“How do people deal with their history? How does society deal with its history?”

Historian and teacher Harald Höflein is shaping remembrance work for the next generation

by Toby Axelrod

The first time Harald Höflein reached out to Julius Bendorf, a Holocaust survivor in California, Höflein was “a bit afraid.”

“I thought he might not want to have anything to do with us, and he might not want to talk to some Ober-Ramstadt students and some weird teacher,” recalls Höflein, who teaches history and politics at the Georg-Christoph-Lichtenberg School, in the town where Bendorf grew up.

It was 2010. Höflein and his pupils wrote to Bendorf and included some of the research they had done online and in the local archive, where Höflein also works. “Within a very short time a letter came back in crisp, sharp handwriting: He was very happy that young people were thinking about him, that they had researched his biography and his family. And he even included pictures of himself,” Höflein says.

That contact would lead to Bendorf’s first visit to his former hometown since the end of World War II. 

“This was a special and very moving experience for us students,” says former student Tara Käsmeier, who works today with migrants in Berlin. “From the conversations with him and his children and grandchildren, the sentence ‘Encounter creates understanding’ always stayed in my head. This conviction remains with me to this day.”

“Mr. Höflein was tenacious in his search to locate our stepfather [Julius Bendorf],” wrote Margot Shapiro and Antoinette Liewen, in a letter recommending Höflein for an Obermayer Award. “He believes that when there is a living human connection to Holocaust victims, the students will gain a deeper connection to history.”

For historian and educator Harald Höflein, an archive is more than just a repository. It is a key to personal stories that help build a living memorial.

In addition to teaching, he holds a part-time pedagogical position at the Hessian State Archives. Through him, countless students in this town in former West Germany have come to know local history, have met eyewitnesses, and have helped ensure a place for remembrance work to come.

Höflein delights in connecting young students with very old documents and objects. Sometimes, documents will lead to “people who will soon no longer be around, with whom we can still conduct eyewitness interviews today.” Such contacts make the past palpable for a younger generation. And they are the hope for the future, he says.

“Dig where you stand”

Harald Höflein, 62, was born in Benzheim, about 20 miles south of where he works today. His father had been a soldier in World War II and then held by the Soviets as a prisoner of war for four years but spoke little about his wartime experiences from that time, other than to recall soldierly camaraderie. “He stopped talking before getting to places that might haunt him,” says Höflein. “My mother was born in 1930. “[She] went through the whole Nazi upbringing which, unfortunately, you noticed at times.”

As a boy, Höflein had “no idea about Jewish life in Benzheim, which of course existed and was a relatively large part of the town's history,” he later learned. In school, lessons about the Nazi period were distant from the local lived experience.

He only realized, he says, “how crazy that actually was” when he attended university in nearby Darmstadt in 1982. There, he was influenced by historian Helmut Böhme, who questioned German militarism. Höflein immediately became a member of the new Darmstadt History Workshop, founded by students and academic staff at the Technical University of Darmstadt. Through that workshop he learned that Jews and Christians had lived together in Benzheim for 1,000 years, and that there had been an impressive, large synagogue in the town. 

The workshop was part of a growing grassroots history movement whose participants were sometimes referred to, a bit disparagingly, as “barefoot historians.” The philosophy behind the movement was explore local history. “The saying was that you should dig where you stand,” he says. 

Back then, with the younger generation questioning their parents, it was still common to hear the phrase, “We didn’t see anything; we couldn’t know anything.” Höflein even heard such comments from his own family. But then there would be family occasions, like a birthday, he recalls. “Things got a bit more boozy. And then suddenly my aunt — I can remember that quite clearly — said: ‘Well, when old Mrs. Katz was thrown onto the cart and then taken away, I thought that was really terrible at the time.’ 

“Then I thought: Didn't Aunt Erna always say, for like 10 or 15 years, that she hadn't seen anything and didn't know anything?”

The more Höflein learned, the more interested he became in how people experienced historical events. “How do people deal with their history? How does society deal with its history? These are precisely the topics that are central to me,” he says.

These topics have shaped his career and the lives of his many students over the years.

The raw material

After completing his studies, Höflein taught in various schools before being hired by the Georg-Christoph-Lichtenberg School, a comprehensive school in Ober-Ramstadt in former West Germany, in 2007.

In 2014, encouraged and inspired by pioneering archive educator Thomas Lange, he applied to work at the Hessian State Archives. 

So in addition to teaching high school history and politics, he heads the educational programming department on a part-time basis at the archive. He routinely brings his high school students there; the files, objects, and testimonies they encounter become the raw material for projects and actions, such as pressing to change remaining Nazi-era street names. He also trains his students to be peer guides.

His goal is to empower his students to “actively deal with relevant issues in today's culture of remembrance.”

