by the text:  For you communists we’ll open the gates again.

Sometimes the nonprofit runs into resistance not just from overt neo-Nazis or parents, but even teachers who are not interested in researching what happened during World War II. When the group encountered right-wing populist sentiments among some teachers, it decided to cooperate with the University of Leipzig to offer a continuing education program for teachers in the form of workshops. These take place in schools and also at the Erich Zeigner House.

On top of the student and adult education programs, the group publishes brochures, pamphlets, and articles dealing with the prevention of right-wing extremism, remembrance culture, and German history education.

Facing right wing extremism is one thing. Financing that effort is another. The group does not have secure financing from the city, state, or federal government and faces a hostile environment from right-wing AfD politicians who have not only questioned the organization’s finances in parliamentary sessions but telephoned the group to question its work. Lewkowitz says the situation became so bad that he once got a phone call from an AfD politician who said he’d vote against providing funds to the Erich Zeigner House as long as it does not install stumbling blocks for German soldiers from World War II.

Given this landscape as its background, the staff is especially pleased about receiving a 2021 Obermayer Award, particularly as recognition of its work and the chance it provides to increase its recognition. Staff is hoping the award will expand its profile, help it to connect with other like-minded groups, and enable it to improve the quality and number of its offerings.

— Obermayer Award recipient 2021