Obermayer Award

“These are the stairs that my father climbed, and my grandfather.”

Marlies and Rudolf Walter touch the hearts of survivors and descendants

by Toby Axelrod

As a young man, Rudolf Walter wanted to learn about what happened to the Jews of his town. So he picked up a 1959 book by a local historian.

“The book included only one sentence about the fate of the Jews of Bad Kissingen: that the synagogue was destroyed in the November pogrom, and ‘everything that happened later is well-known.’”

Except that it wasn't well-known. So Rudolf Walter dug deeper, soon joined by his wife, Marlies.

Today, the Jewish history of Bad Kissingen has been documented and made accessible to people of all ages, and a new chapter has been written in the postwar relationships of German non-Jews with survivors and their descendants. That has happened largely due to the Walters and to 2013 Obermayer Award winner Hans-Jürgen Beck, a one-time student of Rudolf’s and their sometime collaborator. 

Marlies and Rudolf Walter are so-called ’68ers: Growing up in the mid-1960s, rebelling against the values of their elders. Marlies Walter, 67, grew up in the town of Miltenberg am Main near Frankfurt, and Rudolf Walter, 70, in the neighboring town of Kleinheubach.

“It was the generation that started asking questions about the Holocaust,” says Rudolf, who studied at the Julius-Maximilians-University Würzburg and became a history, and social studies teacher at the Jack-Steinberger-Gymnasium in Bad Kissingen, retiring in 2015. “We learned very little about it from our parents because it was repressed.” 

While Rudolf did not learn much, Marlies did speak with her maternal grandmother. 

“She remembered the Kristallnacht pogrom, she remembered names. She walked with my mother through the town and saw the ruins of the synagogue,” says Marlies, who worked at the city archives from 1999 until her retirement in 2021. “My mother told me where the Jewish shops had been, and said her grandfather’s Jewish friend used to bring matzah to them on Pesach. I had a little information, but it was a sign of integration.”

Rudolf’s interest was piqued when his former student, Beck — by then a teacher himself – asked him in 1988 to help organize a remembrance program on the 50th anniversary of the November pogrom, or Kristallnacht. 

 “I recommended to Mayor Georg Straus that we do an exhibit, and he was interested right away,” recalls Beck, who had written a thesis on Jews in Bad Kissingen during the Weimar Republic and Nazi period. Because he was busy preparing for university exams, Beck asked Rudolf Walter if he would be interested in designing this exhibit. “He said yes right away.”

Inspired by the challenge, Rudolf involved his high school students in a hands-on learning exercise, designing and creating a ground-breaking exhibition on Jewish life in Bad Kissingen. The students “found a lot of photos and documents, and we contacted Jews from Bad Kissingen who had emigrated,” recalls Rudolf Walter. “I was moved by what they sent us.”

“They were rooted in this city”

Bad Kissingen is a Franconian spa town with 22,000 residents today. Back in 1925, there were 9,000 residents, about 5 percent of whom were Jewish. “But it has a very old Jewish history, documented back to the 13th century. The Jewish citizens were mostly businessmen and doctors, and they played an important role in making Bad Kissngen a world-class spa town,” says Rudolf Walter.

“You could say,” says Marlies Walter, “it was a flourishing Jewish community from the middle of the 19th century until the Nazi period. Most of the Jews were not very religious; it was a typical Jewish German community.”

Doing their research, the students learned the importance of working in archives and how to use sources like newspaper articles. “We documented the destruction of the synagogue, and the students saw the files about the people who had done this,” Rudolf Walter says. 

“For me, the important thing was for them to see that the Jews were respected members of the community, not victims,” says Marlies Walter. “They were rooted in this city.”

The exhibition was supposed to be in the town hall for two weeks. “About 3,000 people came to look at it, from beyond our district,” Rudolf Walter says. “And astonishingly, the city agreed to turn it into a permanent exhibit.”

Thanks to the enthusiastic support of Mayor Straus, the exhibit — "Jewish Life in Bad Kissingen" — was moved to the town’s former Jewish community center, which is near the city archive where Marlies Walter was working. Today, she continues to supervise the exhibit; gives lectures and guided tours; and stays in touch with survivors from Bad Kissingen and their descendants. She also organizes events for Bad Kissingen’s Jewish cultural festival.

“It was important that the exhibit was made permanent and not just for a few days,” says Marlies Walter. “In Bad Kissingen there are many Jewish guests from Israel who come to visit the health resorts here, and I had the impression that it was important for them to come to a town that presents its Jewish history.”

Some of those visitors had roots in Bad Kissingen. Some even wrote in the guest book that they had not ever wanted to set foot in the town again. Not only did they visit now, they brought their children. And they came back again.