Höflein also has created an extracurricular club at his school dedicated to remembrance work. 

Among the many projects he and his students have undertaken are:

• Installing stumbling stone memorials and creating student-guided tours to these sites

• Contacting and meeting Holocaust survivors and their descendants

• Co-organizing the annual Holocaust Remembrance Day in Ober-Ramstadt

• Contributing to various exhibitions and acting as guides for visitors to the exhibitions

• Organizating an annual memorial day for Georg Elser, the first person known to have attempted to assassinate Hitler

• Creating a multiplier training course for youth and teachers at the archive on Wehrmacht crimes in Greece, with a film screening of The Balcony (Der Balkon), a film on that topic.

• Contributing to the debate on the Nazi-related street names in Darmstadt

• Initiating a graffiti mural project in the public space related to the lives of survivors Julius Bendorf and Trudy Isenberg

Getting different perspectives on history is key, says Höflein. Recently, his students focused on the 80th anniversary of the 1944 Allied bombing of Darmstadt, drawing a nuanced picture based on recollections of local residents and a former slave laborer. Though people who lived through the bombings were traumatized, they must not forget the context, he says: Germany bombed Polish civilians on day one of World War II. And by the time Darmstadt was bombed, “there were already over 3,000 Darmstadt residents missing who were deported to the camps.”

An ongoing project is an annual workshop on Georg Elser, as an example of resistance against Hitler. Höflein uses the story of the first actual assassination attempt on Hitler as a jumping off point for archival research on resistance in Darmstadt. And the archival sources are powerful. “We have almost 900 files on very different people,” he says — people who were arrested for criticizing the Nazi regime or telling jokes about Hitler, for example. The files contain letters, passport photos, even farewell letters from imprisoned people who took their own lives in desperation. “That's such a great treasure trove of wisdom” for students, he says.  

They created an exhibit on Elser and also on the local cases in which people were arrested, he says.

 “When the students look at these files, they see completely normal people, completely simple people who made very intelligent observations, who had very humane attitudes, who said things that did not suit the Nazi system and were therefore punished with prison, with varying degrees of severity,” he adds. 

“Young people need the space to actually engage with what democracy and human rights mean… If history doesn't mean anything to us today, then there's no need to teach it.”

“The remarkable commitment

“Harald Höflein is a teacher who can hold back and give his students space,” says 2019 Obermayer Award winner Hilde Schramm, a politician and philanthropist.

“The joint projects not only require a lot of time from him as a teacher and archive educator, but also from the pupils involved,” says Schramm, who – as the daughter of the high ranking Nazi party member Albert Speer, Hitler’s Minister of Armaments and War Production from 1942 on – has met with Höflein’s students as a witness to history. “[His] commitment, which goes far beyond his duties, is an indispensable prerequisite for the remarkable commitment of the young people, who obviously enjoy working with him,” she adds. 

The contact with survivor Julius Bendorf and the family of survivor Trudy Isenberg (Gertrud Therese, nee Bendorf) had a far-reaching effect on pupils. 

Leonie Renner, who graduated in 2023, took part in commemorating the lives of Isenberg and Bendorf for Holocaust Remembrance Day in Ober-Ramstadt. She spoke with Isenberg’s daughter, Ellen Isenberg Hoffman, via Zoom, and finally met her during the summer of 2024. “The family visited Ober-Ramstadt, and we were able to show them in person a graffiti that was created during the project week,” Renner says. 

“Harald, his colleagues, and students unveiled an amazing public mural honoring my mother's life,” says Isenberg Hoffman, whose mother died in 2019. “I was emotionally overcome.”

Back in 2010, in his first phone call to Julius Bendorf, Höflein explained that the pupils wanted to have a stumbling stone memorial placed at the home where he’d lived with his family. “He said he thought it was a great idea, and that he would come,” says Höflein.

Three or four days later, the phone rang. 

“Hello, are you Mr. Höflein? We are the children of Julius Bendorf. Our father tells us that he wants to fly to Germany…”

Höflein told them about the stumbling stone memorials, and they responded: "We think that's great. We're all coming.”

“It was very moving,” Höflein recalls. It was the first time Bendorf had returned to Ober-Ramstadt since shortly after his liberation from the Dachau concentration camp in 1945. At that time, he told Höflein, he had been “very shocked, shocked because nobody wanted to know anything about him, because his house was of course owned by someone else.”

For decades, he had not set foot in Ober-Ramstadt. In 2010 several family members joined Bendorf on the trip. He returned twice more before his death in 2016, at age 101.

“There's no point in laying some stumbling stones and then basically going back to business as usual. The students always know that they will look after these memorials,” says Höflein, who helps them stay in touch with families “so they know who they're doing it for.” 

— Obermayer Award recipient 2025