Obermayer Award

“This is not learning from a history book but from life.”

Jörg Friedrich inspires students to look closer and think harder about history, and about its significance today

by Toby Axelrod

It takes a certain boldness to switch careers midstream in Germany. And Jörg Friedrich is the personification of bold. 

“I wanted to work with young people, I wanted to effect change, and being a banker did not allow that,” says Friedrich, age 49, who left his job as manager of a savings bank in St. Wendel when he was 30, went back to school, and got a job teaching at the Nohfelden Community School (Gemeinschaftsschule Nohfelden) in 2009. And he’s still there.

Today, he is known for having empowered his teenaged pupils to grapple with the Jewish history in their region, in the western German state of Saarland. And he has changed their lives, much as he changed his own.

“For 11 years now, he has been creatively and sustainably carrying out projects against forgetting, and for more tolerance, openness, and solidarity, as well as against prejudice and pigeonholing,” wrote Monika Greschuchna, principal of his school, in nominating Friedrich for an Obermayer Award. “Without the commitment of Mr. Friedrich, who challenges and encourages, accompanies, guides, and supports the students in his group, this unique remembrance work could not have developed.” 

To Friedrich, it’s the youth who are indispensable. “It was always the initiative of pupils,” he insists. He sees himself as a kind of coach. 

“I want to show my pupils what can lead to extreme views, and I want to nurture democratic thinking,” he says. “History can show us what intolerant thinking can lead to. And on the other hand, history can show us how peacefully people lived together here on our doorstep, 200 years ago.”

 Jörg Friedrich was always interested in history. Like many postwar Germans, he asked his older relatives what they remembered. His grandparents were too old to serve in the war, so “we were ‘lucky’ in that sense,” he says. He recently learned from his mother that his great grandfather, a shoemaker, got his leather from a Jewish man from his village near Trier. “To me, it meant that these interactions were just normal at the time. They more or less lived peacefully together, and 12 years of [Nazi rule] turned that upside down,” he says.

Despite his interest in history, Friedrich initially followed in the footsteps of his father, who was a banker. But he realized that he wanted more out of life than this job could give.

“I can remember the day I quit,” he says. “I had been happy there, had many friends and acquaintances, and the working climate was good. Tears were in my eyes. It was not an easy step to leave a relatively well-paid job and go back to school. It wasn’t easy for some of my acquaintances and for my mom. But I never regretted it.”

He became a teacher of German language and culture and pursued his interest in history on the side. Early on, Friedrich became involved in remembrance projects with his pupils, in grades five and up. In 2011 the Adolf Bender Center in St. Wendel, a local human rights and pro-democracy project, invited the school to attend the laying of the first Stolperstein (a small brass “stumbling stone” memorial) in Nohfelden. Friedrich then invited pupils to pick up the project.

“It was all the pupils’ idea”

They formed a Stolperstein association and conducted biographical research with the help of local historians, who already had the names of the last Jews of Nohfelden. To date they have installed 19 of these small memorials and could do many more if they had the funds, Friedrich says. “We know the names of 137 Jewish people who were killed by the Nazis.”

The project had a strong effect. “Looking more deeply into the first 19 biographies really moved the students,” he says. “One of them was a girl who was the same age as they were. This is not learning from a history book but from life. And when we learn about the Holocaust, we don’t look at the history of Munich or Berlin, but rather of our own town. The kids start talking about it at home and ask their grandparents questions. And then they come back to the classroom with what they have learned.”

When the Stolpersteine project was finished, Friedrich’s students said they wanted to do more. With his guidance, they prepared seven exhibition panels about local Jewish history for a traveling exhibit. There was so much information that they decided to create a website, called Jewish Life Nohfelden. “It was all the pupils’ idea,” says Friedrich.

In 11 years, four generations of students have contributed to what is now called "Multimedia and inclusive remembrance work: Jewish life in the community of Nohfelden.” They have created easy-language and Braille versions of their exhibit, as well as an audio track; translated entries on their website into English; created two films and a remembrance trail (Wege der Erinnerung — “Ways of Memory”) tracing local Jewish history, complete with a flyer and an app; and introduced a Jewish history hiking day with educational materials for local schools.

On the trail of remembrance, “you see signs with old photos,” says Mathias Zell, 22, a former student of Friedrich’s who is now studying history and philosophy. “You can see that this building was a mikvah [ritual bath], here was a synagogue, this is where a certain family lived.”