Jack Steinberger, a Nobel Prize-winning physicist, was one of them. “Without the personal contacts he made on his first visit, he would not have returned,” Marlies Walter says. Steinberger died in 2021 at the age of 99.

“My uncle, who lived in Geneva, won his Nobel Prize the same year that Rudolf and his students were doing their project on Jewish life in Bad Kissingen,” recalls his niece, Elizabeth Steinberger, of North Carolina. “He heard about their project, and they got acquainted. Rudolf spearheaded a project to get the gymnasium named after Jack in 2001.”

A few years later, when Elizabeth came to visit her uncle Jack in Switzerland, she decided to spend a few days in Bad Kissingen “and look around. I knew no one and expected nothing.”

She received a celebrity welcome. Former Mayor Straus picked her up at the station, and Marlies Walter gave her a tour of the family’s former home in the former Jewish community center. “My father and his brothers were born there, where the exhibit is. They grew up there. I got to see their old home, which my father had described in detail. It was amazing.”

Marlies also opened the exhibit for her, recalls Elizabeth Steinberger. “She was extraordinarily knowledgeable. She knew more about the family than I did, and that’s saying a lot because I am the family historian.

“There was a Hebrew school room on the main floor. The Jewish ritual bath was still there. The exhibit was housed in the former apartment of the Neustädter family, who lived just below my father’s family.” Even the original stained glass windows in the prayer room on the second floor had been preserved, notes Steinberger, who has returned several times.

The exhibit is heavy on text and is greatly in need of modernization, says Rudolf Walter. But it is still a regular site for school trips as well as visits from Jews around the world with roots in the town.

Over the years, Marlies Walter has guided many visitors with roots in Bad Kissingen. They get in touch from such diverse corners of the world as South Africa, the United States, and Italy. Often, she says, they are worried about how they will feel visiting the town. She tries to encourage them.

She gave a tour to, among others, descendants of the Neustädter family, who lived a floor below the Steinbergers. “They came in the house, and we went up the stairs. And they said, ‘These are the stairs that my father climbed, and my grandfather.’ It was very moving for them, and also for me,” she recalls.

“We have to preserve this”

In the ensuing years, the Walters have created a comprehensive online database with detailed biographies of all of the Jewish residents of Bad Kissingen during the Nazi era. Rudolf Walter and Beck published the exhibition text as a book.

The Walters have put together several publications about the city’s Jewish history, organized interactive educational activities and school presentations for local teens, and led Jewish history tours. They have contributed to numerous civic projects related to local Jewish history and culture, including installing Stolpersteine (stumbling stone) memorials, creating commemorative events, protesting against vandalism in the old Jewish cemetery, and renaming the local high school after Steinberger.   

Most recently, the Walters have created a comprehensive online database of detailed biographies of Bad Kissingen’s Jewish residents during the Nazi era.

The database, which currently contains nearly 700 biographies, can be expanded and corrected at any time, says Rudolf Walter. It also has a map of Bad Kissingen with all the Jewish shops and the synagogue marked. An English translation is also available.

“The descendants can’t speak German anymore, but they now can read it and add and give corrections,” says Rudolf Walter. 

“At a memorial, you read names,” adds Marlies Walter. “But here you can read about the history of the people.” Pupils are “most moved by the individual stories: he grew up here, she went to school here, he was able to emigrate or was deported. It is the history that stands behind the memorials and the plaques.”

The connections with survivors and descendants led them to a new project: finding out about the 230 Jewish students who attended the local high school until the Nazi regime threw the last one out in 1936. 

“Descendants told me stories and I thought, we have to preserve this,” says Marlies Walter.  

Rudolf Walter went down to the school archive, which was in the school’s Cold War-era air raid shelter, and pored over the records of those students. “It was completely dark and with no windows,” he says. “I spent 14 days there in the height of summer; it was actually very cool there.” The files contained the religions of all students, something that would be unthinkable today. “It was interesting to see how the teachers were thinking about the students, describing their grades and their personality characteristics,” he says.

“What happened here in Bad Kissingen and in all of Germany was an immense injustice‘” says Beck. “It is important to keep the memory alive of the history and fate of these people. And it is a great gift to have these contacts with descendants.”

Marlies and Rudolf Walter, says Steinberger, “are an example of how things have changed in Germany, and they are one of the main reasons why things have changed. They are thoroughly dedicated to educating the townspeople about their Jewish past and the Holocaust, and to keeping Jewish culture as an ongoing part of the life of the town. It has been an amazing 34 years.”

“To me,” says Rudolf Walter, “it has always been important to look at not just what happened but what led to it — to look at how democracy was taken down.” 

Marlies Walter adds, “You have to show what can happen if you don’t step up at the right time, and it is important to not only talk about the victims.”

— Obermayer Award recipient 2023