Obermayer Award

“We didn’t see the important connection — that could have been your neighbor.”

Marie Rolshoven brings survivors to Germany to share their stories in their former homes.

by Toby Axelrod

Holocaust education used to be a kind of shock therapy. That’s how Marie Rolshoven recalls her history lessons in 1980s West Berlin.

“We saw lots of terrible pictures” of Nazi war crimes, says Rolshoven, a cultural scientist, photo artist, and filmmaker. “We didn’t see the important connection — that could have been your neighbor; that could have been the girl who was at school with you, or in your sports club. Instead, it was all very distant.”

“Pedagogy has changed dramatically since then,” says Rolshoven. And she has played a part in that change.

In 2016 Rolshoven, with her mother, political scientist and artist Jani Pietsch (who died in 2020) and the late biologist Florian Voss, introduced a powerful project in Berlin that focuses on personal and local history. That project, Denk Mal am Ort — a German play on words that means both “memorial at this place” and “think about this place” — has grown into a movement with branches in Berlin, Hamburg, Frankfurt, and Munich.

Every year around the May anniversary of the end of World War II in Europe, people open their homes where Jews and other victims of Nazi persecution once lived, and host readings or lectures, give tours, and hold discussions. Among the many events in 2023 were:

• An open house on Kantstrasse in Frankfurt, where the Jewish Stern family lived until they fled Nazi Germany. Dozens more Jews were forcibly relocated to the building by the Nazis.

• A lecture on Baaderstrasse in Munich. Visitors could see the former home of Jehovah’s Witness Josef Pfeifer, who was deported to the Dachau concentration camp, where he died. 

• In Hamburg, an open house and lecture in the house where Ida Dehmel, wife and muse of the poet Richard Dehmel, lived and worked until she took her life in 1942.

• In Berlin, a visit to the Reichsstrasse home of the renowned pediatrician Gustav Tugendreich and his wife Irene, who escaped Nazi Germany to the United States; and a conversation with their granddaughter, Alina Tugend.

Sometimes these meetings are filmed, says Rolshoven. “I’m always thinking about the fact that we won't have survivors for long.”

Denk Mal am Ort was inspired by the Open Jewish Homes project that Dutch activist Denise Citroen initiated in 2012 together with the Jewish Historical Museum in Amsterdam. Each year, on the anniversary of the liberation of the Netherlands in May, the public is invited into the living rooms, kitchens, and even attics of former Jewish residents and members of the Dutch resistance, where they sometimes meet special guests with a link to the history.

“Be happy you’re alive”

Denk Mal am Ort is also a natural outgrowth of the environment in which Rolshoven was raised.

Marie Rolshoven was born in 1972 in Brussels, where her parents met as students. They moved to West Berlin when she was only two. Today, she shuttles between Berlin and the Madeira islands in Portugal. 

Her interest in Holocaust history was piqued early on through her mother’s close relationship with the late Dimitri Stein, a Berlin Jew who escaped Nazi Germany with help from his thesis advisor and from Pietsch’s father, another university colleague. When Pietsch was born in 1947, Stein became her godfather. The family’s connection to Stein “was always very much a part of our lives,” Rolshoven says. 

She heard the story of how, when Stein returned to Berlin Technical University after the war and asked to defend his doctoral thesis in electrical engineering, he was told, “What do you want? Be happy you’re still alive. Now scram.” It wasn’t until 2008 that the university finally arranged for him to defend his thesis and granted him his degree.

“He didn't talk about [his life in Germany] that much with his own children,” she recalls. Stein and his wife, Sophie, had three sons who “always asked my mother” to fill in the gaps in their family story.

The silence was typical in many families, both on the side of survivors and on the side of the perpetrators, says Rolshoven. “My grandmother refused to do an interview with my mother” about the former forced labor camp near their home in the Harz Mountains.

Her mother ended up writing two books on Holocaust-related subjects, though she was never able to fill in the blanks of her own family’s story. Inspired by her mother, Rolshoven, too, has always sought to know more. But she did not plan to make this theme her life’s work.

Her dream was to go into stage design, and to work abroad. With that in mind, she studied carpentry and briefly built furniture in Berlin, winning a prize for her work in 1997. From there, she moved to Barcelona, where she worked in stage design and created marionettes. Returning to Berlin, she tried her hand as a location scout and production design assistant in the film world. She then professionalized her skills, studying theater, film, and art history at the Free University of Berlin.

