Obermayer German Jewish History Award

Walter Demandt and Almut Holler

Norden and Hage, Lower Saxony

As the co-chair and chairman of the Ökumenischer Arbeitskreis Synagogenweg Norden e.V.(Norden Ecumenical Synagogue Way Working Group), the retired pastor Almut Holler and the retired teacher Walter Demandt came to Norden, in the East Friesland region of Lower Saxony, with very different backgrounds and experience before they found each other through their shared passion to resuscitate the city’s 400-year-old Jewish past.

For Holler, born in 1943 in Berlin, reading The Diary of Anne Frank as a schoolgirl marked “the beginning” of her historical awakening. At 20 she discovered traces of a Jewish community and cemetery in the small town where she grew up, close to Bremen, though “the people of the older generation didn’t tell me about it, there were scarce details and little knowledge, and I learned only later that it would be necessary to speak about history and politics.”

Demandt, born in 1944 in a village near the Westphalian town of Siegen, “only heard very late in school about the Holocaust. I was more shocked when I learned about the first Auschwitz trials in the 60s.” After moving in 1973 to Norden, he taught French and religion at the city’s oldest Gymnasium. Holler, meanwhile, had learned Biblical Hebrew, Greek and Latin as a theology student and become the pastor of an evangelical church in the city. Then, in the 1980s, the pair met through the Working Group that was founded by Norden residents Lina and Hans-Gerhard Gödeken, and the pair have since dedicated their lives to revitalizing the memory of Norden’s 250 Jews who lived there before the war—half of whose population perished in the Holocaust.

“It’s important to mark this place, this house, this fact—not in common, not generally, but specifically this one. History lives in specific facts, and that history is present every day. I’m not young enough to forget it,” says Holler, who along with Demandt, has led tours through the Jewish cemetery and places of Jewish interest in Norden, lectured on the Holocaust to young people, built a website explaining the city’s Jewish history, and helped plant some 80 Stolpersteine outside the homes of former Jewish residents (30 more are scheduled to be installed in 2016).

In 1987, Lina Gödeken, founder of the working group, raised funds to erect a memorial at the site of Norden’s former synagogue, which burned on Kristallnacht, and that same year they held the town’s first “week of encounter,” inviting Jewish survivors of the Holocaust to return to Norden to meet with German residents. “It was a very emotional week for me, being confronted with people who had survived the Holocaust,” recalls Demandt, “and since this date, it was clear that I would concentrate my work on this task of remembrance.”

Since then, together with the working group, the pair helped establish a common gravestone in Norden’s old Jewish cemetery, which dates back to 1569, bearing the names of the last Jews from Norden who died without the town’s formal recognition. In addition, they erected a memorial at the cemetery honoring the names of all the Jews from Norden killed in the Holocaust, who numbered around 200.

For Demandt, a lifelong Protestant, leading a group of his high school students on a 10-day trip to Israel was an especially eye-opening experience because it brought the Biblical land of his studies to life in a new way. “The Christian faith cannot be understood without Jewish history at its source—Judaism is the basis of the Christian religion,” says Demandt, who has drawn inspiration from Jewish philosophers like Martin Buber and Shalom Ben Chorin, and the Orthodox theologian Pinchas Lapide, “because these were Jewish thinkers who had studied the New Testament and they were experts of Jesus’s history.”

In 2000, Lina Goedeken’s book Rund um die Synagoge in Norden, (Around the Norden Synagoge) inspired Demandt, Holler and the Working Group to take their work further. The pair helped install a plaque at the birthplace of the German-Jewish resistance fighter Recha Freier, who in 1933 founded the Youth Aliyah organization that helped save some 10,000 Jews from perishing in the Holocaust— including four young Jews from Norden—by enabling them to emigrate to Palestine. Thanks to the efforts of teh working group with Holler and Demandt’s efforts, a square in Norden has been renamed Recha Freier Platz.

Demandt and Holler have organized numerous exhibitions exploring the Jewish legacy in Norden, including a 2013 show at Norden’s town hall entitled “Land of Discovery: Trip into the Jewish East Friesland,” which described Jewish family histories in detail and included photographs, documents and other artifacts. They are compiling a permanent collection of objects, photos and documents representing everyday Jewish life in Norden; their hope is to use the city’s former Jewish school and rabbi’s house and convert it into a cultural and study center to house archives, host exhibitions and seminars, and showcase the city’s Jewish past. Jack de Loewe and Claudia de Levie, residents of Israel, praise Holler’s painstaking work to “resist oblivion and bring back the names of the victims, the persecuted and murdered Jewish citizens of Norden, and to convey family history information to their descendants” based on rigorous genealogical research at archives and registries. “Almut learned Hebrew to translate and understand the inscriptions at the Jewish cemetery, where she gives guided tours and lectures to children and adults about the region’s Jewish past, and explains how important it is to prevent anti-Semitism, oppression and intolerance.”

Demandt is motivated to continue his work, he says, because “we see that anti-Semitism is always alive in Germany, it exists, and that is why it is very important and necessary to speak about this with young people. We see in schools that young people want to discuss this past. They want to avoid [repeating] all that the Holocaust caused here. It’s very positive, their reaction, and this is a big encouragement for us. But it’s a task which cannot be ended. We must continue to teach all these subjects.”

Echoing him, Holler says, “It’s more and more necessary to pay attention, now and always, and to be aware of this history—and to tell the new generations about the people and facts and the long history of their Jewish neighbors. Jewish people ask me about their families and I’m able to tell them a lot of details, more than they ever knew. It’s intensive work, but I’m not able to stop it. It’s my life now.”