“I knew absolutely nothing about this before Mr. Friedrich began his work,” continues Zell, who got involved with the stumbling stone project as a 12th grader. “Friends came to me and said, ‘We are doing this, and we need a few more people.’”

Jan Zubix, now 21 and studying art history and German language, says “People say history class deals with the past in the present for the future. This is a difficult part of our German history, and we should not close our eyes to it.

“I don’t know any other teacher in my life who has invested so much time to bring us closer to this history,” he adds. “He spent nights typing things up, he made the work pleasant and not annoying. It was fun: He was more like a friend than a teacher.”

Marie Mueller, 19, chose to become involved with the Stolperstein project when she was in 10th grade. She ended up representing her school at a youth congress in Berlin. It was inspiring, she says, “to see young people getting involved with this kind of work, and to know that they might continue it later in their lives.” Mueller is planning a career with the German police, where “there are opportunities to work against discrimination and prejudice.”

The work Friedrich has done does not stay “at home” — he developed a ninth grade curriculum for teaching about local history under Nazi rule, and also created an extracurricular place of learning for children from the entire region in cooperation with the St. Wendel Regional Education Network. 

“I did this for our future pupils,” explains Friedrich: “I wanted to build something sustainable, where new kids can always work on this material.”

For Friedrich, it was also important to learn about Jewish life in Germany today. “We don’t have any more Jewish citizens in our area,” he says. “But about seven years ago, we did a survey of pupils and found that there were 20 Muslims, one Buddhist and one Jew among our 1,000 pupils.” This survey sparked new interest in learning about different faiths. Friedrich took pupils to visit the nearest Jewish and Muslim communities, or invited members to visit them. “Getting to know each other helps break down stereotypes,” says Friedrich.  

 Although he believes that details about the fate of Jews during the Holocaust should be presented to older teens only, he encourages teachers to introduce younger pupils to Jewish culture, religion, and tradition. For example, a visit to a Jewish cemetery (of which there are two in the area) can lead to questions about Jewish symbols seen on stones, the Hebrew alphabet and calendar, and Jewish traditions regarding death, prayer, etc.

“With each other, not against each other”

Formative for Friedrich was his friendship with the Holocaust survivor Alex Deutsch, who had lived in the area. “There was a teacher training on the theme of right-wing extremism; in the morning, we met someone who had left the [right-wing] scene, and this was followed by a meeting with Alex Deutsch.”

Deutsch’s first wife and their son were murdered in Auschwitz. “He experienced many hits of fate, but he always said, ‘We have to live with each other, not against each other.’ I had great respect for him,” says Friedrich, who remains in touch with Deutsch's widow, Doris. She still meets with students as a way of ensuring her husband’s story will not be forgotten.

Friedrich “has brought Jewish history into the villages for everyone to see,” wrote school principal Monika Greschuchna, adding that he “acts with heart and mind, great intrepidity, determination, openness, and clarity. His intention to teach and learn from history for a future of peace and freedom succeeds through his tireless efforts every day, every hour. 

There has been little resistance to the memory work that Friedrich has sparked. Once, he says, some of the traveling exhibit panels were defaced with swastikas. “The worst thing is when you have this nationalist mindset— ‘Germans first.’”

“Racism and antisemitism have been growing in our society,” says student Marie Mueller. “And when you notice that it’s starting, you have to take action. That’s what Mr. Friedrich’s work does.”

Student Mathias Zell says, “I could talk about his work all day. It shaped my life.”

“It is because of Mr. Friedrich that I got to know the Holocaust survivor Margot Friedländer,” who presented her eponymous award to the Stolperstein AG at a ceremony in Berlin in 2019. “She is the only survivor I got to know personally, and I find this woman simply wonderful,” Zell says.

“She is very tiny and thin and has these big eyes, then she takes me by the arm and says: ‘Be human.’ And I can still see her saying this, this tiny woman with big eyes. It is because of Mr. Friedreich that we had this opportunity.

“The Holocaust is about people,” adds Zell. It’s not just abstract numbers about something that took place a long time ago. “There are photos of them, they had kids, their kids had friends, their lives had value, they had hopes and they had dreams.”

— Obermayer Award recipient 2023