By then she was 31 and had started a family. Seeking steady work, she applied in 2011 for a job with the exhibition We Were Neighbors (Wir waren Nachbarn), a remembrance project launched in 2005. It focuses on Jews from Berlin’s Schöneberg district who were persecuted and murdered from 1933 to 1945. Housed in the district’s city hall, the project is constantly adding new biographies and details.

Through her work, Rolshoven met many survivors and their relatives, including the late Berliner Rahel Mann, who survived the Holocaust as a child, hiding in a cellar. “She was… one of the people who impressed me so much,” says Rolshoven. “She was so full of life, and still put in a lot of energy into telling children her story. The children were always so impressed, too. And then, I thought, we have to do a film about her. Because I’ve always had this connection to film, and I also see what a great impact they can have.”

The films would come later. Her next career move took her to the Silent Heroes Memorial (Gedenkstätte Stille Helden) in 2012, where she still works. The memorial’s exhibits and programs focus on the exceptional people who acted selflessly, sometimes even risking their lives to help Jews in Germany and German-occupied Europe under the Nazi regime.

It was through this position that Rolshoven learned of the Amsterdam project, Open Jewish Homes, at conference in Budapest. She remembers being blown away by the idea of holding commemorations “exactly where those people who were persecuted once lived.”

They said to me, ‘But you can do the same in Berlin, can’t you?’ ”

“I answered, ‘Actually, yes, why not?’”

Back in Berlin, she told her mother about the encounter. They both realized that their past experience had prepared them well. “My mother said to me, ‘That’s great, let’s do it.’” 

That was in 2016. In the years since, they have held dozens of open house events. During the height of the coronavirus pandemic, they took their remembrance work online, returning to in-person events in 2022.

“It honors those who perished”

After Jani Pietsch died in 2020, “Marie continued the project in Jani’s style, and even expanded the project to several German cities,” says Jack Weil. Weil, whose mother had fled from Berlin to Holland, met Pietsch and Rolshoven in 2015 in Amsterdam, where they had come to experience Open Jewish Homes for the first time.

Denk Mal am Ort in Berlin was a success from the very start, he says. “The project is very important to me, because it honors those who perished and those who survived with vivid stories, photos, and other documents.”

Rolshoven has made several short films with survivors and their relatives. In one of the first, Rahel Mann recounted how Frieda Anna Vater, wife of the janitor in her family’s apartment building on Starnberger Strasse in Berlin, hid her in the cellar for six months. She and her husband brought down food and books for the girl, and occasionally snuck her upstairs for a bath.

Interviewing Rahel Mann is resident Andreas Köhler, who recounts how suspicious he was when she knocked on his door one day in the 1990s, wanting to visit the dark basement. That encounter changed the lives of Köhler and his neighbors, who put up a plaque dedicated to Vater on their building and kept in touch with Mann for the rest of her life.

“An Anne Frank story with a happy ending” is how he describes Mann’s story of survival. “From 2016 and until her death in 2022, Rahel Mann conducted readings and guided tours in our house. This enabled the residents and guests to develop a fundamental understanding of this part of our past,” he says. “The merging of our and other initiatives would be unthinkable without the thoughtful, expert, and creative support of Marie Rolshoven.”

In 2019, Rolshoven and her mother helped found the organization KUBIN e.V. – an acronym for Culture Berlin International (Kultur Berlin International) as an umbrella association for Denk Mal am Ort and other projects dedicated to “the democratic culture of remembrance and collective memory.”

That same year, Rolshoven interviewed 90-year-old Yoel Ludwig Katzenellenbogen in the living room of his family’s former apartment in Berlin. He flew in from Israel, and they went to the apartment together. “We were really excited, wondering what it would be like for him,” Rolshoven says. “He told me, ‘I don’t think anyone will come. No one will be interested.’ And then it was completely packed.” 

When Katzenellenbogen walked in, “He immediately said, ‘Ah, my brother's bed was here, and my father's desk was there,’” she says. “He was very moved and fought back tears.” The owner of a shop that once belonged to his family came to the open house, and made an appointment with them to go back to the old store.

Katzenellenbogen died a few months later. Every year since then, his daughter Elsa has flown in from Israel to take part in the Denk Mal am Ort program. 

“Each year I am amazed and moved by the wonderful volunteer work of Marie, who took on the project in such a sensitive way with love and care,” she says. “Marie became an inseparable part of our lives, of my family and my loved ones. Her great energy, her kindness, and her wonderful work in the project made her my family… She gives hope for a better world and, most importantly, makes sure that they don’t forget the worst of all, so that it will never happen again.”

— Obermayer Award recipient 2024