Obermayer German Jewish History Award

Rolf Kilian Kießling

Forchheim, Bavaria

As a child in the early 1950s, Kießling heard from his grandmother about their former Jewish neighbors in their Bavarian hometown, Forchheim – about how friendly the Jews were, how they had shared matzo with local kids, how generous Jewish shopkeepers had been. But where were they now?

Then, one day, his great aunt read aloud a newspaper report about trials of concentration camp guards: “They made Jewish prisoners stand outside in winter and threw ice cold water on them. For a child this was hard to handle,” he recalls. “On the one hand, you heard that the Jews were friendly and it was good to shop in their stores. On the other hand, people mistreated them terribly, destroying their shops, locking them up, torturing and abusing them. I couldn’t resolve this conflict in my mind.” For Kießling, this inner conflict was the beginning of a lifelong commitment to illuminate the fate of local Jews and reach out to their
descendants.

Today, this high school teacher is known as an expert in the history of Forchheim’s Jews, going back centuries. His quest has taken him to archives and on journeys around the world, to meet with Jews who fled during the Nazi era. He has taught adult education programs on the subject, has helped create exhibits, memorials and walking tours. All of this accumulated knowledge he shares with his own pupils, colleagues and the public at large. “I have the feeling that people here are definitely interested in the history,” he says in all modesty.

The author of books, essays and articles on the topic, Kießling is now documenting the destruction of the Jewish communities of nearby Ermreuth and Dormitz. Most impressively, his 2004 book – a 240-page, illustrated tome on Jews in Forchheim: 300 Years of Jewish Life in a Small Franconian Town – is based on his accumulated research and informs the contemporary Forchheim community about its past, both the bright and the dark sides. The book traces local Jewish history from the 1600s, with anecdotes and lists of Jewish residents from the 18th and 19th centuries and details of Jewish life in the Weimar Republic and the Nazi era. It concludes with updates on the lives of local Jews who escaped Nazi Germany and made it to such cities as New York, Montreal, Milwaukee and Sydney. Not only is the work an important record of history; it also has provided invaluable information to Jews in search of their roots After it was published, more people started contacting Kießling, learning from him, and coming to visit the town where their grandparents had lived.

Born in 1949, Rolf Kilian Kießling became an avid student of history, English and Latin at the Herder Gymnasium. He and some classmates noticed that few teachers wanted to discuss the Nazi period with them. So instead they met with other, older youth in a state-sponsored political club, and started researching for themselves. At 17, Kießling went with his friends to the former concentration camp at Flossenburg, about 100 kilometers from home. “The barracks were all torn down completely, but you could see the mass graves and we leaned how the prisoners had to work in mines. It was an important, first-hand experience.” In that year, a German neo-Nazi party got more than 20 percent of the vote
in his region. “For us kids, this was a signal. I thought – we can’t let the old Nazis be reelected! Thankfully, people lost interest in them. But it made us aware that there were still people around who bought these right-wing extremist ideas.”

Kießling later studied German literature and language and Catholic theology at the University of Würzburg and became a high school teacher. In 1997, Kießling got a job in his own former high school. He found that things had changed – younger teachers were now encouraging pupils to find out what happened after 1933 in their town. Kießling believed it was important to go back beyond 1933, to find out about Jewish life during the German Empire (1871-1918) and the Weimar Republic, which lasted until the Nazis came to power.

He learned that Jews had lived in Forchheim since at least 1650. Reading through old newspapers in archives, he saw names he recognized in advertisements and deduced where Jewish-owned shops had stood and what was sold in them. On 18th century tax lists he found the names of heads of Jewish families, who had to pay a special “Schutzgeld” tax for permission to do business. In local Jewish cemeteries he encountered still more names.

Starting in 1998, Kießling wrote articles about local Jewish families and their lives for the local newspapers, Fränkischer Tag and Nordbayerische Nachrichten. Through his writings, he connected his readers and humanized their long-gone Jewish neighbors. For example, one article told of a girl who was orphaned at 13 and then struggled to emigrate to America. Another was about a popular merchant who sold traditional Bavarian cloth, and a third article dealt with the Jewish owners of the town’s first department store.

“That’s how it started,” said Kießling. “People, including my family, reacted, saying ‘Yes, we also went shopping there,’ or ‘I knew him,’ or ‘His daughter was in my class.’ People spoke to me about their personal contacts with these people. I have had only positive experiences. People have called me to tell me things: [One man recalled how] as a child he always brought fish to Jewish families, and he said he could still count using the Hebrew alphabet: aleph, bet, gimmel – and he pronounced the fourth letter with a Frankish accent: dollet!”

Today, Forchheim has 30,000 residents – twice as many as before World War II. At its peak. the local Jewish population reached about 200 in 1900. It wasn’t long before Kießling started trying to find former Forchheim Jews. A Jewish newspaper in Sidney, Australia, mentioned his search for Ludwig Bauer, who had moved there with his parents in 1939. In 1998, Bauer, who is now living in Las Vegas, learned about Kießling’s Australian inquiry and responded. When he determined that Kießling was born after the war, Bauer shared his recollections: “As a kid, I was chased, called names, had stones hurled at me, and it became downright dangerous for me to be out in public, alone.” Later, other Jews from Forchheim shared with him their memories of growing up under the Nazis.

The pedagogic aspect is important to Kießling’s work: “We have to bring young people to this history, showing that the synagogue was here, or this is where the people were deported from. That is the teacher’s job, to show where these people – who were murdered – once lived and worked.” Such confrontations with harsh reality – like his own visit to the site of Flossenburg as a teenager– leave the deepest impressions, said Kießling, who has helped organize exhibitions and design memorials to the Jews of Forchheim.

“We have photographs of the destruction of the synagogue, on 10 November 1938,” he said. The building was dynamited, and “if you look at the pictures before and after, you have to ask yourself the question – why? Why was it blown up?” Another photograph, on display at the city museum, shows the deportation of eight Jews from Forchheim on November 27, 1941. “You see an old man with a bundle in his hand – a woolen blanket. He is the last one to board the truck. And you have to ask yourself: ‘Why must an old man who lived all his life in Forchheim be taken away?’

“Once you ask the question, your quest for answers has begun.”