Obermayer Award

A Refuge, a Greenhouse, a Place to Confront the Past 

Treibhaus’s many offerings attract young people. Those young people are helping rewrite their town’s history

by Toby Axelrod

When Stephan Conrad was a teenager growing up in Döbeln, youth clubs were terrorized by neo-Nazis. He personally experienced violence and threats, and was even beaten up on one occasion. 

But there was one place he could go if he was in trouble: Treibhaus. 

The name means “greenhouse” in German, and Treibhaus is literally a greenhouse for cultural and social offerings—a place in Döbeln where good things flourish. Since it was founded in 1997, it has offered safe spaces for youth to gather, on a do-it-yourself, no frills basis. Today, it is also a place for learning about local history during the Nazi era—a history that was very much swept under the rug in the former East Germany, where Döbeln is located. 

But in the beginning, neo-Nazis were the immediate problem. Erik Osswald, one of the original founders, recalls how he and his teenage friends would “meet every week and look for a place where we can be and do what we want” without being harassed. They created Treibhaus for themselves—and for people like Conrad.

Osswald and his friends rode skateboards and listened to punk and hardcore music, says Conrad. “And if I had any problems with Nazis, I could go and talk to them. They were pretty important when I was 16.”

Fast forward to 2021: Conrad, whom everyone calls Conny, is now 36 years old and a licensed social worker, and has been working with youth at Treibhaus for 10 years. Even before that, he was a volunteer there and chair of its board. Treibhaus changed his life, and he has seen it change the lives of so many others.

Conrad opens up the Treibhaus every day and spends the day listening to teenagers talk about “problems with their parents or school or the justice system. I help them write resumes and applications for jobs. And I also clean the toilets and do the dishes,” he laughs. 

Over the years, many projects have been added to the roster of offerings. Visitors can work on art projects or learn how to repair their own bicycles. Refugees can come in for counseling, classes, and company. Whether it’s Café Courage, a meeting and event place for youth organized by volunteers; Skate Force Döbeln, where kids can socialize and practice their moves on skates or skateboards—off the street; or AG Geschichte (History working group), which brings participants in contact with the fate of Jews and forced laborers under Nazism, Treibhaus challenges the status quo, opens doors, and paves the way.

“You have to have courage. And you can’t be shy,” said Jenny Leisker, who got advice from Treibhaus in launching a new skating park for local kids. “You should contact others for help, because you can’t do it alone.”

Uncovering History

The History working group (AG Geschichte) was inspired by Conrad’s university studies. In 2010, as part of a course on education for youth and adults, he visited many memorials. But he realized he knew little about the history of his hometown. He and a fellow student and later colleague at Treibhaus, Sophie Spitzner, “asked ourselves what happened during the [Nazi] period in Döbeln. We tried to do some research.”

They knew that there had been armaments production there during the war, and Conrad knew that his grandparents had fled after the war from Silesia (a region that had been returned to Poland) to Döbeln, where they met. “I exist because of [Nazism] and the war, and everything that happened after the war. I knew that. But we did not know if there was Jewish life in Döbeln, or if people were forced to work in the factory.”

He and Spitzner learned that there had indeed been a Jewish community, which was completely gone after 1945. And that there had been forced laborers at the factory. “We wanted to give this knowledge to others,” he says.

Together with a local high school teacher, Michael Höhne, they were able to have 11 stumbling stone memorials (Stolpersteine) installed in Döbeln, at the last known homes of Jews who were deported. The memorials are brass-plated cobblestones that are installed on the sidewalk. Höhne already had worked to have five stumbling stones installed in 2007, the first in Döbeln. The History working group has now helped install 27 more in nearby villages.  

Since 2013, Treibhaus has offered walking tours for the public and for schools. “We show them the houses where Jewish families lived and also the factories where people were forced to make weapons. And we never stopped researching,” says Conrad.

Treibhaus published a brochure, “No One Came Back: Jewish Life in the Döbeln Region Until 1945" (Niemand kam zurück – Jüdisches Leben im Altkreis Döbeln bis 1945), and produced an app so people can take the walking tour on their own.

Each year on the anniversary of the Nazi anti-Jewish pogrom of November 9-10, 1938, known as Kristallnacht, Treibhaus holds memorial events in Döbeln and nearby towns. “In every city people meet at 6 p.m. at a spot where there are stumbling stones, and we clean them and put candles and flowers on them,” says Conrad. “And then people from the schools or youth centers will read the biographies of the people who lived there. We go from stone to stone and remember these people.”

A few years ago, their work led to a connection with a Jewish family with roots in Döbeln. 

Connecting with Descendants

Cousins Hella and Sandra Rottenberg of Amsterdam, both journalists, learned in 2014 that their grandfather, Isay Rottenberg, had owned a cigar factory in Döbeln. He had survived the war by fleeing to Holland and hiding. But he never talked about his lost factory.

In one of the last phases of compensation for property confiscated by the Nazis, the Rottenberg family received reparations for the factory about six years ago. What they learned about their family history will soon be published in a book, titled simply, “The Cigar Factory of Isay Rottenberg.”

 “We vaguely knew our grandfather was the owner of a factory somewhere near Dresden and that this factory was taken from him by the Nazis and that he was imprisoned in the 1930s in Nazi Germany,” Hella Rottenberg says. “We knew nothing else: Not the name of the factory, not what it produced nor where it was located.”

After researching in archives in Berlin and Döbeln, they began to put the pieces together. Ultimately, the cousins contacted Treibhaus, which found the location of the now-closed factory and put them in touch with the current owner.  With Treibhaus members Conrad, Spitzner, and Judith Sophie Schilling, they visited the site. “It was a huge building, a former military barracks,” Hella Rottenberg recalls. Inside, she says, “It was as if everything was still there, only the clock was not ticking any more. We stepped into the past.

“The young people of Treibhaus were a bridge between us and the Heimatfreunde,” the local historical society—a group of older citizens who had researched local history. The historical society had put together “a very good chronology of everything that happened in Döbeln, but didn’t take it any further… And what was good about the young people is that they wanted to present it to the [public], to make them conscious of what happened in reality,” she says. In effect, they wanted to undo decades of whitewashing, to show that “Döbeln had a very different history than those who lived there always had thought.”

Cousins Hella and Sandra Rottenberg invited Conrad and Schilling to visit them in May 2018, to take part in an annual commemoration of the liberation of Holland from Nazi occupation. There, Conrad spoke about the work of the History working group—while standing in the former home of Isay Rottenberg.  “There were a lot of Dutch Jews there, and they were very impressed by what [Treibhaus] did,” Hella Rottenberg says.

“You don’t have to go far from home to learn about this history,” says Conrad. “If you ask kids now, did you know there was Jewish life in Döbeln, everyone says ‘No. I didn’t know that.’ If you start in your own town, it is a deeper connection to your own biography than if you are going to [the memorial at] Auschwitz. It is important to know what happened in Auschwitz, but these people lived here before.”

Erik Osswald, today an event planner in Berlin, is amazed to see what Treibhaus has become since he started it with a bunch of skaters and punks in 1997. The History working group. “is a big step in this small city; it will be informative for a lot of generations,” he says. “These young people are taking Treibhaus and making it into something, and I am really proud.”

— Obermayer Award recipient 2022