Obermayer German Jewish History Award

Sibylle Tiedemann

Berlin

Sibylle Tiedemann has traveled the world to find the last Jews from her home city of Ulm. And she has captured their stories on film, preserving a memory of pre-war Jewish life that otherwise might have been lost.

Over the years, Tiedemann has made documentary films that focus on Jewish life in her region. In the process, she has built lasting relationships with far-flung Jewish families who have roots in Ulm. Her award-winning films have been shown in schools and museums at home and abroad. She is inspired by the need to confront the past and safeguard the future: "It is important to preserve these biographies for the next generation," she said.

Her life's work was sparked by a childhood friendship with a Jewish boy whose parents had met in a post-war displaced persons camp in Bavaria. "Through him I found out about the Jewish religion and family life," Tiedemann said. She began to wonder what life was like for Jews in Ulm before the war.

A chance encounter with elderly citizens of Ulm would lead Tiedemann on a journey of discovery. It began when Tiedemann's mother attended a reunion of her all-girls' school. When Tiedemann asked her mother's classmates, then in their 70, what had happened to their Jewish friends, she realized they could not or would not answer.

Tiedemann, who by then had studied filmmaking, decided to look for the former classmates herself. Eventually, she located and met with women in Israel, California, Texas, Chicago, Kentucky, New York, and Canada. Her first film, the award-winning 1997 documentary titled in English "Kinderland–Cinderland," includes interviews with four Jewish and eight non-Jewish women. 

While the Jewish women recalled the pain of being excluded and rejected by their friends, the non-Jewish women described, sometimes wistfully, the overwhelming sense of pride they had felt in being members of the Hitler Youth, an exclusive German nationalist organization, complete with uniforms, parades, songs, group trips, service appointments and sporting events. "Their viewpoints could not have been more different, but I brought them together… and got them to communicate," Tiedemann said. "We learned a lot, and the effects went way beyond the film.

"Former Jewish citizens reconnected with non-Jews in Ulm, and friendships have extended to the second generation. For the film's first screening, more than 300 guests were invited, including 175 former Jewish citizens of Ulm and relatives of White Rose activists Sophie and Hans Scholl, teenagers from Ulm who were executed as traitors in 1943. 

Another film followed: In "Hainsfarth had a Rabbi: Jewish Traces in the northern Ries region" (2001), Tiedemann used interviews with elderly citizens to paint a portrait of the town's Jewish community.

Tiedemann has remained with the theme. Her recent film, "Letters from Chicago," is a profile of former Ulm residents Lore Frank (nee Hirsch), who had attended the girls' school, and her late husband, the self-taught photographer Gustav David Frank. The film conveys the role of memory and what it means to grow old in exile.

Tiedemann also organized an exhibition of his works for the film premiere in Ulm in November 2008. She "spent days - truly a labor of love - looking through the thousands of photographs and negatives that my father had produced," said nominator Karen Frank Scotese, of Evanston, Ill. "She also visited my mother every day. My only regret was that my father was no longer alive to see his photos exhibited in Ulm."

The collection included photos he took as a teenager in Ulm, and those he took in 1945 when he returned to the city as a US soldier. "He came to Ulm looking for his parents - they had been deported and murdered," said Tiedemann. He found his hometown in ruins. "It was 80 percent bombed. But in spite of everything he never lost his love for his homeland." Tiedemann recently helped arrange for Frank's archive to be housed at the New York-based Leo Baeck Institute for the study of German Jewish history.

Through her films and her work in bringing together Jews and non-Jews of several generations, Tiedemann has helped promote healing and reconciliation, as well as conveyed essential lessons from history. "With great skill and tact, Sibylle [has] pointed out the importance to educate today's young people about 'good and evil,'" said nominator Ann Dorzback, who was interviewed in the first film.

Tiedemann, who now is planning a documentary on the post-war displaced persons camps, says "it was left to the post-war generation to make films, and write books and articles" looking at the past. "The theme of remembrance is constantly with me. If individual memory is lost, then the collective memory is lost, too."